Bible and Empire: The Old Testament in the Spanish American Wars of Independence

From the moment Columbus first landed in America in 1492 to the time Spain lost control of its kingdoms in the New World in the nineteenth century, the Old Testament shaped the culture of the global Spanish Monarchy. The Book of Samuel taught kings, priests, and the people the contested foundations of monarchical authority and popular sovereignty. While priests sought to recapitulate the lives of Aaron, Elijah and Jonah, magistrates aspired to be like Moses and Joshua.  Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers served out lessons on territorial expansion and colonization and the proper way to design the arks and tabernacles that were Catholic Churches. Judges, Kings, and Judith introduced females to the exemplary lives of warriors like Judith, Yael, and Deborah; challenging a Marian ideal of a passive, suffering mother-figure as the sole role model for women. The Old Testament offered a rich theological foundation for most loyalist and patriotic political discourses the Wars of Independence and the. These discourses however have escaped the radar of those who cast the wars within the Enlightenment discourse of the Age of Revolutions or within a tradition of Hispanic liberalism, culminating with the Cortes of Cadiz. I seek to recast the historiography on the Spanish American Wars of Independence by highlighting the importance of Old Testament narratives to both loyalists and patriots.  I trace the biblical origins of terms like "Libertador," "nation," and "caudillo" as I make patently visible the extraordinary parallels between the biblical discourses of the American and the Spanish American Revolutions. Indeed many patriots translated (in separate occasions) the writings of Thomas Paine on biblical republicanism. Yet these patriots also added substantially to Paine's works as they tapped

into their own well-established local colonial traditions on biblical republicanism.