On June 16, 2026, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee made a striking claim before a crowd: “Without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be an America. We owe our very existence to what happened in this land.”

The remark came shortly after President Trump suggested that without him, Israel wouldn’t exist — and Huckabee’s counter-statement quickly ignited a firestorm online. Critics called it “nonsense,” pointing out that America is older than the modern state of Israel, so it can’t possibly owe its existence to it.

But that critique missed Huckabee’s actual point. He wasn’t talking about the modern nation founded in 1948. He was talking about the nation of Israel — the Jewish people, their scriptures, their ethics, and the land where it all began. And on that reading, his argument holds real historical weight.

Early America Saw Itself as a New Israel

The connection between America and biblical Israel goes back to the very first settlers. The Pilgrims and Puritans of the 17th century didn’t just read the Hebrew Bible; they lived by it as a template for their own story.

They understood their voyage to America as a new Exodus: England was their Egypt, the Atlantic their Red Sea, and America their Promised Land. They saw themselves as a covenant people with a divine mission, echoing Israel’s relationship with God at Sinai.

This showed up in law and governance. The New Haven Colony’s legal code of 1655 contained 79 statutes, roughly half referencing the Bible — almost entirely the Hebrew Scriptures. Massachusetts followed a similar model with its 1641 “Capitall Laws,” drawn heavily from Mosaic law. The Mayflower Compact itself reflected the biblical idea of governance by covenant and consent. Even the map of colonial America bore the imprint: towns named Salem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Zion dotted the landscape. Puritan ministers studied Hebrew and framed their “errand into the wilderness” as a reenactment of Israel’s story.

Biblical Ideas at the Heart of the American Founding

By the time of the Revolution — partly financed by Jewish merchant Haym Solomon — the Founders were operating in a society thoroughly shaped by this biblical inheritance — even as they also drew on Enlightenment philosophy, English common law, and classical political thought. Alexander Hamilton himself, according to historical accounts, was educated in a Jewish school, placing Jewish values at the very heart of the founding.

The fingerprints of the Hebrew Scriptures are visible throughout the founding era. The phrase “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land” — inscribed on the Liberty Bell — comes directly from Leviticus 25:10. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson proposed an official seal depicting the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, with the motto: “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

Core ideas underpinning American democracy — human dignity, equality before the law, the rule of law above rulers, protection for the vulnerable — trace back to the Hebrew Bible’s legal and prophetic tradition. The concept of a higher moral law that kings and governments must answer to echoes Israel’s covenantal model. Some Founders explicitly held up the ancient Hebrew republic as a model for self-governance.

John Adams said: “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.”

These values reached the Founders primarily through Protestant Christianity, which is itself built on the Hebrew Bible. The dominant Protestant culture of early America transmitted a specific set of assumptions: that individuals have inherent worth, that liberty requires moral accountability, that education matters, and that rulers can be questioned and resisted. These were the cultural foundations on which concepts like natural rights — and the Declaration of Independence itself — were built.

Today, a marble portrait of Moses hangs in the U.S. House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol.

Bottom Line

Huckabee’s critics are right that America didn’t depend on the modern state of Israel politically, and Jews were a tiny minority at the founding. But that’s not what he said. His claim was about civilizational DNA — the moral, legal, and spiritual inheritance flowing from the biblical story that originated in the land of Israel. Whether one shares his religious convictions or not, the historical record makes clear that this inheritance was central, not peripheral, to how America understood itself from the very beginning.

Sources

Arutz Sheva, American Heritage, Armstrong Institute, Aish, Harvard, Christian Publishers