The golden thread does not begin and end in Greece and Rome. This episode widens it in two directions the schoolbooks usually omit. First, to Jerusalem: the Hebrew tradition that gave the West its most radical political idea — that even the king stands under the law — expressed through the covenant at Sinai, the prophets who confronted kings to their faces, and above all Samuel’s warning in the eighth chapter of First Samuel, a catalog of royal takings that states the Liberty Test three thousand years early and ends by telling a freed people they will make themselves slaves again. The Founders made this inheritance their own, from the Mayflower Compact to Franklin’s proposed Great Seal of Moses drowning Pharaoh. Second, to Baghdad and Córdoba: the House of Wisdom and the Islamic Translation Movement that preserved the Greek philosophical corpus through the six centuries the Latin West had lost it, the great commentators — al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun — who carried it forward, and the Toledo translators and Jewish intermediaries like Maimonides who handed it back into Latin so that Aquinas, and eventually Philadelphia, could inherit it. The episode confronts honestly the imperial and slaveholding character of the civilizations that did this work, answers three serious objections at full strength, and closes on the recognition that no single people built the inheritance at the root of American liberty.
