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Assignment 2: WILLIAM BRADFORD 
In 1650, three years after he had ceased to chronicle the happenings at Plymouth
for posterity, and at the age of sixty years, William Bradford took up the study
of Hebrew. In a copy book he listed over a thousand words and a number of common
Hebrew phrases, with their English translations. Scholars have remarked that many
of the words and phrases concern the duties of fathers to their sons. On one page
he paused to explain why, at an advanced age, he had embarked on a new path of
learning: Though I am growne aged, yet I have a longing desire to see, with my owne eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the law and Oracles of God were written; and in which God and angels spoke to the Holy Patriarcks of old time; and what names were given to things at the Creation.For Bradford, learning Hebrew was an act of filial respect. It was an act of learned devotion with which a son of the Church wished to honor his spiritual forefathers, "the Holy Patriarcks of old time." It was also Bradford's way of returning to the origins of Christianity, thus of purifying his faith by seeking a more direct, unmediated experience of divinity. Rather than English biblical scriptures translated from the Latin, themselves translated from the Greek and Hebrew texts, Bradford wanted the originals in that "holy tongue" used to name things "at the Creation." Bradford's adventure into Hebrew symbolizes much about his own character and that of the Separatist colony he governed. For example, if you have already read the editors' introduction to Bradford (page 164), you will have remarked that he was practically an orphan. Raised by grandparents and uncles after his father's death, Bradford was also self-orphaned when, at the age of sixteen, he renounced his family for membership in the Separatist congregation at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, thus to further renounce England and its King when, in 1609, he joined their migration to Leyden, Holland, in search of religious freedom. The migration to America he describes in Of Plymouth Plantation culminates a series of geographical and spiritual migrations. Here then we have one of those defining moments in American cultural experience: the son renounces real, biological patriarchy in order to claim another, self-chosen and ideal patriarchy. It is the definitive experience detailed over and over in American culture: in Benjamin Franklin's story of leaving his Boston family at age seventeen for a new life in Philadelphia; or (from our own century) in F. Scott Fitzgerald's story The Great Gatsby, of a youth who abandoned his North Dakota father for a new, self-invented identity. In the decades after the 1620 migration Bradford began writing Of Plymouth Plantation in order to explain the public facts of the colonists' choices. The autobiographical side of his story never enters in, so fully was Bradford's personal life subordinated to their greater social and spiritual project. Notably, though, one of Bradford's main purposes in chronicling that project was to inspire a sense of filial duty in the sons of the original Pilgrim fathers. Indeed, at one of the most moving points of his narrative, after asking his readers to "stand half amazed" (page 176) with him in contemplating the severity of the conditions greeting them in the New World ("savage barbarians" all about, in a strange wilderness, and winter approaching), Bradford writes (page 177): "May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say, 'Our fathers were Englishmen who came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice.'" In a broad sense, then, just as an aging Bradford took up Hebrew to purify his faith at its origin, so in the late 1640s, when these pages were written, he admonishes the first generation of American-born settlers that they too should purify their faith in the American experiment by drinking at its origin, in Bradford's account. Of Plymouth Plantation documents the ideals driving that experiment. In John Robinson's letter to the colonists, in the "Mayflower Compact," in the communalistic society they first established at Plymouth, we have clear expressions of those ideals. Yet Bradford's text also records the realities that drove those ideals down. In his accounts of how the colonists abandoned the communalistic model, of Thomas Morton's disruptive influences, of outbreaks of sexual depravity, and of how their eventual prosperity moved the Pilgrims to disperse and finally divide their congregation and leave the church "like an ancient mother grown old and foresaken of her children" (page 204): in all such details Bradford poignantly illustrates the fragility of their high ideals. Reading Assignment
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