Most prevalent in Moby-Dick is Melville’s use of biblical allusion. Several characters in the book are named after characters from either the Old or New Testament. Captain Ahab is a reflection of King Ahab, the evil Israelite king who, as recorded in 1 Kings, angers God with his idolatry. Captain Ahab, too, is an ominous figure, with a perverse kind of obsession with the white whale. Like the king, the captain also denies the prophecy of his death, assuming he will be victorious in battle. Ishamel and Queequeg are approached by a local lunatic named Elijah before setting out on the Pequod. Elijah attempts to dissuade the men from dealings with Captain Ahab. Elijah shares his name with the Tishbite prophet who denounced King Ahab and proclaimed to bring evil against him and his posterity. Captain Bildad bears the name of one of Job’s friends. Like the Shuite, Captain Bildad is full of proverbial wisdom and pious dialogue. Pip, short for Pippin, proves to be the holiest of the crew. His name reflects “the good seed … children of the kingdom” (Matthew 13:38), the purest of God’s progeny. Melville’s Pip, however, exhibits a mindless type of purity that proves passive and effeminate. These are just a few of the many characters given biblical names and backgrounds throughout the prose of Moby-Dick.
In addition to the incorporation of biblical names, the biblical theme of prophecy permeates the text, corresponding to the different historical stages of Hebrew prophecy. First, there is the prophecy of the simple foreteller, like Elijah. Next, an intermediary or spokesman for God, such as Father Mapple, the priest who gives the foreboding sermon about Jonah at the beginning of the novel, delivers prophecy. In the fashion of the book of Daniel, prophecy takes an apocalyptic turn with the appearance of Gabriel, the sailor aboard the Jeroboam who professes Moby Dick to be the incarnation of the Shaker god. Finally, Melville incorporates Captain Ahab’s false prophet, Fedallah, a representation of the 400 false prophets whom King Ahab denies.
Allegorically, the most important biblical references in Moby-Dick are to the stories of Job and Jonah. Captain Ahab shares the same confusion and frustration with God that both of these Old Testament characters exhibit. All three men question God’s action and intentions. Captain Ahab also differs somewhat deliberately from the biblical characters. Unlike Job, he is not patient with God, and he does not bow before the whirlwind of his might. Although the plot most significantly follows chapters 1 and 2 from the book of Jonah, Captain Ahab does not fit the mold for the characterization of the Jonah in this story, either. Instead of confessing his sins against God and being thrown overboard by his crew, Captain Ahab professes his judgment of God and unites his crew of miscreants in rebellion against him. He rather reflects the Jonah of chapters 3 and 4, the Jonah who professes he “[does] well to be angry, even unto death” (Jonah 4:9). Moby-Dick’s narrator, Ishmael, better represents the patience of Job as well as the spared Jonah of the first two chapters.
Captain Ahab, then, serves as Melville’s anti-hero, a leader determined to rid his people of an evil entity, even though his grievance against God is a personal matter. Ishmael is Melville’s folk hero, a character who observes and muses with a vast and colorful imagination, and whose metamorphic presence allows him to go places and see things that the reader cannot. Through these two heroes, Melville expounds upon and complicates the stories of Job and Jonah. The moral implications of Melville’s message are possibly just as unknowable as the white whale and God prove to be to his characters. His use of biblical allusion provides an exposition of the different approaches to living in a world where men have limited knowledge and capacity to understand. Father Mapple’s unquestioning fatalism is one such approach. Captain Ahab’s vengeful defiance against God is another. Ishmael ponders the wonders of the world, and even relates to Captain Ahab’s despair, participating in his revenge plot, but does not commit himself to purity or evil. He is neither passive nor active, in a sense. He is also the only character spared at the novel’s end. Ishmael’s salvation is through Queequeg the cannibal, his soul mate who finds peace by connecting with his fellow man. Melville’s purpose, it seems, is to employ a humanistic theme alongside the theological, a theme that resonates long after the battle for knowledge comes to a close. In the end, the testament of the struggles and relationships of mortal men aboard the Pequod are all that remain.
Melville sets the standard for religious piety with Father Mapple’s sermon in the beginning of Moby-Dick. The priest delivers a passionate address regarding the book of Jonah. He animatedly recounts Jonah’s flight from God’s command, his time on the sea as well as in the belly of the whale, his repentance, and God’s redemption and reward for his obedience. Surprisingly, Father Mapple has nothing to say regarding the last two chapters of the book, a suggestion that men should be rewarded for their obedience to God’s commands. He ignores the Jonah of chapters 1 and 2, the man who is angered by God’s decision to spare the people of Nineveh, despite sending Jonah to warn them of their destruction. The latter Jonah begrudges God for his curious actions and questions his intentions and treatment of man. Father Mapple suggests that men should accept their divinely-imposed fates and follow God’s law without question. His sermon proves to be a prophecy of the journey Ishmael and Queequeg will take with Captain Ahab at the helm. However, there is little room for Father Mapple’s Christianity on the Pequod. It soon becomes evident that life on a whaling ship takes on a religion of its own. This religion supersedes the base religion of each man who boards the ship. Often times, a man must question or even sacrifice his personal convictions in order to contend with the demands of the religion of the sea.
Not only is Captain Ahab angry like Jonah, he questions God’s actions and intentions like Job. Like Job, he assumes that the sum of things must follow some humanly intelligible system and demands to know what the system is. He is described as a “grand, ungodly, god-like man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world,” an early indicator of his struggle with the divine (Melville 156). He is “god-like” because he creates his own perception of the world, but “ungodly” because he refuses to submit to forces beyond his control. Having been at sea for forty years, Captain Ahab is the ideal Romantic hero; while Charles Darwin has yet to publish his Origin of the Species, Captain Ahab certainly sees the world at sea as a “Survival of the Fittest.” Alienated from the comforts of traditional religiosity, he is finely tuned to nature and its effects on the human mind. He has seen the laws of nature defy the laws of God, and he has come to define the all-knowing creator as a malevolent force. It is no surprise that Captain Ahab chooses to unleash his internal battle with the spiritual unknown on nature's leviathan, the elusive white whale that took his own leg out from under him. In both philosophy and at sea, Captain Ahab chooses to combat that which limits his intelligence and ability to create his own destiny.
Beginning with his soliloquy in Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Captain Ahab contends that God is, in fact, a malevolent agency. He strives to defy limitations placed on human beings by conventional morality and religion, questioning God's right to have such complete control over his subjects. Captain Ahab concludes that God has been cruel to man, and that he, too, must answer to someone for his sins. It is also in “The Quarter-Deck” that Captain Ahab reveals to his crew that his mission is about more than just enacting revenge on the white whale for the loss of his leg. Like Ishmael, Captain Ahab looks for hidden realities in everything around him, and like Job, he wishes to confront God, but cannot locate him physically to do so. After Moby Dick almost premeditatedly bites off his leg, Captain Ahab projects all of his perceptions regarding evil in the world onto the whale that attacked him. Comparing the whale to a wall shoved against him, he complains that “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him” (Melville 138-139). Captain Ahab finds a commonality between the unknowable God and the elusive white whale, and he transfers his anger of the first onto the latter, which is, in his view, possibly more tangible and combatable.
Imagining himself as the representative of his race before God, Captain Ahab sees himself as a sort of martyr, as Adam “staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise” (Melville 427). His death is not suicide, but a sacrifice in judgment of God himself. Captain Ahab surrenders his ship, his crew, and his own life in defiance of the great unknowable, proudly hailing the endurance of humanity until the very end. His death gives his life purpose, and because he has died in commitment of a struggle he cannot win, his tale becomes legendary. By pitting himself against fate and its initiator, Captain Ahab becomes a sort of god of the godless. He becomes a hero to those who share his curiosity of the divine, and whose thirsty minds fail to settle for limited knowledge and control regarding their fates.
While Captain Ahab reflects questioning Job, he is most definitely not patient with God. Job persists in pursuing wisdom by fearing God and avoiding evil, but Captain Ahab pursues wisdom by confronting God directly and engaging evil as necessary along the way. In the biblical account, God humbles Job by shouting rhetorical questions from a whirlwind, pointing out how little Job actually knows about creation and his almighty power. God actually cites his creation of the leviathan as a great wonder unknown to man. Overwhelmed, Job acknowledges the limitations of human knowledge and submits to God’s supreme authority. Captain Ahab does not bow down to omnipotence, and therefore, has the greater integrity.
Ishmael more closely resembles patient, rational faces of Job and Jonah. He tolerates the absurdity of Captain Ahab's conviction, recognizing that many cultures believe in malignant forces in the world. Despite the outrageousness of Captain Ahab's quest for vengeance, Ishmael sympathizes with his disdain for the omnipotent God. He articulates Captain Ahab's torment well, and even justifies his transference of anger from God to the whale:
That intangible malignity … Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments … all truth with malice in it … all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it (Melville 154).
However, Ishmael is more rational than Captain Ahab, and patient with God because he, like Job, recognizes the incomprehensible wonder of the universe. In both the book of Job and in Moby-Dick, the leviathan serves as an example of the divine creativity that fascinates Job and Ishmael. Ishmael tirelessly explores the whale’s physiology and idiosyncrasies, but continues to find him just as elusive, although ubiquitous, as when he began. All of his attempts to define the whale through art, science, folklore and myth are in vain, and he is left with the terrifying image of the whale’s whiteness, the “colorless all-color of atheism” (Melville 164). Neither Job nor Ishmael believe it is possible to know the magical underpinnings of the universe, however, they both pursue knowledge anyway. In the end, Ishmael is rewarded for his Job-like patience, and is expelled from the sea like Jonah is from the whale’s belly.
Through allusions to the biblical books of Job and Jonah, Melville presents a number of approaches to dealing with the imperfections that God has bestowed upon men. Father Mapple would recommend that men should, like patient Job and obedient Jonah of chapters 1 and 2, bow down before God and accept the path he has chosen for them. Captain Ahab, like angry Jonah of chapters 3 and 4, represents men who choose to defy God and protest their inferior creation, insisting that every man has a right to control his own destiny. Ishmael’s ideology is a mixture of these temperaments. Like Job, he questions God’s actions and is enthralled by his unknowable majesty. Like Jonah, he attempts to flee from one unsatisfying fate only to be delivered another. One of the first things we learn about Ishmael is that he is going to sea as a sort of self-annihilation, as an alternative to “throw[ing] himself upon the sword” (Melville 14). Jonah runs from God’s command to inform the people of Nineveh of their destruction, and is subsequently swallowed up and held captive in the belly of a whale. Ishmael runs from his dreary life on land and finds himself embroiled in an epic battle between good and evil, steered toward certain death by a monomaniacal captain determined to eliminate God or sacrifice himself and his crew while trying. In the end, Job, Jonah and Ishmael are all rewarded for their obedience to and patience with God. Captain Ahab dies “angry, even unto death,” like the Jonah that Father Mapple so purposefully leaves out of his sermon.
Ishmael’s redemption could be said to derive from his relationship with Queequeg, the pagan cannibal who accompanies him on the journey. From the very beginning of the novel, Ishmael and Queequeg form a relationship that transcends each man’s religious convictions. They ignore ritual and tradition as necessary in order to maintain their companionship. Queequeg goes through one of the most interesting religious transformations of all of the characters in Moby-Dick. Despite being assumed an evil savage, Queequeg has several acknowledgements of the divine laws of love and humanity. First, he saves an overboard bumpkin on the New Bedford schooner. Later, he spares Ishmael as well as Tashtego, who falls into the vast pit of a dead sperm whale’s head. Finally, it is his coffin, which he prepares during his own sickness, that keeps Ishmael afloat after the ultimate battle. Queequeg’s love redeems Ishmael from the fatal isolation that had led him to set sail with Captain Ahab and throw away all remnants of his former self. Melville’s ultimate commentary might be that mortal endurance in a world where men are imperfect and have limited understanding is not possible without love. Regardless of the approach to one’s relationship with God, one’s relationships with people are most meaningful. The novel’s final image of Tashtego relentlessly hammering the flag to the ship as it sinks signifies the crew's loyalty to their captain's purpose and, to a greater extent, the enduring spirit of humanity in the face of that which it cannot control.
Captain Ahab, a deep-thinking philosopher and man more tuned to nature than civilization, finds limitations in both God and in the white whale he hunts. Like Job, he is angry with the omnipotent creator because he built man with the capacity to learn, but not with the ability to understand God Himself or the great mystical underpinnings of the universe. He rejects Father Mapple's assertion that people should blindly accept their fate, as it has already been written by God and cannot be altered on earth. Having lived at sea for much of his life, Captain Ahab has come to regard only himself as the author of his destiny. He perceives the world, not through God, but through nature, and because the white whale is the only beast in the sea he cannot control, he compares it to the lack of control men have over their own lives when they blindly follow fate. Captain Ahab's crusade against Moby Dick is a crusade against God himself. Captain Ahab and his crew of miscreants die in defiance of man's limited knowledge, declaring that, from this point forward, men will create their own destinies. Melville's Moby-Dick, then, becomes the holy doctrine of men who cannot accept religious determinism, and Captain Ahab becomes a god of the godless and a hero to the disillusioned.
Works Cited
The Bible: Authorized King James Version. NY: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Dover, 2003. Print.
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