“Go ye!” – Patriarchs and Pioneers

by Kenneth Hanson (July 2012)

Politics and Pilgrims

The Pilgrim Chronicles makes deliberate allusion both to Abraham and the covenant, extrapolating the term to their own society:

The Tension We Never Mention

And he spoke with them, saying, If it is your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me, and ask for me of Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah which he has, which is in the end of his field. For as much silver as it is worth he shall give it to me for a possession of a burying-place among you.^[8]

In another speech Lincoln commented:

Jacob the Entrepreneur

But there is yet more insight to be gained here, for the story is as much about private property rights as it is about tactics and strategy in the game of life. The right to property and its improvement by personal labor was to be enshrined in American political theory as something akin to sacrosanct, and political theorists from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson were keenly aware of biblical commentary on the same. Locke observed in 1690:

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his.^[16]

Jefferson added (1801):

Joseph the Bureaucrat

And now do not be grieved, nor angry with yourselves that you sold me here. For God sent me before you to preserve life.^[20]

Let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it will be when there comes a war, they join also to our enemies, and fight against us, and get out of the land.^[23]

^[1] The History of Freedom in Antiquity,1877.

^[2] William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Robert Cushman, John Robinson, George Barrell Cheever, The Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth: in New England in 1620: reprint from the original volume, New York, J. Wiley, 1848, 182.

^[5] Ibid., 422

^[7] Robert Wolfe, From Habra to Hebrews and Other Essays, (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2011), 11ff..

^[8] Genesis 23:8-9.

^[11] J. G. Nicolay and J. Hay: Abraham Lincoln, I., 615-616.

^[12] Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 30, 1790.

^[13] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chap. 2: Of the Principle which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour.

^[16] Micheline Ishay, ed., The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2007), 117.

^[18] David W. Tandy, Warriors Into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 103-4.

^[19] Warren L. McFerran, Political Sovereignty: The Supreme Authority in the United States (Sanford, FL: Southern Liberty Press, 2005), 123.

^[20] Genesis 45:5.

^[22] Exodus 1:8.

^[23] Exodus 1:10.

^[24] Richard Gabriel, The Military History of Ancient Israel (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 61ff.

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