The present US president is fond of saying that the greatest gift that his divinity had bestowed on humanity is (was?) liberty. Let’s forget about the past tense and the time stamp and restrictions it puts on divine interventions. The corollary of the way in which he frames this declaration is that our liberty-based American democracy is naturally on the side of the divinity, and vice-versa. I find it shocking to see the Bible put to such use. Scripture doesn’t speak of liberty. It speaks of slavery and redemption, not exactly the same thing as liberty or freedom. I don’t think redemption is capitalizable or useable as a sledge-hammer in foreign policy. Or at least there are ominous pronouncements against this abuse in, say, Deuteronomy. The whole Bible is written from the point of view of a people who have lost their political freedom and turned this loss into something deeper than a superficial liberty that is all too often a simple pretext for the unfettered looting of natural resources and unjust exploitation of labor.