While this July 4th, most Americans are, amidst the barbecues and jumps in the pool, unlikely to pop open a Bible and start reading the book of Joshua, they might at least take a moment during the festivities to consider how the book’s eponymous Israelite hero helped shape the United States from the colonial period to the Civil Rights era.

Joshua first appears as Moses’s assistant after the parting of the Red Sea in the book of Exodus. We see him with Moses on Mount Sinai to receive the Law, and leading the battle against Amalek. Eventually Joshua becomes Moses’s successor, leading the people of Israel across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land.

Sidney and Separation of Powers

In the colonial era, Joshua began to serve as a model for what would become the independent nation. Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) was an English political philosopher and major intellectual influence on Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. He directly advised William Penn on Pennsylvania’s early constitution. And in Sidney’s 1698 volume Discourses Concerning Government, he proposed the government of the Jews prior to the monarchical age as a model to be admired.

In describing the system Joshua set up, Sidney declared that “we shall easily find that it consisted of three parts, besides the magistrates of the several tribes and cities. They had a chief magistrate, who was called judge or captain, as Joshua, Gideon [from the book of Judges], and others, a council of seventy chosen men, and the general assemblies of the people.” This separation of powers, of course, would serve as a foundational principle of the U.S. government.