Image: Ethiopian Woman by JW Kelly The Song of Songs is a beautiful, poetic and erotic dialog between two lovers. Verse 1:5 is famous. Here are several English translations: King James Bible I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Christian Standard Bible Daughters of Jerusalem, I am dark like the tents of Kedar, yet lovely like the curtains of Solomon. English Standard Version I am very dark, but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. New [...]

When Your Characters Talk Back Authors often say that their characters seem to take on lives of their own. Amos Oz, author of My Michael (Michael sheli מיכאל שלי in Hebrew) reported getting into long, heated arguments with his main character, Hannah. Below is the record of an argument I had with a character of mine. His name is Zakaryah, and he's one of the principal characters of my novel Light of Exile, coming this September. I was having trouble fleshing him out. I tried to cheat and he didn't like it, not one bit. The story just wasn’t working. [...]

How did the ancient Israelites get their bread to rise? After all, they couldn’t just run out to the grocery store and buy a packet of yeast. That was the question I posed to Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott a little over a year ago. She’s an archaeologist among whose specialties is diet and food preparation.  It turns out that they got their yeast from the air around them. They were sourdough bakers. I am too.  The thing about using sourdough starter is that it takes time. With commercial yeast, dough needs to rise for a total of about two hours. With starter, dough [...]

The name of the prophet in PaleoHebrew, modern Hebrew and English In my novel By the Waters of Babylon (available now) there’s a scene in which twelve-year-old Ya’el meets the prophet Jeremiah. You might be familiar with Jeremiah. He’s famous for his bitter denunciations of the ruling powers of Judah during the beginning of the 6th century BCE. He’s so famous for this, in fact, that he has his own word in the English language: jeremiad. In writing the passage, I pictured him as a gruff old man with a long gray beard, of kindly disposition but furious [...]

by Christopher Farrar Have you ever been accused of heresy? It happened to me a few weeks ago. In one of my Facebook groups I had posted a newspaper story about some pottery that was found in the traditional Hebron burial place of Abraham and Sarah. I introduced the story this way: “Was Abraham real? The short answer: It's hard to say.” And the fact is that every effort to find historical or archaeological evidence has failed, not just for the man himself but also for the time period in which he could have lived. One reader had this response: [...]