Book Review: "Jericho Moon" by Matthew Woodring Stover

[lethargic_man]

Jericho Moon is the sequel to the author's Iron Dawn, which I reviewed when I read it. That novel is set in Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon), and Canaan is only vaguely on the radar, particularly to the Pictish protagonist Barra:

There's this people called the Habiru, and they're getting together to attack a big city called Jebusi, under their old general Joshua ben Nun. They're kind of a queer people, from what I hear. The story is, they carry their god around with them in a box, can you imagine? I don't know that this is true, but I do know they have decided that their god has given them Jebusi to be their own city. Adonizedek, the Jebusite king, is hiring lots and lots of mercenaries, so I'm going to go and help him defend his city. These bloody Habiru don't even know the real name of the place; they call it Jerusalem.

Sounds like easy money to me.

This is the hook into the second novel, but for years I put off reading it, because this is a setting I (obviously) know well, and I was worried the novel would get it wrong, and thus spoil the first novel for me.

The above paragraph displays, indeed, several of my causes for concern: Firstly, the name of the city is wrong; it's יְבוּס Yevus (possibly Yebhus, with an aspirated B, in contemporary Hebrew?), there's no I on the end. (Also, the name "Jerusalem" is attested (as Urusalim) in Egyptian sources a thousand years earlier (though that doesn't know mean Barra (the narrator) knows this.)

The use of KJV spelling is annoying too. It's probably for the good reason that it makes Hebrew/Canaanite/Phoenician names more familiar to the lay reader, but it's still annoying, and occasionally wrong—"Joshua", for example, is actually "Yehoshua".

This might sound like linguistic nit-picking, but I felt this was symptomatic of a wider problem. The protagonist, for example, is called Barra Coll Eigg Rhum. These names (being those of her matrilineal ancestors) are, if you haven't realised, all names of Hebridean islands—but they're all in modern Gaelic, not the language the Celts would have been speaking at the time of the story. Even in the last two thousand years, the Celtic languages have changed a lot—the name "Caratacos", for example, has been whittled down by time to "Caradog" in modern Welsh. How different, then, would these names have been three thousand years ago!

But there's the rub. Three thousand years ago there were no Picts or Gaels in the Isle of the Mighty at all! And nor were the Phoenicians yet trading all the way to Britain. The whole underpinning of both books is anachronistic. So long as you don't mind that, the books are highly enjoyable, as fun romps through the Levantine cultures of the time—but they don't fit perfectly well into their setting, as is also evidenced by Barra's "bloody" in the above quotation. Indeed, reading the first book, as I did, not long after Mary Reynault's The King Must Die (the story of Theseus told as a historical novel) brought home how very well the latter does a job of portraying a society and mindset very different to our own—and how little this comes across in the Stover book.

Given these concerns—added to the fact that the author doesn't realise the Canaanites and Phoenicians were, substantially, the same people, and spoke the same language—you ought now to see why I was nervous of reading the second book.

Whilst all of the above still applies in Jericho Moon, however, what struck me on reading it was not how much it got wrong, but how much it got right. The book follows the (now distinctly unfashionable) view that the events described in the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua actually happened as described. (I suppose this parallels the earlier novel's following of the chronology from Greek myth of the Trojan War being only a few years after the fall of Minoan Crete, rather than the couple of centuries the archaeological record shows.)

The book takes the minimalistic portrayals of the characters in the Book of Joshua—Joshua, Eleazar the High Priest, the latter's son Phinehas—and fleshes them out into real people. Joshua, for example, comes across as a man who dedicated his life to Moses, who has still not got over his death, twenty years later. Now old, the last thing he wants to do is go to war again, but he cannot cross the Divine will: bitter experience has shown him that when people do that, they die.

The portrayal of G-d in the book is strongly hostile. Though G-d is described in the Torah as being "merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin," the picture we see, all too often, is of a merciless, jealous, vengeful G-d, and that is what is portrayed here.

I didn't actually mind that. The book is, after all, largely told from the perspective of the Jebusites and their allies, the Israelites' enemies—and when we do get Joshua's perspective, the Israelites largely come across as driven by their G-d rather than intrinsically warlike themselves.

But there is one passage which differs. It is from the perspective of a character who has witnessed, telepathically, the death of every man, woman and child in Jericho, and now sees the same fate awaiting the Jebusites:

Soon, all too soon, these folk would kneel in their lines, hands bound behind them as they awaited Habiru knives. They would watch each other die. Some of them would carry the corpses of their children to the fires; some would carry their parents.

This narked me. No matter what the injustices of the past, this was a different age, with different standards. To use Holocaust imagery, with the Israelites in the role of the Nazis, is antisemitism, plain and simple. That said, this was a single, isolated passage. The rest of the book does not come across as antisemitic (if one does not judge the Jews of later history for the deeds of their Israelite fathers); I do not know what made the author put this passage in.

Moving on, the book reads well whatever your knowledge level. It does not require knowledge of Biblical history—indeed, if you don't know it, it will probably come across as more suspenseful, purely in terms of not knowing that Jerusalem held out as a Jebusite city-state until the time of King David. But for those that are familiar with the Bible, there's lots of fun tidbits to spot (e.g., to give a rare NT example, "'Kheperu?' Joshua said. 'Morning Star? What a peaceful name. How can anyone who names himself Lightbringer be an Enemy of God?'"). Likewise the story is well researched from the perspective of the Egyptian and other records; Kheperu, the Egyptian, refers to the Israelites by the Egyptian description shasu.

Finally, if you're wondering about the name of the book; Jericho יְרִיחוֹ Yəriḥo is derived from יָרֵחַ yārēaḥ "moon"—though curiously the book does not mention this, instead, identifying the city's god as "Tchera'khu," meaning, apparently, in Egyptian, Fortress of Light.

Comments

[sleepycinderell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that; it sounds a rather interesting read.

Am I correct in thinking that you are one of the (long-lost) members of the writers' group on autopope? I spotted you in Charlie's LJ comments and you suddenly seemed very familiar! If you are not he, I apologise..


Morag

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I'm not lost; I know perfectly well where I am! :o) Perhaps "alumnus" would be a better word...?