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This Biblical bent was explained in Philip Gorski’s historical analysis of the period titled “American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.” Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, contends that the US was founded as “a prophetic republic that would weave together the ethical vision of the Hebrew prophets and the Western political heritage of civic republicanism.”
Gorski explained that the image of Moses leading the Israelites over the Red Sea proposed by Franklin “shows how powerful, how influential the Exodus narrative was, and remained, during the revolutionary era.”
“In a way, it’s too bad,” said Gorski. “I would have preferred it [the Moses seal] to the eagle. It’s something more worth remembering, aspiring to.”
Yet another concept competing against Benjamin Franklin’s Biblical vision for the seal was submitted by artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière, who depicted a shield consisting of the traditional symbols of the six European nations that had settled North America. The shield was surrounded by thirteen shields representing the states and flanked by the goddess of liberty and an American rifleman. It also bore the eye of Providence and the motto “E Pluribus Unum.”
When the design featuring a bald eagle was ultimately chosen, Franklin was disappointed, explaining this in a letter to his daughter, describing the bird as an “avian aristocrat”:
For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labor of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a Fish… the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.
Franklin had also suggested an image of a rattlesnake to represent the nation while others argued for a turkey or a dove.
“For the Truth, Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird,” he wrote. “He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”
The issue was finally settled in 1945, when President Truman officially mandated the use of the eagle in the Presidential Seal.
Everything else is just history…
