Massachusetts-born Thaddeus Mason Harris, one of the founding members of the AAS, spent as much of his life studying the history of the American continent as he did about the ancient world of the Israelites. Harris trained for the ministry at Harvard and served as the College’s librarian from 1791 to 1793 before becoming pastor at First Parish Church in Dorchester, a position he held until his death in 1836. As early as 1789, Harris began to explore his interests in “the first peopling of America” (although none of these interests saw publication until his 1805 Journal of a Tour Into the Territory Northwest Of The Alleghany Mountains, in which he suggested that America’s aboriginal peoples were descended from the “ancient Scythians” of Siberia). His commonplace book, titled “Ancient Inscriptions, Hieroglyphics, &c.” and held at the AAS, is a compilation of Orientalist studies, natural history, and antiquities that includes sections on customs, manners, and literature as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics, “Siberian languages,” Mexican history, and Indigenous American artifacts. While working on this project, however, and serving as Harvard’s librarian, Harris published something seemingly far afield from his North American speculations: The Natural History of the Bible, or, A Description of All the Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles, Trees, Plants, Metals, Precious Stones, &c. Mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures (Boston, 1793). True to the title, the entries focus on the plants, animals, and minerals mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Taking the dictionary as its type—complete with a reference to Samuel Johnson in the introduction—each entry provides definitions, usage, and cross-references similar to a contemporary lexicon. Harris’s Natural History demonstrates a decidedly philological and ecological approach to biblical criticism, attempting to save Old Testament landscapes from European ignorance and restore them to new life in North America.
Harris belonged to a long line of Atlantic theologians who believed that the “Book of Nature” complemented the “Book of Revelation,” a common contemporary starting point even with the increasing secularism of late eighteenth-century transatlantic scholarly culture. He also believed that God’s Truth was reflected in human language. This particular kind of biblical scholarship, later known as “Higher Criticism,” was a form of Christian hermeneutics that embraced empiricism as the basis for biblical interpretation. During his theological studies, Harris had come to believe that previous English translations of the Old Testament had distorted Scripture’s true meaning due to insufficient knowledge of the natural landscape of the “Holy Land,” which at the time included all the areas of greater Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. Previous mistranslations of the Bible, Harris contended, obscured not only metaphors and felicities of ancient phraseology but had transmuted entire ecologies. Indeed, the authorized King James edition was so full of creatures with which “the Jews must have been wholly unacquainted”—like the badger and unicorn—that the effect was, at best, befuddling. Dragons, whales and apples, appearing in the place of crocodiles and citrons, placed the reader in seventeenth-century England, not ancient Palestine, and effectively miscommunicated God’s truth. Harris found, however, that consulting Hebrew etymology and the foundational Greek and Latin sources in combination with European naturalists’ reports from the East, “serve[d] to clear up many obscure passages . . . and open new beauties, in that sacred treasure.” To Harris, reconstructing a word’s relationship to climate and geography—as a cipher for the ancient Hebrews’ relationship to place—could restore previously uncommunicated knowledge. Just as the Pittsfield phylactery would, almost two decades later, the environment of the Holy Land would prove the “eternal truths of Scripture” and, crucially, America’s place in it.