America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  What makes Columbus’s evoking of Moses so notable is that the Bible was not widely read in Europe at the time. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church, eager to monopolize its power, insisted that the Bible was so sacred it must be read only in Latin, could be interpreted only by its clergy, and had to be kept only in church. The penalty for violating these edicts could be death. Also, since the Bible contains around 774,000 words, creating a new volume by hand was prohibitively time-consuming. Two monks working full-time would take at least four years to transcribe an entire Bible. Very few churches had one. Simply put, there were few people of the book because there were few books.

  Within decades, though, Martin Luther began agitating against the Church, accelerating a process that, along with the invention of the printing press, would open the Bible to millions of lay readers and convert the epic narrative of the Israelites from a little-read relic into a living inspiration. Protestants believed civilization should be based on sola scriptura, Scripture alone, as opposed to Scripture interpreted exclusively by the Church. Soon vernacular Bibles popped up across Europe—especially in Britain. One scholar estimates that 1,342,500 Bibles were printed in England between 1520 and 1649, enough for every household. “Consider the great historical fact,” wrote Thomas Huxley, that the Bible “has become the national epic of Britain.”

  If the Bible was the national epic of Britain, it was the national birthright of America. What the Reformers realized when they read the text—particularly the narrative books of the Hebrew Bible, which the Catholic liturgy downplayed—was that the Bible argues against the divine right of kings. It constitutes a veritable call to revolution. The Hebrew Bible has always been a radical political document, wrote Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, “testifying to the right of prophets to criticize kings, the inalienable dignity of the human person…and a clear sense of the moral limits of power.” Though these ideals appear throughout the Bible, they are introduced with Moses: the prophet who stands up to the mightiest king ever known; the individual to whom God entrusts the Ten Commandments; and the figure stopped short of his ultimate destination when he disobeys God’s word.

  Among Protestants, Moses was arguably the preeminent figure of the Hebrew Bible. Luther himself was frequently compared to him. As the centenary of Luther’s posting the Ninety-five Theses approached in 1617, an occasion for which Protestants invented the century as a landmark of historical measurement, the German monk was hailed as Europe’s Moses, the man who led the chosen people out from papal bondage. The Pilgrims took the Protestants’ interest in Hebrew Scripture to its ultimate extreme by reenacting Moses’ journey. By foisting themselves across the sea on an “errand into the wilderness” of America, ordinary citizens could now cast themselves as actors in the greatest drama ever conceived. In effect, everyone could now be Moses. As John Milton wrote in 1644, “The time seems come, wherein Moses the great Prophet may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that…all the Lord’s people are become prophets.”

  Title page of the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible, which depicts the Israelites camped before the Red Sea. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

  “Protestants viewed themselves as living in biblical time,” Jim Baker explained as we walked toward Pulpit Rock. “To them, the Bible represents the original church, and they want to be a part of it. In coming to God’s New Israel, they viewed themselves as re-creating God’s original kingdom that had been occluded by the manmade church.”

  For Pilgrims and Puritans who came to America, the Exodus story took on an even deeper resonance because they were breaking away not simply from the Catholic Church but from the Church of England as well.

  “There’s very little precedent for what they did,” Jim said, “and they realized that their actions were not going to go over very well with the authorities. Therefore you’ve got to convince yourself—and everybody else—that breaking away from England was a good idea. To do that, you go back to the source, like a lawyer citing precedent. The Bible was the ultimate source, and the Exodus the ultimate example.”

  PULPIT ROCK IS located in a small clearing, surrounded by clover, dandelions, and daisies. It’s a granite boulder that weighs about thirty tons and was deposited here during the last glacier period, when retreating ice ferried down chunks of granite from New Hampshire. Plymouth Rock arrived in the same way. Neither boulder appears in contemporaneous accounts; they were added to the story more than a century after the Pilgrims landed.

  Once the men of the Old Colony Club had assembled, a member climbed to the top of Pulpit Rock and began tapping out a tune on a snare drum. He later told me he had played a similar song upon the arrival of the Mayflower II in 1957 when the captain sidled up to him and said, “Laddie, could you pick up the pace. We haven’t had a bath in sixty days.”

  Then Harold Boyer, at ninety-seven, the senior member of the club, was hoisted to the summit. “Friends of the Old Colony Club,” he said. “When I first became a member, I was attracted by the fellowship, but also the responsibility to perpetuate the memory of the Pilgrims.”

  He carefully recapitulated the Pilgrims’ story, from their departure from Holland to their landing on Cape Cod to the dawning of their first day on Clark’s Island. “They were ready to set out the next day, Sunday,” he said, “and seek a permanent place for landing. But Sunday was the Sabbath, so they set aside every other thing and worshiped. The first service in the New World.” He pointed out a carving on Pulpit Rock that said ON THE SABBOTH DAY WEE RESTED.

  “Today, my friends, Americans have lost connection with the Pilgrims. We have forgotten the biblical faith that they had. We desecrate the Sabbath. We no longer see ourselves as exiles searching for the Promised Land.” He paused.

  “My brothers, I may not be here next year with you,” he continued. “So on my last visit to this sacred place, I beg of you to remember the words the great prophet said on Mount Nebo. God has promised us this land. He will make the land flow with milk and honey. But we must remember to give him thanks.”

  In the background, the drum began to sound. A bluebird settled on the grass. I could hear waves splashing on the shore. And on Pulpit Rock, Harold Boyer closed his eyes and continued reciting what are among the most oft-cited lines in the Bible, from Deuteronomy 30. They are the words from Moses’ farewell address on Mount Nebo in which the man of choices offers his people the ultimate choice. John Winthrop quoted these words on the Arbella in 1630, Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked them the night before he was killed in 1968, and Ronald Reagan repeated them at the base of the Statue of Liberty on its centennial birthday in 1986:

  See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and adversity. For I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments. But if you turn away, you shall certainly perish; you shall not long endure on the soil that you are crossing the Jordan to enter. I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—that you and your offspring shall live.

  IN MANY WAYS, Plymouth was an unfortunate choice for the Pilgrims. While the soil and water were good, the shipping would have been better in Boston, the fishing superior on Cape Cod. Today the town is still stranded between these more attractive neighbors. It has many signatures of New England—white clapboard churches, green copper cupolas, American flags—as well as its share of wry tributes, like Bradford’s Package Store on Route 3A. An eighty-one-foot-tall statue of Faith, known as Forefathers Monument, stands on a hill. A slightly squat cousin of the Statue of Liberty, the female figure rests her foot on Plymouth Rock and holds a Bible.

  A few miles away is Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the town circa 1627. (The facility uses the original spelling of the name.) The village includes thatched cottages, herb gardens, and dozens of re-enactors in buckled shoes, bonnets, and white lacy collars. Visiting the plantation is like walking into an elementary school Thanksgiving play, except the actors have Ph.D.’s in their pockets instead of p
eanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Jim Baker had suggested I meet the park’s premier historian, John Kemp, the author of a book about 1620, who that day was playing the role of William Brewster, the preacher on the Mayflower. He had a gray Vandyke and was tending a fire on his hearth. He offered to show me his Bible.

  “Our leader has a phrase he often mutters—Scrutinized Scriptures,” Kemp, er, Elder Brewster, said. “He speaks of the need for each family to make studying Scripture a daily duty.” The Pilgrims even named their children after biblical virtues, he explained. Brewster had daughters named Fear and Patience. He had a son named Love and another named Wrestling, after the Hebrew word Israel, which means “wrestling with God.”

  But the Pilgrims’ attachment to the Bible goes even deeper, to another idea at the heart of the Moses story: covenant. The Moses narrative is built on two pillars. The first is freedom. In times of oppression, slavery, or pain, the story suggests, humans can cry out and God will liberate them from their distress. “I have marked well the plight of my people,” God tells Moses at the burning bush. “I am mindful of their suffering.”

  But freedom alone is not God’s desire for humans. Freedom must be accompanied by the second pillar of the story: responsibility. In the Bible, this notion is captured in the word brit, or covenant, an agreement between two parties to perform and/or refrain from certain activities. In Genesis, God makes quasi covenants with Adam, Noah, and Abraham. But the climactic covenant comes at Mount Sinai, when the agreement finally takes written form. Having freed the Israelites from slavery, God now demands that they follow his laws, namely, the Ten Commandments and 613 other mandates. The Bible’s message: There is no freedom without obligation. True freedom depends on giving up some freedoms in return for a civil and just society.

  One reason the Puritans proved so influential in American history is that they were the first to sear these twin pillars into American life—freedom and law, Exodus and Sinai. A century and a half later, these parallel ideas would be entrenched in the defining events of American history, the liberation of the Revolution followed by the constriction of the Constitution. In both cases, the language was heavily influenced by Moses.

  I was struck during my visit to Plimoth Plantation by how profoundly strict the Pilgrim covenant was. Sinners were whipped in public or placed in stocks. In those early, brutal months, one of the few healthy residents had his hands and feet bound. Later, adulterers were forced to wear an AD on their outer garments and a sodomizer was put to death. Bradford justified the punishment by citing verses of Mosaic law. Considering the Pilgrims had traveled halfway across the world, had virtually no food, were surrounded by Indians, and steadily lost family and friends, you’d think they might have relaxed their religious convictions. Instead, they tried to out-Moses Moses. Having just crossed their version of the Red Sea, they quickly implemented their own Sinai.

  The Pilgrims’ commitment to covenant began with the Mayflower Compact, signed immediately before they came ashore on Cape Cod, in which they agreed to “covenant and combine ourselves” into a civil body. In 1636, John Cotton presented the commonwealth of Massachusetts with an elaborate legal code based on the books of Moses that included forty-six separate laws drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Though Cotton’s plan was watered down, the commonwealth still adopted laws taken directly from Deuteronomy, including punishing crimes associated with the “first table” of the Decalogue, the first five of the Ten Commandments. These offenses included incest, bearing false witness, even cursing one’s parents. A cage was set up for people who did not honor the Sabbath. Over time, the idea of covenant became part of the fabric of America. The word federal, for instance, comes from the Latin foedus, or “covenant.”

  I asked John Kemp in his role as Elder Brewster why a group of Christians would rely so heavily on Old Testament notions of freedom and law.

  “For us, freedom is not as important as you might think,” he said. “We wanted freedom from oppression, and freedom from the bondage of the Church. But what we really wanted was freedom to go back to the Bible.”

  “So you didn’t come here to be free?” I asked.

  “We wanted to be free from the tyranny of England, absolutely. But we really came to obey God. In reading the Bible, we learn that the true church of God is all his elected leaders of the past, and that includes the Hebrew prophets. Of those, Moses was the greatest. We know that God chose to give the law to him, and through him it comes down to all of us.”

  MY LAST STOP in Plymouth was an exquisite white Victorian house on the grassy shore of the harbor overlooking Clark’s Island. Squint your eyes and double the acreage, and the lawn would be the perfect setting for a game of Kennedy touch football. Only this home belongs to the least likely member of the Old Colony Club and the most unexpected tender of the Mayflower flame.

  The Reverend Peter Gomes has as much stature as Forefathers Monument and an even firmer grip on the Bible. He’s the preacher at Memorial Church of Harvard University and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. A former president of the nearly two-hundred-year-old Pilgrim Society, he was named Clergy of the Year in 1998 by the magazine Religion and American Life. He’s also black, Republican, and gay. (He later changed his registration to Democrat to help elect the state’s first black governor.) Unable to attend the pilgrimage to Clark’s Island, he invited me to his home the following day to discuss the Pilgrims and their role in introducing Moses to American life. I arrived to find him wearing slippers and watering gardenias on his porch. He offered me a glass of lemonade, and we settled into rocking chairs.

  “It’s one of the great spots in the world, to sit here and look out at this landscape and realize that most of it was quite accidental,” he said in an accent that suggested he could teach the king a few things about the King’s English. “They never would have gotten here had they not wrecked on Clark’s Island.”

  “Is there any significance that they took a day off to pray?” I asked.

  “I like the notion that ‘On the Sabbath day we rested,’” he said. “They had church. That I can understand. I view Clark’s Island as an anticipation, the point from which a great adventure begins afoot.”

  I asked him why this group of radical Christians was so openly motivated by Moses.

  “By the early 1600s, English translations of the Bible had been around for almost seventy-five years,” he said. “Biblical metaphors were already ripe and rich. The Puritans saw themselves as a chosen people being oppressed by a great imperial force. Also, Jews had been kicked out of Britain by then, so in the absence of real Jews, it’s possible for everyone to be Jewish. You can hijack their ideology lock, stock, and barrel, which is essentially what they did. I would suspect the Pilgrims didn’t like Jews as persons, but the Exodus is the greatest narrative there is, so you take it and make it your own.”

  “Did they see themselves as continuing the biblical narrative, or re-creating it?”

  “Oh, fulfilling the biblical narrative,” he said. “There’s a big difference. They’re not just a group of people in succession. They want everybody to see that they really are biblical truth come to light. All the mutuality, the bearing of one another’s burdens, the rich taking care of the poor, was to build a society that was so ideal that everybody would want to duplicate it.”

  “And did they succeed?”

  “They viewed landfall as a success,” he said. “They weren’t killed at sea! The Indians didn’t kill them! They didn’t all starve! I think they saw those as special providences. Only later did they sense that they were losing the dream.”

  When I set out looking at Moses in America, I assumed the Hebrew prophet was the ultimate model of success. The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea; the colonists confronted King George as the Israelites confronted the pharaoh; the slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad as the Israelites escaped Egypt. But I quickly realized that I had overlooked one of the central reasons for Moses’ appeal: He fails. He doe
s not reach the Promised Land. Moses is as much a model of disappointment as he is of achievement.

  Which is another reason he became so appealing to the Pilgrims. Like the Israelites freed from slavery, the Pilgrims saw their excitement at their emancipation from England turn quickly to despair once they arrived in Massachusetts. In Plymouth, they were isolated from trade, surrounded by Indians, and hamstrung by debt. It took them two years to replace the settlers they lost in their first year; a decade later they still had only three hundred people; twenty-five years later only twenty-five hundred. Worse, their faith waned. By the 1660s, Puritanism was under assault in England and in decline in America. Clergy bewailed the “degeneracy of the rising generation.” America had not become a New Israel. It was the Old Israel all over again. “What should I do with such a stiff-nekt race?” God complained in a 1662 poem.

  William Bradford was particularly overcome with despondence. A passionate man, with a prophet’s fire and a psalmist’s soul, Bradford had been elected governor every year but five between 1621 and 1656. Toward the end of his life he withdrew from day-to-day running of the colony and retreated into the Old Testament. He even began studying Hebrew. The original manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation included eight pages of Hebrew vocabulary notes and a remarkable hymn to God’s sacred tongue, for having brought Bradford closer to his hero of heroes.

  Though I am growne aged, yet I have had a longing desire to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the law and Oracles of God were write; and in which God and angels spake to the holy patriarchs of old time; and what names were given to things from the creation. And though I can not attaine to much herein, yet I am refreshed to have seen some glimpse hereof (as Moyses saw the land of Canan a farr of).