America's Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America

I  MOSES! MOSES!

THANKSGIVING IS THE mandatory holiday in my family. It’s the one time of year when we clear our calendars, pack up gifts, and travel across the country for a ritual that is one part Americana, one part Hanukkah, one part nostalgia. The event begins when my mother polishes dozens of apples, pears, pomegranates, and kumquats and arranges them with a pumpkin, some Indian corn, and cranberries to create a cornucopian centerpiece. It continues with Thanksgiving dinner, a mix of trendy roasted this and that along with some embarrassing 1950s classics we love, notably a hot fruit compote made with five different kinds of canned fruit baked with macaroons and sherry. During the meal, in a custom that makes me cringe yet always seems to work, my sister insists that we go around the table and say why we are thankful. The weekend concludes with an early celebration of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights. It’s a classic American event, a mix of church, state, shopping, and turkey.

Passover is the equivalent holiday for my in-laws. Every spring, my mother-in-law hosts thirty-five people on one night and a different thirty-five people the second night for a ritualized retelling of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. The food is equally ritualized: chicken soup with matzoh balls; gefilte fish with hot pink horseradish sauce; Debbie’s tasty brisket with carrots and potatoes; and Auntie Barbara’s Jell-O mold with, yup, canned fruit. Passover is so important to my in-laws that when they expanded their home some years ago they redid not their bedroom or bathroom but their dining room, just for these two nights a year. The centrality of these two holidays to our respective families is such that when my mother met my future mother-in-law for the first time they retreated into a corner and came out a few minutes later with smiles on their faces: The Feilers would get Thanksgiving; the Rottenbergs would get Passover.

Though it took me a while to realize it, discovering the unexpected bridge that links these two holidays would occupy the coming years of my life.

Before attending my first Passover with my in-laws, I warned them that I would make the world’s most insufferable seder guest. I had just returned from a yearlong journey through the Middle East, in which I actually crossed the likely Red Sea, tasted manna, and climbed the supposed Mount Sinai. In the liturgical list of Four Sons included in the seder service, I would surely be the Pedantic One. In ensuing years, I continued my biblical wanderings, traveling through Israel, Iraq, and, with my bride, Iran. A honeymoon in the Axis of Evil, she called it. A year later she gave birth to identical twin girls: Eden, for the Garden of Eden; and Tybee, for the beach near Savannah where I grew up and where we celebrated our wedding. They seemed like emblems of our lives: ten toes in the Middle East, ten toes at home.

One theme of these travels was exploring the explosive mix of religion and politics. But I realized upon returning that the front line of that battle had migrated back home. The United States was involved in its own internal war over God that in many ways mirrored—and in some cases fed—the wars being waged in the Middle East. The buzzwords only hinted at the battle lines: left/right, red/blue, believer/nonbeliever, extremist/moderate.

These tensions were reflected in all the usual places of modern discourse—the ballot box, the call-in show, the Bible study, the book group. Yet they were most acute at home. So many of the laments I heard about religion were variations on a theme: I can’t talk to my brother about it without getting into a fight. My father is a Neanderthal. My daughter is making a big mistake. He doesn’t understand what made this country great. With greater mobility and more choices, we no longer passed down religion seamlessly from one generation to the next. Nearly half of Americans change religious affiliations in their lives, a Pew study concluded. Stuck with our parents’ genes, we seemed less interested in being burdened with their God as well. And we certainly didn’t want to talk to them about it.

Thanksgiving, the symbol of American blessing, the one holiday that marked the union of God, the people, and the land, had, for many families, become a minefield of fraught conversation.

Around this time I began noticing something else. On a trip to visit my in-laws on Cape Cod, we stopped off in Plymouth and I took a tour of the Mayflower II. A reenactor was reading from the Bible. Exodus fourteen, he explained. The Israelites are trapped in front of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians are about to catch them. The people complain, and Moses declares, ‘Hold your peace! The Lord shall fight for you.’ Our leader read us that passage during our crossing. Moses, on board the Mayflower.

On a trip to visit my parents in Savannah, I stopped off at my childhood synagogue. A letter from George Washington hangs in the lobby, sent after his election to the presidency: May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the promised land, whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation, still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven. Exodus, on Washington’s pen in the first weeks of the presidency.

On a trip to visit my sister in Philadelphia, we went to see the Liberty Bell. The quotation on its face is from Leviticus 25, which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai: PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF. The law of Sinai, in the bell tower where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

In coming weeks, I found a similar story over and over again. Columbus comparing himself to Moses when he sailed in 1492. George Whitefield quoting Moses as he traveled the colonies in the 1730s forging the Great Awakening. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, comparing King George to the pharaoh. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, in the summer of 1776, proposing that Moses be on the seal of the United States. And the references didn’t stop. Harriet Tubman adopting Moses’ name on the Underground Railroad. Abraham Lincoln being eulogized as Moses’ incarnation. The Statue of Liberty being molded in Moses’ honor. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson tapping into Moses during wartime. Cecil B. DeMille recasting Moses as a hero for the Cold War. Martin Luther King, Jr., likening himself to Moses on the night before he was killed. The sheer ubiquity was staggering and, for me, had been completely unknown.

For four hundred years, one figure stands out as the surprising symbol of America. One person has inspired more Americans than any other. One man is America’s true founding father. His name is Moses.

For two years, I traveled to touchstones in American history and explored the role of the Bible, the Exodus, and Moses in inspiring generation after generation of Americans. I examined how American icons of different eras—from the slave girl Eliza carrying her son to freedom across the Ohio River in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to an orphaned Superman being drawn out of a spaceship from Krypton—were etched in the image of Moses. And I probed the ongoing role of Moses today, from the Ten commandments in public places to the role of the United States as a beacon for immigrants. Even a cursory review of American history indicates that Moses has emboldened leaders of all stripes—patriot and loyalist, slave and master, Jew and Christian, fat cat and communist. Could the persistence of his story serve as a reminder of our shared national values? could he serve as a unifying force in a disunifying time? If Moses could split the Red Sea, could he unsplit America?

Just as I was completing my journey, the 2008 presidential election was reaching its historic climax. Once again, Moses played a prominent role. Hillary Clinton compared herself to the Hebrew prophet. With every bit of progress you try to make, she said, there’s always gonna be somebody to say, ‘You know, I think we should go back to Egypt.’She asked, Do we really need to move forward on transformative social change? before answering: Yes, we do. Barack Obama also placed himself in the Mosaic tradition, though he claimed the role of Moses’ successor. We are in the presence of a lot of Moseses, he said in Selma, Alabama, in 2007. I thank the Moses generation; but we’ve got to remember that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was … he didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land. He concluded: Today we’re called to be the Joshuas of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across this river.

Obama’s use of the Exodus story became so prominent that his rival, John McCain, issued a video in which he mocked Obama for anointing himself The One. The video concluded with a clip of Charlton Heston splitting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. But the echoes of the Exodus only continued. On the day before the election, the African Methodist Episcopal church bishop for Ohio stood up before 60,000 people in Columbus and thanked God for having given us a Moses and a Martin called Barack Obama. As civil rights pioneer Andrew Young said to me days later, We are living in biblical time. The amount of time that passed between Martin’s assassination and Obama’s election—forty years—is the same amount of time the Israelites spent in the desert.

Four centuries after the earliest colonists in North America likened themselves to their Israelite forebears, Americans once again found meaning by drawing parallels between their ongoing struggles and those of the central figures of the Hebrew Bible. The analogy took on added poignance as Americans again confronted challenging times, with economic turmoil at home and a shifting role in the world. As with every hard time in American life—from the frozen cliffs of early New England to the snowy camps of Valley Forge; from the fractured fields of the Civil War to the bloody streets of the civil rights era—Americans turned to the Exodus for direction, inspiration, and hope. And so they did in another moment of national anxiety, when the country was asking, What is the meaning of America? What are our values? Will we rise again? As he had for generations, one figure held the answers and pointed the way. And I couldn’t help wondering if our ability to repair our damaged sense of purpose and reclaim our national unity might depend on our ability to recall the centuries-old interplay between the Thanksgiving and Passover narratives and remember the central figure in both stories and why he had proven so inspirational all along.

II  AN ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

THANKSGIVING BEGINS EARLY in America’s Hometown. It doesn’t start on the last Thursday in November, the day Abraham Lincoln first invited Americans to observe a festival of praise to honor the country’s fruitful fields and healthful skies. It doesn’t begin on the second Saturday in October, the day the re-created Pilgrim village outside Plymouth, Massachusetts, hosts the first of its seventeenth-century Harvest Dinners with turkey, mussels, corn pudding, and psalms. It kicks off, instead, on a Friday in mid-June, the day the members of the Old Colony Club, the oldest gentlemen’s club in America, board rickety vessels on Plymouth’s clam-covered shore and set out toward the mysterious Clark’s Island. For these Keepers of Thanksgiving, this excursion is their annual pilgrimage to the accidental spot of America’s First Sabbath.

Clark’s Island is the forgotten front door of America’s founding story. On a stormy Friday evening in 1620, a band of nine beleaguered Pilgrims, half a day’s sail from their families on the Mayflower, were scouting the Massachusetts coastline in an open boat for a suitable place to settle. Having barely escaped from a skirmish with Indians that morning, the Pilgrims were frightened, lost, and out of food. But as the afternoon wore on, their situation worsened. And at dusk, fierce winds and rain nearly overturned their vessel, forcing the men ashore. The wreck was the latest deflating detour on the Pilgrims’ flight from slavery to freedom. For these men had crossed the sea and arrived in this great and terrible wilderness, convinced they were on a mission from God to escape the oppression of a latter-day pharaoh and build in America a new Promised Land.

Everything the Pilgrims had done for two decades was designed to fulfill their dream of creating God’s New Israel. When they first left England for Holland in 1608, they described themselves as the chosen people, casting off the yoke of their pharaoh, King James. A dozen years later when they embarked on a grander exodus, to America, their leader, William Bradford, proclaimed their mission to be as vital as that of Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt. And when, after sixty-six days on the Atlantic, they finally arrived at Cape Cod, they were brought to their knees in gratitude for safe passage through their own Red Sea. May our children rightly say, Bradford wrote, echoing a famous passage in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice.

And the Pilgrims weren’t alone in applying the Exodus story to their lives in the New World. The settlers at Jamestown had likened themselves to Moses when they arrived in Virginia in 1607. John Winthrop, gliding into Boston Harbor aboard the Arbella in 1630, quoted Deuteronomy three times in his sermon, Model of Christian Charity, and ended by quoting Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites on Mount Nebo. Cotton Mather, writing in 1702, said these pioneers had no choice. The leader of a people in a wilderness had need be a Moses, he said. And if a Moses had not led the people of Plymouth Colony, he wrote of Bradford, then the colony would not have survived.

Yet these leaders did have a choice. For centuries, European explorers had set out for new lands without using expressions like pharaoh and promised land, New Covenant and New Israel, Exodus and Moses. By choosing these evocative lyrics, the founders of America introduced the themes of oppression and redemption, anticipation and disenchantment, freedom and law, that would carry through four hundred years of American history. Because of them, the story of Moses became the story of America.

But why? Why did these leaders choose this three-thousand-year-old story? Why did they take an ancient tale, unproven and unprovable, and transform it into a revolutionary ideal that would sacrifice lives, launch wars, unmoor millions of families from their lives and propel them through uncertain waters into an unknown wilderness based only on an untested notion of freedom? In short: Why did this story have such power?

ON BOARD THE small fleet of boats heading toward Clark’s Island this afternoon, the men of the Old Colony Club were ebullient. This annual excursion was one of the highlights of their year, along with the August clambake, Past Presidents Night in the fall, and Forefathers Day, held every December since 1769, when the members dress in top hats, bear arms, and celebrate the landing on Plymouth Rock with a breakfast that can’t be beat. The men, ranging in age from old to older, were more casual today, drinking beer and waving at other boaters on the water.

Plymouth Harbor is naturally shallow, explained Roger Randall, a lifelong resident. When I first pitched up in town, I quickly learned that the Pilgrims’ legacy is nursed by a tight-knit gentry of descendants and devotees who protect the Mayflower like Beefeaters guarding the crown jewels. Roger was kind enough to invite me along on their expedition.

It’s very difficult to get in and out of this harbor, he continued, but it’s well channeled. There’s conjecture that if Plymouth had been a deepwater harbor, this could have been Boston today.

So why did the Pilgrims settle here?

He smiled. The wreck.

Almost everything about the Pilgrims’ mission was spectacularly poorly planned. Like the Israelites, the Pilgrims were so convinced they were chosen by God that they didn’t prepare themselves for the harsh conditions they would face in the wilderness. From their outpost in Holland, they had secured a charter to settle near the Hudson River. A small group left Holland on the Speedwell over the summer, and more joined in England on the Mayflower. The two vessels departed Southampton on August 5 but were diverted to land when the Speedwell began taking on water. The ships sailed a few weeks later but again turned back when the Speedwell proved unseaworthy and had to be abandoned. On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower successfully set sail with 102 passengers.

For all the poetry it later inspired, the Mayflower was hardly a beautiful craft. A merchant ship that mostly shuttled wine across the English Channel, the one-hundred-foot vessel was said to have a sweet hull, which meant the spillage of French Bordeaux had seeped into the planks, tempering the noxious fumes from the bilge. In 1957 a replica of the Mayflower was built using the exact dimensions of the earlier craft. Roger Randall worked as a rigger on the ship. It was like a big old tub, he remembered. "Part of the problem was it had such a high freeboard. A low-sheer vessel you can control a lot better, but the Mayflower had a lot of flat surfaces that present themselves to the wind. It must have been very harrowing crossing the ocean at that time of year."

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 firstborn 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. Begone! 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