As a lifelong athiest I have always been perplexed about the meaning of the word "bless." The first definition in the dictionary defines it as "to make something holy."
I suppose when a Priest might use the phrase "Bless you, my child" they are invoking some magic holy protection order that you may not come to harm, or rather, that you come to less harm than you might otherwise come to as the result of the erroneous direction to which your free will might lead you. That the Priest has put you under the protection of a diety, not complete protection, but by having a diety help you make the right choices.
When invoked by well-wishers after a sneeze I've heard that the ancients believed that your holy spirit left your body for an instant, and that the blessing was to assure that evil spirits did not take advantage of its absence and protection.
But what about when referring to a country? Does "bless" mean "approve of our actions?" That the diety should know that we are doing what we think is right and we hope you'll agree? Does it have the first sense of meaning, that is "make us holy?" Give us godly powers to vanquish our enemies?
Your confusion comes from the translation of Old Hebrew, not from a fundamental inconsistence.The English word ‘blessed’ is translated from the Hebrew word ‘buhruk’. The English word often refers to the abstraction of making something holy. However, it can also mean to give ‘rewards of a material nature’. I will speculate on how one evolved to mean the other.
Most prayers in Hebrew start with ‘baruk atah adonai’. ‘Show submission toward God’. I conjecture that the meaning of the word 'baruk' evolved from 'kneel toward'.
The Old Hebrew word ‘baruk’ actually meant ‘kneeling toward’. The ‘ruk’ means to kneel and the buh means ‘in’. The concept of ‘in’ and ‘toward’ are topologically similar. So ‘baruk’ is usually used as a command to ‘kneel toward’. You are supposed to kneel toward God or some representation of God. ‘Baruk Atah Adonai’ means ‘You must kneel toward God’.
The concept of ‘kneeling’ was generalized to ‘showing submission’ probably in late Biblical times. ‘Baruk attha odonai', commonly repeated, would be to show submission to the Lord your God. Originally the people and priests would be kneeling to an idol. Later on, they would be kneeling toward the Ark of the Covenant while visiting the Temple. Still later, when Solomon centralized the religion, one bowed toward Jerusalem because God in some sense is in Jerusalem.
‘Bahruk atah adonai’ did not mean ‘God should kneel toward you’. I don’t think God ever ‘blessed the people’ in Hebrew. God does not show submission to anyone. I haven’t looked thoroughly, so I can’t be sure. However, I don’t think God ever ‘baruked’ the people of Israel. The people ‘baruked’ God because they showed submission. So the subject of the sentence was ‘people’ and the object of the sentence would be God. ‘Show submission to God would be ‘Baruk Atah adonai’.
I suspect that some translators confused the subject in the Hebrew sentence with the object in the Hebrew sentence. So a sentence like, “The people kneeled to God’ became confused with ‘God kneeled to the people.’ All it would take is one sloppy translation. The priests and worshippers knew very well that God would not kneel to the people. So they decided that ‘blessed’ acknowledge the importance’.
Now, subject and object can be reversed. Sure, the people can acknowledge the importance of God. However, God can acknowledge the importance of the Hebrew people. A ruler doesn’t submit to followers, but he can acknowledge their importance.
A ruler can acknowledge the utility of his servants. The accepted response of a ruler toward an important servant is to give the servant rewards. If you acknowledge the importance of something using a religious criteria, you are making it holy.
‘Holiness’ is just a state of being acknowledge for ones importance. A holiday is an important day, whether it is secular or religious.
So ‘God bless America’ is asking God to give America rewards because of its good service. We want all the benefits of doing what He wants.
http://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Baruch.html#.Vqulr8dlmi5
The root-verb ברך (barak) may either mean to bless or to kneel. It's not clear which of the two meanings came first; whether the action of kneeling came from the action of blessing or blessing came from kneeling, but in the Bible the two are thoroughly intertwined. The same duality occurs in cognate languages but some scholars insist that the common Semitic root ברך (brk) should be split into two separate verbs that have nothing to do with each other.
Whatever the true etymology, our verb occurs with the meaning to kneel only about three times (2 Chronicles 6:13, Psalm 95:6, and - of camels - Genesis 24:11) and hundreds of times with the meaning of to bless. From these many occurrences, we learn that to the Hebrews, the act of blessing had to do with "to endue with power for success, prosperity, fecundity, longevity, etc," as HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament puts it.
