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biblical faith that they had. We desecrate the Sabbath. We no longer see ourselves as exiles searching for the Promised Land.” He paused.
    “My brothers, I may not be here next year with you,” he continued. “So on my last visit to this sacred place, I beg of you to remember the words the great prophet said on Mount Nebo. God has promised us this land. He will make the land flow with milk and honey. But we must remember to give him thanks.”
    In the background, the drum began to sound. A bluebird settled on the grass. I could hear waves splashing on the shore. And on Pulpit Rock, Harold Boyer closed his eyes and continued reciting what are among the most oft-cited lines in the Bible, from Deuteronomy 30. They are the words from Moses’ farewell address on Mount Nebo in which the man of choices offers his people the ultimate choice. John Winthrop quoted these words on the Arbella in 1630, Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked them the night before he was killed in 1968,and Ronald Reagan repeated them at the base of the Statue of Liberty on its centennial birthday in 1986:
    See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and adversity. For I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments. But if you turn away, you shall certainly perish; you shall not long endure on the soil that you are crossing the Jordan to enter. I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—that you and your offspring shall live.
    IN MANY WAYS , Plymouth was an unfortunate choice for the Pilgrims. While the soil and water were good, the shipping would have been better in Boston, the fishing superior on Cape Cod. Today the town is still stranded between these more attractive neighbors. It has many signatures of New England—white clapboard churches, green copper cupolas, American flags—as well as its share of wry tributes, like Bradford’s Package Store on Route 3A. An eighty-one-foot-tall statue of Faith, known as Forefathers Monument, stands on a hill. A slightly squat cousin of the Statue of Liberty, the female figure rests her foot on Plymouth Rock and holds a Bible.
    A few miles away is Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the town circa 1627. (The facility uses the original spelling of the name.) The village includes thatched cottages, herb gardens, and dozens of re-enactors in buckled shoes, bonnets, and white lacy collars. Visiting the plantation is like walking into an elementary school Thanksgiving play, except the actors have Ph.D.’s in their pockets instead of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Jim Baker had suggested I meet the park’s premier historian, John Kemp, the author of a book about 1620, who that day was playing the role of William Brewster, thepreacher on the Mayflower . He had a gray Vandyke and was tending a fire on his hearth. He offered to show me his Bible.
    “Our leader has a phrase he often mutters—Scrutinized Scriptures,” Kemp, er, Elder Brewster, said. “He speaks of the need for each family to make studying Scripture a daily duty.” The Pilgrims even named their children after biblical virtues, he explained. Brewster had daughters named Fear and Patience. He had a son named Love and another named Wrestling, after the Hebrew word Israel, which means “wrestling with God.”
    But the Pilgrims’ attachment to the Bible goes even deeper, to another idea at the heart of the Moses story: covenant. The Moses narrative is built on two pillars. The first is freedom. In times of oppression, slavery, or pain, the story suggests, humans can cry out and God will liberate them from their distress. “I have marked well the plight of my people,” God tells Moses at the burning bush. “I am mindful of their suffering.”
    But freedom alone is not God’s desire for humans. Freedom must be accompanied by the second pillar of the story: responsibility. In the Bible, this notion is captured in the word brit, or covenant, an agreement