An Early Pledge of Allegiance
When the people of Israel first came to settle in the land of Canaan, they were immigrants, so Moses commanded them to make a kind of Pledge of Allegiance. I don't know if they did this only once, or it was an regular ongoing event. Here are his instructions: “When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance and have taken possession of it and live in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from your land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket, and you shall go to the place that the Lord your God will choose, to make his name to dwell there. And you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.’ Then the priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the Lord your God. “And you shall say, ‘ A wanderi