As historians have noted, the first thanksgiving ceremony held by English colonists in America was not that of the Plymouth Rock pilgrims commemorated by this week’s holiday. It was conducted nearly two years earlier, and a full year before the Pilgrims landed on the Massachusetts coast, by the 36 settlers aboard the ship Margaret who set sail for Virginia from the English port of Bristol in September 1619 under the command of Captain John Woodlief. Woodlief had instructions from the Berkeley Company, which underwrote the venture, to offer a prayer of thanks upon landing, and the first thing he did when his group came ashore near Jamestown on December 4 was to have it kneel and pray, after which he declared: “We ordain that this day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for [a] plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

By way of contrast, there is no evidence that the Plymouth colonists accorded their 1621 harvest celebration any such historical significance, or that they even used the word “thanksgiving” to describe it. Could the name Thanksgiving have been transferred by subsequent generations from the Virginia prayer to the New England banquet, whose participants never referred to it in such a manner? I think it might have been.

The word “thanksgiving” itself, as opposed to the phrase “giving thanks,” was fairly new in 1619–21. It seems to have first entered the English language, or at least been popularized, through the 1538 Coverdale Bible, the completed version, undertaken by the English cleric Myles Coverdale, of the unfinished translation of William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake in what is now Belgium for heresy by the Catholic Church in 1536. (Both Tyndale and Coverdale were early Protestant reformers who fled England before Henry VIII swung it into the Protestant camp.) Among the parts of the Bible left untranslated by Tyndale was the book of Psalms, in which Coverdale used “thanksgiving” twice, once in the 40th and once in the 100th Psalm.

The five-verse-long Psalm 100 is one of the shortest of all the psalms. In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, which was greatly influenced by the Tyndale-Coverdale translation, its first four verses read:

A Song of Praise. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

Coverdale’s rendering of the fourth verse, which the King James changed only slightly, was: “O go your way unto his gates with thanksgiving, into his courts with praise. Be thankful unto him, speak of his good name.” In the Hebrew that he was translating—Bo’u sh’arav b’todah, ḥatserotav bi-t’hilah; hodu lo, barkhu shmo—todah, “thanks,” is a noun formed from the verb l’hodot, “to thank,” and hodu is the second-person-plural imperative of this verb, i.e., “thank ye!” Although l’hodot in biblical Hebrew can also have the related meanings of 1) to acknowledge or to confess, and 2) to praise, Coverdale did not think that the former applied in this case. He did, though, resort to the latter in translating the psalm’s title of Mizmor l’Todah as a “A Psalm of Praise,” which became the King James’s “Song of Praise.”

Two other Protestant Bibles were published in English between the Tyndale-Coverdale and the King James. One, the Great Bible of 1539, was essentially a crown edition, bearing Henry VIII’s seal of approval, of the Tyndale-Coverdale translation, and it served as the royally authorized English Bible until the King James replaced it; its wording of Psalm 100 followed Coverdale’s. The other, the 1560 Geneva Bible, was the work of Protestant scholars who exiled themselves from England during the country’s brief reversion to Catholicism under the reign (1553–58) of Henry’s daughter, Mary I. An original translation, it rendered Psalm 100’s first four verses as follows:

A Psalm of Praise. Sing ye loud unto the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyfulness. Know ye that even the Lord is God; he hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with praise, and into his courts with rejoicing; praise him and bless his Name.

Unlike Coverdale, the Geneva translators of Psalm 100 took the verb l’hodot to have the primary meaning of “to praise,” not of “to thank.” This might have little bearing on the holiday of Thanksgiving were it not for one thing—namely, that when, as William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, later wrote in a memoir, the just-landed Pilgrims, “Being thus arrived in good harbor and brought safe to land, . . . fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean,” their “blessing” took the form of the 100th Psalm. Although Bradford did not mention this detail, several contemporary accounts agree on it, differing only as to whether Psalm 100 was read aloud by William Brewster, one of the Pilgrims’ religious leaders, recited in unison by all of them, or sung by them as a hymn.

“Well, then,” you say, “quite obviously ‘thanksgiving’ was a word engraved in the Pilgrims’ minds from their dramatic reading or singing of Psalm 100 upon casting anchor in 1620. Why doubt that they would have used it to characterize their harvest celebration, which marked a year of surviving great hardship in their new surroundings?”

Why? For a very good reason. Contemporary accounts also agree that the Bible used by the Pilgrims was not the Great Bible or the King James, both associated by them with the established Anglican Church from which they were dissenters, but rather the Geneva Bible—and in the Geneva Bible, as we have seen, the word “thanksgiving” does not appear, neither in Psalm 100 nor anywhere else!

And if Psalm 100 had been sung as a hymn? This simply leads us away from the Great Bible and the King James by another route, because we know that the only Psalm-based hymnal that the Pilgrims possessed was one prepared by Henry Ainsworth, a Mayflower passenger who, too, was one of the Protestant exiles from Mary’s rule—and Ainsworth, a scholar in his own right, had preferred the Latin Vulgate’s interpretation of the verb l’hodot in the 100th psalm as meaning “to confess.” His hymnal gives its fourth verse as “O with confession enter ye his gates,/ His courtyards with praising,/ Confess to him, bless ye his name.”

True, there was at least one King James Bible aboard the Mayflower. Belonging to the Pilgrim John Alden, it is on display today at the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth and demonstrates that the Pilgrims did not forbid privately reading the King James. Yet they certainly did not use it for their public Bible readings or ceremonies, and it is unlikely that any of them, with the possible exception of Alden himself, was familiar with the word “thanksgiving” from it. The word may not have been part of their vocabulary at all, and if it was, they wouldn’t have connected it with Psalm 100 or with their arrival in America. Very likely, it indeed came from Virginia, although that’s something we’ll probably never know.