A First Thanksgiving
A First Thanksgiving
Before their first autumn harvest, and amid scarcity and adversity, the Pilgrims gave thanks to God.
According to history books, 1621 was the “first Thanksgiving,” when the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors gathered to celebrate that year’s abundant autumn harvest. But the real first Thanksgiving happened a year earlier, under far more dire conditions, in a prayer ceremony with older biblical roots.
In 1620, the Pilgrims—English Christian Separatists—stepped off the Mayflower onto the shores of Cape Cod. As William Bradford relates in his definitive history:
Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.1
But the weary travelers weren’t out of the woods yet. They had “no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.” It was winter, with its “cruel and fierce storms.” And “the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.”
“What could now sustain them,” Bradford writes, “but the spirit of God and his grace?” And here, Bradford quotes Psalm 107 from his Geneva Bible:
May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice, and looked on their adversity, &c. Let them therefore praise the Lord, because he is good, and his mercies endure for ever….2
Psalm 107 is a great psalm of thanksgiving. In it, God rescues His people from mortal dangers—sickness, imprisonment, stormy seas, desert wanderings—and the psalmist four times utters the phrase, “Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man” (ESV).
Bradford’s company of Christian Separatists saw themselves in Hebraic terms. They were a small people seeking a new birth of freedom. Their journey was a new exodus. The “vast and furious ocean” was the wilderness they had crossed over. So it’s easy to see why, upon making landfall, they would draw inspiration from Psalm 107, fall on their knees, and thank God.
But there’s more to this story. In his landmark book Making Haste from Babylon, historian Nick Bunker argues that the Pilgrims’ prayer ceremony in fact had deeper biblical roots. As Bunker explains, the Pilgrims “respected few men more” than Henry Ainsworth, a fellow Separatist and biblical scholar.3 A copy of Ainsworth’s commentary on the Psalms traveled with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, and in it, Ainsworth relates an interpretive tradition based on Psalm 107:
And from this Psalm, … the Hebrews have this Canon; Four must confess (unto God) The sick, when he is healed; the prisoner when he is released out of bonds; they that go down to sea, when they are come up (to land); and wayfaring men, when they are come to the inhabited land.... And the manner of confessing and blessing is thus; He standeth among them and blesseth the Lord, the King eternal, that bounteously rewardeth good things unto sinners, etc.4
Ainsworth traces this tradition to the twelfth-century Jewish sage Maimonides, but it undoubtedly goes back further.5 For Ainsworth and his fellow Separatists, there were theological reasons for tapping these older interpretive traditions. As Bunker puts it, “[t]hey wished to swim back up the stream of learning, and to absorb the wisdom of the Bible from as close to the source as possible.”
If we were to ask William Bradford to identify the “first thanksgiving,” he would surely point to that landfall prayer ceremony in 1620, of which next season’s harvest meal was but the fulfillment—when a ragtag group of believers facing scarcity, uncertainty, and yet more danger, would nevertheless pause, lift a prayer to heaven, and thank God for His steadfast love and mercy.
Amidst our celebrations this year, perhaps we too will pause and reflect upon this, giving thanks to God not only for the blessings of liberty and prosperity, but even more importantly, for the faith of our ancestors that made them possible.
William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation (Wright & Potter, Boston, 1898), at “The 9. Chap,” available at Project Gutenberg (spelling modernized))
Ibid.
Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World (2010), pp.60-67.
Henry Ainsworth, Annotations Upon the Book of Psalmes (1617), at “Psalme CVII” (spelling modernized).
Moshe Sokolow, “Thanksgiving: A Jewish Holiday After All,” Jewish Ideas Daily, Nov. 23, 2011.