The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (HQ - Harper Collins)
Keeping on top of my vague 2025 plan and reviewing another NetGalley book that is published this January - this time the historical novel about Herod the Great.
I've long loved books that retell parts of history in novel form, and this includes novels based on parts of the Bible - The Red Tent from Anita Diamant came out back in 1997 and I think that I read and loved that one very close to its original publication date.
This book wasn't fully completed in Hurston's lifetime and has now been published using the drafts, notes, and letters that she left about the book and for the most part I think that the book works really well. Towards the end the details become more sparse and large chunks of time are passed over quite quickly, which is at odds with the rest of the book but there's just enough left that the book hangs together.
The Herod at the heart of this book is the King Herod from the Nativity in the Bible and we learn about how he came to rule Judea and what type of man he was. Hurston has obviously researched many of the contemporaneous sources as well as later interpretations and you are left with the idea of a man who could have called for the Massacre of the Innocents as in the Gospels or who might not have done and is on the receiving end of biased history - an interesting point to ponder.
I think for me the best part of this book was the way it clarified in my mind how all the various books/histories I'd read about before were actually linked. It hadn't actually occurred to me that Herod the Great and the birth of Jesus occurred roughly at the same time as is covered in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra / Julius Caesar and Robert Graves' I, Claudius. I felt spectacularly dim as all the dots connected but also these other reference points did help to colour in some of the gaps from the book.
I'm certainly going to look out more of Hurston's books now - probably starting with Moses, Man of the Mountain.
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