America's Prophet (2 page)

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.”

To prevent the Israelite firstborns from being killed, God instructs the Hebrews to slaughter a lamb and spread the blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. They shall eat the roasted flesh that night, God says, “with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs.” It is a “passover offering to the Lord,” the text says. “When I see the blood I will pass over you.” This final plague works. Faced with the carnage and the loss of his firstborn child, the pharaoh relents. “Be-gone!” he tells Moses. “Go, worship the Lord as you said.”

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.

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?”

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.