Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate the same story: fifty-six men in Philadelphia, a war for independence, and a document declaring that all men are endowed with unalienable rights. It is a story worth celebrating. It is also, according to a new teaching from Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, an incomplete one.

Three thousand years before the Declaration of Independence was signed, God gave the Israelite nation its own founding document at Mount Sinai, one that laid out a vision of liberty the American founders would later echo almost word for word. In a new class released ahead of the holiday weekend, Rabbi Wolicki walks viewers through the biblical text itself to make the case.

The connection begins with a strange redundancy in the biblical text. Before delivering the Ten Commandments, God introduces Himself to the newly freed slaves standing at the mountain: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). Every person present already knew they had come from Egypt. They had lived it. The reminder was unnecessary, unless the point was not information but emphasis. Rabbi Wolicki argues that God was not introducing Himself as Creator or as the God of the patriarchs. He was introducing Himself specifically as the God who breaks chains.

That theme does not end with the Exodus. In Leviticus 25, the Torah establishes the law of the Jubilee year, a fifty-year cycle in which land that had been sold reverted back to its original family. The mechanism prevented any single dynasty from permanently consolidating land and power at the expense of everyone else, a structural safeguard against exactly the kind of economic entrenchment that strips a population of real independence, regardless of what its laws claim on paper.

The parallels to 1776 are direct. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” reads the Declaration of Independence, language that maps closely onto the biblical claim that freedom originates with God, not government, and comes bundled with responsibility rather than a release from it.

The argument arrives at a pointed moment. As debates continue over the size and reach of government power, unelected agencies, and the limits of individual liberty, Rabbi Wolicki frames the biblical case as more than ancient history. It is being offered as the original blueprint.

The class is now available for free on Bible Plus, timed to release ahead of the holiday weekend. Rabbi Wolicki’s teaching argues that recovering the biblical roots of liberty is not a matter of religious sentiment, but of understanding what is actually being defended every time the idea of freedom is invoked.

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