The hit Broadway musical Hamilton, written by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as the Founding Father whose face is on the $10 bill (for now), is rightly called the hottest ticket on Broadway and is making American history cool again. It’s a marvel of a musical, mixing genres from Broadway anthem to hip-hop, staging cabinet debates between Jefferson and Hamilton as rap battles, drawing parallels between rhetoric then and now, between contemporary political issues and those that faced the Founders.
It’s also highly literate, loaded with references to the Founding documents, the age of Enlightenment, Shakespeare, contemporary rap—and of course, the Bible.
I saw the show last month, but have been as obsessed with the Hamilton soundtrack (which you can listen to in its entirety) as anyone for a long time. (It’s a sung-through musical, in the manner of Les Miserables, which means if you’ve heard the album, you’ve basically heard the whole show, a couple of connective pieces notwithstanding.) The longer I listened, the more intentional quotations of and resonance with the Bible and a handful of Christian theological concepts I heard.
And I got interested. This display of biblical literacy is good for the show: it enriches both its sense of history—the Founders, whatever their individual beliefs, were conversant in the Bible—and in several cases builds out the story’s themes and characters in ways that make them even more complex and fascinating.
So I investigated, and here are the results: 18 times Hamilton directly references the Bible or Christian theological concepts, with short explanations, for any fan of the soundtrack or the show. I’ve ordered them by the order in which the tracks appear on the album. (And I hope I didn’t miss any.)
“Alexander Hamilton”
Alexander Hamilton in 'Hamilton: An American Musical'
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a / Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a / Forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence / impoverished, in squalor / Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The show’s first track (watch the cast perform it at the White House a few weeks ago) introduces us to the characters and the early days of Hamilton’s life. These are the first five lines of the show, and they suggest, in a parlance favored at that time, that Hamilton’s place in history was fixed by “Providence”—or God. (For instance, William Bradford, the Plymouth governor who lived a century earlier, uses the term often in his writings.)
“My Shot”
Foes oppose us, we take an honest stand / We roll like Moses, claimin’ our promised land
This is an obvious reference: Moses led the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan, but they had to fight to take it. (Technically Moses never entered the Promised Land; that was left to Joshua.) The hymn “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks,” written by British Seventh Day Baptist minister Samuel Stennett, is contemporary with Hamilton’s setting—it was first published in 1787—and became popular in 19th-century America thanks to camp meetings.
But there are a lot more layers in here. The story of the Promised Land looms especially large in the imagination of both Civil War-era slaves longing for freedom and the Underground Railroad. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and “Wade in the Water” are three of dozens of spirituals that use the imagery—which brilliantly managed to express a longing for freedom, call up Christian language to assuage those who would put down rebellion, and sometimes function as coded instructions for escape. The deep link to the Exodus story is also why Harriet Tubman was called “Grandma Moses.” The Civil Rights movement later drew on the same story, with Martin Luther King Jr. bringing it up repeatedly in his rhetoric; the movement revived many old spirituals as protest songs, as well as making oblique references to the Exodus in songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome.”
