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At Land’s End

At Land’s End

Last updated on: May 20, 2026 at 2:20 pm by Dan Peterson

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At Land’s End 2026-05-20T14:20:17-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A fresco of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, from an old church in Bulgaria
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This article went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Reprint: “Ḥesed and the Redemption of Abraham,” written by Jennifer C. Lane:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Thompson, Matthew L. Bowen, and David R. Seely. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/abraham-and-his-family.

“Twenty years ago, I explored the redemption of Abraham in the context of covenant redemption. In this paper I will review those connections and articulate the additional depth provided by including an understanding of the Lord’s ḥesed, or covenant love. We’ve all heard of the covenant of Abraham and the blessings of Abraham, but just what is the redemption of Abraham, and why does it matter? How does it connect with covenant and the Lord’s ḥesed? The connection between Abraham and redemption is made by Isaiah when he refers to the God of Israel as “the Lord, who redeemed Abraham” (Isaiah 29:22).”

Also newly posted on the long-dead and never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Come, Follow Me — Old Testament Study and Teaching Helps (2026), May 25-31: Judges 2-4; 6-8; 13-16 — ‘The Lord Raised Up a Deliverer'” Once again, Jonn Claybaugh has kindly prepared and provided a concise set of helpful notes for students and teachers of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A 2016 Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph of St. Michael’s Mount by oikk

My wife and I drove down to Land’s End today. It’s at the very southwestern tip of England, as far as you can go on the cape that is Cornwall into the North Atlantic. On our way back, we drove through Penzance. We also took a look at St Michael’s Mount, just off Marazion, which is across the bay from the town of Penzance. St. Michael’s Mount is an English counterpart of the French Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. Like Lindisfarne (“Holy Island”) off the northeastern coast of England in Northumberland, both St. Michael’s Mount and Mont-Saint-Michel are tidal islands, meaning that both are only accessible from the mainland only when the tide is out. I’m happy to say that my wife and I have been on both Mont-Sant-Michel and Lindisfarne (where we once spent the night). They were, I suppose, on my mental bucket list; I suspect, though, that we’ll never make it out to St. Michael’s Mount.

Naturally, though, being in Penzance put us in mind of Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert, but not because the former wrote the music for “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” No, there is an actual connection between the town, on the one hand, and, on the other, Gilbert and Sullivan. Unfortunately, though — it not being the right season of the year — we saw no pirates today.

By the late nineteenth century, Penzance had become a popular summer resort destination, so that the idea of depicting it as a major den of pirates was very funny to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Victorian audience. Here are two versions of one of the most popular songs from their 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty:

“Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance – live and with lyrics!” Seeing the lyrics on the screen, as here, can be helpful. Note the reference to Gilbert and Sullivan’s own 1878 work HMS Pinafore. And you need to understand that the phrase sat a gee is an old English expression equivalent to rode a horse.
“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” — This one is from a New York stage production that featured Kevin Kline as the Pirate King and Linda Ronstadt as Mabel.

And it’s become very popular since the days of Gilbert and Sullivan to repurpose the song with updated allusions, often political. Here are three amusing (but non-political) specimens of such redirection:

Some of our driving today took us through some remarkably narrow streets, barely wide enough for our vehicle alone but designated for — and actually featuring — two-way traffic, with thick bushes and sometimes stone walls on either side. (If you’ve driven much here outside of the larger cities and towns, you probably know the type. Coming unexpectedly face-to-face with a large truck or lorry is one of life’s pleasures that shouldn’t be missed.) These weren’t the roads that we should have taken; our GPS device simply enjoyed putting on them.

A view from Land’s End, which, other than the (relatively near) Isles of Scilly, is the westernmost part of England. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’m an unabashed Anglophile — that fact may have been noticeable here — so I hope that nobody will take it amiss that I offer here four quotations that might be taken as critical of England and/or the English.

The first comes from George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. “The English,” he said, “are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”
And, in his book Notes From A Small Island. the American-British writer Bill Bryson poses an important rhetorical question: “What other country . . . could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start?” I have a book somewhere at home about funny English place names, and it includes a great many true gems, including Lickey End Fanny Hands Lane in Ledford, the two Norfolk villages Great Snoring and Little Snoring, Dorset’s River Piddle, Lower Swell in Gloucestershire, the villages Sheepy Parva and Sheepy Magna in Leicestershire, and a number of others that I decline to post on this family-friendly, Latter-day Saint blog.
In his Piddly Poems for Children, a songwriter, musician, poetic humorist, and children’s author by the name of Benny Bellamacina remarks that “The sun doesn’t live in England; it comes here on holiday when we’re all at work.”
And, finally, in a short story entitled “The Canterville Ghost,” the nineteenth-century poet, playwright, and general wit Oscar Wilde quipped that “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” Another formulation of this general idea has been variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and even Winston Churchill. I myself have heard it credited to George Orwell. Who knows? Anyway, it describes England and the United States as “two nations divided by a common language.”

Posted from Newquay, Cornwall, England

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