"Their form of government was as strictly theocratical insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch…. God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so…." (William Holmes McGuffey, McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader (New York, NY: American Book Company, 1879) p. 225.)

William McGuffey was undoubtedly influenced by the writings of renowned early American preachers such as John Cotton:

"The famous John Cotton, the first minister of Boston … earnestly pleaded “that the government might be considered as a theocracy, wherein the Lord was judge, lawgiver and king; that the laws which He gave Israel might be adopted….” At the desire of the court, he compiled a system of laws founded chiefly on the laws of Moses…. (Jeremy Belknap, John Farmer, The History of New-Hampshire (Dover, NH: George Wadleigh, 1862) pp. 42-43.)

John W. Welch commented on the outstanding influence Yahweh’s law had in Colonial America:

"Indeed, it has rightly been concluded that “the ideal polity of early Puritan New England was thought to comprehend divine intentions as revealed in Mosaic law.” The rule of law began, not with the rules of man but with the rules of God. One Puritan document directly states, [T]he more any law smells of man, the more unprofitable,” and thus, it asserts, the only proper laws were in fact “divine ordinances, revealed in the pages of Holy Writ and administered according to deductions and rules gathered from the Word of God.'" (John W. Welch, “Biblical Law in America: Historical Perspectives and Potentials for Reform,” Brigham Young University Law Review, 30 September 2002, http://www.contra-mundum.org/essays/theonomy/WEL1.pdf.)

For more, see "The Preamble: WE THE PEOPLE vs. YAHWEH" at http://www.missiontoisrael.org/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt3.php.