The Life of Herod the Great A Novel

Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah G. Plant

eBook - 2025

A never before published novel from beloved author Zora Neale Hurston, revealing the historical Herod the Great—not the villain the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision.In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston's retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the "slaughter of the innocents," but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.From the peaks of triumph to the depths of human misery, the historical Herod &...quot;appears to have been singled out and especially endowed to attract the lightning of fate," Hurston writes. An intimate of both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, the Judean king lived during the first century BCE, in a... more