by Bruce Feiler
Blown off course, the Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod on November 9. The crew proceeded along the back side of the peninsula toward the Hudson but were soon whiplashed by wicked shoals off Nantucket. Half the shipwrecks on the Atlantic Coast are said to occur in this area. With the ship on the brink of disaster, Master Christopher Jones made the historic decision to sail northward around Cape Cod. The Pilgrims would settle in New England.
The Mayflower Compact, 1620. William Bradford leads the Pilgrims in signing the Mayflower Compact aboard the Mayflower; November 11, 1620. Engraving, 1859, after Tompkins Harrison Matteson. (Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York)
In his memoir, William Bradford described the next few weeks in language drawn directly from Moses. Searching the cape for a suitable place to settle, some Pilgrims encountered a band of Indians, who summarily fled, and a stash of dried corn, which they promptly stole. Bradford justified the thievery by citing the spies Moses sent into the Promised Land, noting that in both cases the purloined goods made their brethren “marvelously glad.” A crew member who had visited the area before recalled a “good harbor” across the bay, and on Wednesday, December 6, a small expedition set out in an open boat with a pilot, nine Pilgrims, and a servant.
Camping out the following night, the settlers were awakened by a hail of arrows. “Be of good courage,” the Pilgrims shouted to one another, echoing Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites. “Woach! Woach! Ha! Ha! Hach! Woach!” the Indians responded (echoing no known biblical passage). As the boat sailed north in the freezing air that Friday afternoon, its rudder came loose and the vessel careened out of control. Moments later, the mast splintered, bringing down the sails and any hope of reaching the mainland. The men took up oars but had no idea where they were.
“That still happens,” said Roger Randall. “Even if you’ve lived here forever, you can get lost in bad weather.”
The Pilgrims steered into what they later learned was the lee of a small island, where they slept for the night. The following morning proved to be a “fair, sunshining day,” and the men discovered they were on an island, safe from the Indians. They dried their sails and tried to calm their nerves. The next day, their first Sunday on American soil, they observed a day of rest and gave God thanks for his “deliverances,” yet another reference to what the Bible calls the Israelites’ “deliverance” from Egypt. For the Pilgrims, twenty miles from the Mayflower, more than three thousand miles from their homeland, this simple act of thanksgiving introduced into American life one of the central themes of the Bible: God hears his children when they suffer and helps deliver them to safety. As Bradford memorialized the occasion, in words taken from the Ten Commandments, “And this being the last day of the week, they prepared there to keep the Sabbath.”
THE STORY OF Moses begins in the second book of the Hebrew Bible—Exodus—known with Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as the Five Books of Moses. These books are also called the Pentateuch, from the Greek for “five books,” or the Torah, from the Hebrew for “teaching.” Genesis tells a multitude of stories—Creation, the Flood, the patriarchs, Joseph—and covers almost two thousand years of history, but the Moses story slows considerably, covering only forty years in four books. This ratio suggests that Moses dominates these books, but that’s not quite true, as the Pentateuch devotes no more than 14 of the 167 chapters in the last four books to Moses’ life. Instead of a domineering and heroic character, Moses is presented as a largely passive, even reactive figure who is clearly subservient to the primary actor in the story, God.
Exodus opens around the beginning of the thirteenth century B.C.E. with the Israelites living under forced labor in Egypt, the dominant power in the ancient Near East. The pharaoh, fearing the expansion of an alien force within his borders, orders the slaughter of all newborn Hebrew males. A woman of the Levite tribe hides her boy for three months, then sets him afloat on the Nile in a wicker basket. The daughter of the pharaoh is bathing by the Nile and draws the boy out of the basket. “This must be a Hebrew child,” she says. The boy’s sister, who has been watching, offers to get a Hebrew wet nurse, and summons the boy’s mother to suckle her son. When the boy gets older, the mother returns him to the pharaoh’s daughter, who raises him as her son. She names him Moses, explaining, “I drew him out of the water.” Since it’s unlikely that the daughter of the pharaoh spoke Hebrew, Moses’ name probably comes from the common Egyptian suffix meaning “born of,” as in Rameses, son of Ra. Moses is the Hebrew boy who carries an Egyptian name. He’s the child of hardship who’s raised in the greatest palace on earth. He’s the “son of” nobody, a hole not filled until he finds his true calling and becomes what Deuteronomy calls “God’s man.”
Commentators have observed that Moses’ life is defined by four choices. Each moment is a test of character in which Moses’ behavior shapes not only his own fate but the nature of the people he is destined to lead. The first choice occurs early in his adulthood. A gap of decades has passed since his rescue, and a grown Moses witnesses an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, which the text identifies as “one of his kinsmen.” No clue is given as to how Moses discerns his ancestry. His dilemma is whether to cling to the life of opulence he has enjoyed or cast his lot with the suffering people he barely knows. In a flash, Moses aligns himself with the powerless against the powerful. He murders the overseer, then bolts to the desert after the pharaoh issues a death warrant against him. For the child of privilege, Moses’ move is a life-defining act of rebellion. The prince of Egypt rejects the loftiest house on earth and aligns himself with the lowest members of society.
In the desert land of Midian, Moses marries a shepherdess, Zipporah, and they have a son, Gershom. The Bible explains the boy’s name as meaning “I have been a stranger in a foreign land,” a Hebrew wordplay suggesting that Moses still feels alienated from his homeland. One day while tending his new family’s flocks, Moses catches sight of a bush aflame. He says, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?” God then calls out, “Moses! Moses!” “Here I am,” the shepherd answers, echoing the words of Abraham when he first heard God’s voice eight hundred years earlier. God enjoins Moses to remove his sandals, for he is standing “on holy ground,” then announces, “I have marked well the plight of my people in Egypt.” God asks Moses to help rescue the Israelites from Egypt and deliver them to a “good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
This challenge represents Moses’ second choice. Will he stay in Midian and enjoy the pleasant life he has built, or will he follow the call of this mysterious voice and attempt to free a people enslaved for centuries? This time Moses hesitates. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites?” he asks God. “What if they do not believe me?” In a plea long taken to mean that Moses was a stutterer, he adds, “I have never been a man of words” and “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Finally Moses wails, “Please, O Lord, make someone else your agent.” God is unmoved. He unleashes a series of miracles, and finally Moses relents. More than just a husband and a father, Moses elects to become a savior. The man of choices chooses to lead the chosen people.
Back in Egypt, Moses confronts the pharaoh, his surrogate grandfather: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go.” The pharaoh resists and redoubles the workload of the Hebrews, crying, “You are shirkers, shirkers!” God unfolds a series of ten plagues designed to impress upon the pharaoh the power of the Lord. The early four are nuisances—blood, frogs, lice, and insects. The next four are more serious—pestilence, inflammation, hail, and locusts. The ninth is an act of terror, covering the country in darkness. And the tenth is the ultimate retribution for the pharaoh’s decision to kill the newborn Israelite males. “Toward midnight,” God says, “I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstone.”
Freed from bondage, more than six hundred thousand Israelite men, along with women and children, flee toward the Promised Land, being led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. But the pharaoh changes his mind and pursues them with his army, including six hundred chariots. The Egyptians soon trap the Israelites before the Yam Suf, or Sea of Reeds, a name mistranslated for centuries as Red Sea. The frightened Israelites turn on Moses. “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness?” At the final hour, God moves the pillar of cloud so that it shields them from the Egyptians, then instructs Moses to stretch out his arms over the water. The Lord drives back the sea with a strong east wind, turning it into dry ground. “The waters were split,” the text says, forming a wall on their left and another on their right. The Israelites cross to safety, then God sends the waters plunging back on the Egyptians, who have charged into the path between the waters. Moses leads the Israelites in a song of praise.
For the first months in the desert, the “stiff-necked” Israelites complain to Moses about the lack of food and water. If only we had died “in the land of Egypt,” they cry, “when we sat by the fleshpots.” God converts salt water into sweet and rains down quail and manna from the sky, but still the Israelites grumble. “Before long they will be stoning me!” Moses complains. After two months the Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai, and God summons Moses to the top, saying, “I bore you on eagles’ wings” so you could become a “holy nation.” God utters 10 commandments and 613 additional laws, then gives Moses two stone tablets containing their pact. The first five commandments cover humans’ relation with God, the second their relationship with one another.
But as soon as Moses descends the mountain, he discovers that the Israelites have grown anxious over his absence and molded an Egyptian god, a golden calf, as a surrogate deity. God is furious and offers to destroy the people and create a new one from Moses’ seed. I will “make of you a great nation,” God says. Here Moses faces his third choice. Will he accept this tempting offer to choose a people made in his image, or will he continue to struggle with the one made in God’s? In his greatest act of leadership, Moses opts for selflessness over self. He talks God out of his impulse. Then, turning to the orgying masses, Moses hurls the tablets to the ground and compels the Israelites to sign the covenant, though not before thousands are killed for apostasy. God provides replacement tablets, and the Israelites continue on toward the Promised Land.
But no sooner do they leave the mountain than the rebellions begin anew. Moses sends twelve spies to scout the land of Canaan. After forty days the spies return and report that the land “does indeed flow with milk and honey.” But the cities are fortified, and the men appear like giants. Only two of the dozen spies—Caleb and Joshua—believe the land can be captured. The Israelites once again lose hope, crying, “Let us head back for Egypt!” God is furious. He wipes out the apostate spies and punishes the entire population by announcing that they will be forbidden to enter the Promised Land. “Your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, while your children roam the wilderness for forty years.” The duration of forty years is chosen, the text says, with one year corresponding to every day the spies were gone.
Moses is soon denied entry to the Promised Land, too. In a cryptic incident described in Numbers 20, God instructs Moses to assemble the community, who are grumbling over the lack of water, and “order the rock to yield its water.” Moses instead raises his hand and strikes the rock twice with his rod. “Out came copious water.” But in what appears to be God’s final attempt to undermine Moses, the Lord says, “Because you did not trust me enough to affirm my sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.” Here Moses faces his final choice: Will he stand up to God and fight for his just reward, or will he accept God’s decision and prepare the Israelites for their future? Will he think of himself, or his people? Moses’ final choice is in keeping with his others. The leader chooses his followers. He will spend the remainder of his days teaching the people what they must know. As he guides his people toward Mount Nebo, Moses knows that the peak from which he will see the Promised Land will be his final spot on earth. What will the man of few words choose as his final words? What will his farewell message be?
CLAR’S ISLAND TODAY is more wooded than it was in 1620, nearly overgrown, and privately controlled by a few families who have been feuding for centuries. One of the founders of the Old Colony Club, John Watson, was a loyalist during the Revolution and took refuge here to avoid being tarred and feathered. In 1873, Henry David Thoreau stayed in the Watson family home. Our boats landed on the same narrow beach, covered in scallop shells and horseshoe crabs, and from there we stepped onto a grassy lawn.
A cookout was set up, with a large pot of chili, corn bread, and half as many plastic bowls as men. The members made drinks and enjoyed the breeze, a tailgate party in the antechamber of America. I was struck by the seriousness of their purpose; they were a self-appointed Thanksgiving Protection Society.
When the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, explained Jim Baker, a local historian, they had little for which to give thanks. They lost half their population in the first year and were forced to survive on scrod, flounder, and salted cod. A year later they celebrated their initial harvest, and while this occasion is often referred to as the first Thanksgiving, Jim explained, it was not a traditional day of prayers. The first official Day of Thanksgiving and Praise was not held until 1623, and it was a solemn occasion of worship to mark the end of a drought and the arrival of fresh colonists. There was no feasting, as the impoverished settlers could offer their guests only “a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup of fair water.”
In time, harvest festivals would be celebrated across the colonies, and President Washington called for a onetime day of Thanksgiving in 1789, but these had nothing to do with the Pilgrims, as Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and other accounts were lost until the nineteenth century. The only people who seemed to care about the zealots from England were the men of the Old Colony Club, who invented Forefathers Day in 1769. Even Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation that declared Thanksgiving an annual holiday does not mention the Pilgrims or a mythical “first Thanksgiving.” That connection did not occur until the late nineteenth century with a retroactive romanticization of the small band from Plymouth. As poet James Russell Lowell wrote in 1870, “Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little ship-load of outcasts who landed at Plymouth…are destined to influence the rest of the world.”
But even then, Jim Baker lamented, Plymouth Rock got all the glory, and Clark’s Island was forgotten. Baker is a dry, studious man with an accent as pure Boston as the Red Sox. A winner of the Distinguished Mayflower Scholarship Prize, he had just completed a book on Thanksgiving. After dinner, he led me to the island’s center and a giant boulder known as Pulpit Rock, the reputed spot where the Pilgrims worshiped in 1620.
The idea of linking the founding of America with the birth of Israel was not inevitable. If anything, it was a historical anomaly. For all the importance of the Moses narrative in the Bible, Moses himself played an ambivalent role in the religions that revered his story. Early Jews considered Moses a great prophet and an inspired teacher, but they repeatedly stressed that God was the real founder of the nation. Moses did not liberate the Israelites from slavery, God did. Moses was not the true lawgiver, God was.<
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Early Christians downplayed Moses even more. Moses is mentioned more than eighty times in the New Testament, more than any other figure in the Hebrew Bible. Yet the Gospel according to Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses, sent to supplant the first one. Just as the pharaoh kills baby Israelite males and only Moses is saved, so Herod kills the children around Bethlehem and only Jesus escapes. Just as Moses was born in Egypt and leads Israel to freedom, so Jesus goes to Egypt and leads humanity to freedom. “I have come not to abolish” the law, Jesus says, “but to fulfill.”
Islam performed a similar diminution. The Koran calls Moses the “confidant of God” and mentions him in thirty-four chapters, more than a quarter of the total. “We showed favor to Moses and Aaron,” God says in the Koran. “We gave them the glorious book.” But elsewhere Moses is used to undermine the role of the Jews, “those to whom a portion of the Scripture was given.”
Jewish leaders often objected to these characterizations, but their ghettoized voices rarely penetrated. At the close of the Middle Ages, Moses was a marginalized figure, confined largely to superseded Scripture, with few prospects for influencing world events. The idea that the founders of any nation would attempt to legitimize their actions by likening themselves to Moses would have been preposterous.
So why did this happen in the United States?
The American elevation of Moses grew out of an extraordinary collusion of trends—geographic, religious, and technological. For waves of believers who left the civilized world, crossed a forbidding sea, and arrived in untamed territory, the New World could plausibly be considered a wilderness. As early as 1492, Christopher Columbus likened himself to the Hebrew prophet. On September 23, seven weeks after departing Spain, Columbus experienced an uncommon swelling of the ocean. “The rising of the sea was very favorable to me,” he recorded in his journal, “as it happened formerly to Moses when he led the Jews from Egypt.” On a later voyage Columbus claimed that God had treated him like Moses and David, adding, “What more did he do for the people of Israel when he brought them out of Egypt?”