In the lush and verdant land of Khemet, an ancient royal returns after a lifetime away. He brings with him a new god and the worst chaos the land has seen since the beginning of time. Young King Men-Kheper-Re is the only one on earth able to convince the gods to stop the wanton destruction of the land, but is unwilling.
Not even Hapiseneb, the young king's most trusted advisor, is able to persuade him to allow this new god's only request. A god himself, Men-Kheper-Re instead chooses to engage this newcomer in a battle of wits and wagers, choosing instead to replay the same contests fought millennia ago.
Everyone in the land of Khemet suffers from the gods' battles. Far away from the palaces and politics, Yered, a foreigner, hears about this god of his ancestor--this god his fathers forsook that had promised them everything before abandoning them to slavery. The ancient royal promised a land flowing with milk and honey, but all Yered can see is mud and straw.
Historical fiction is a hard row to hoe, but it is also amazing. It is sometimes difficult to get into the minds of some of these people who lived hundreds or, in this case, thousands of years ago. Biblical fiction is even harder.
Not only is there added pressure to get things right--we biblical fiction writers are usually writing very well-known stories--but there is the added concern that our readers will take our words and give equal weight to them as to the original source material, the biblical account. It is enough to keep writers awake at night.
There is also additional pressure in a book like this, using actual, historical figures—famous and powerful figures. Not much is known about this time in Egypt's history, the co-reign of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut, when the king was just a boy. For most of history, Hatshepsut was an unknown entity. Her stepson, after her death, proceeded to try to erase her from history completely. His reasons, Egyptologists speculate range from his extreme hatred of his stepmother and wanting to erase her from the afterlife (Egyptians believed that anything written down--especially written in stone--would happen again in the Afterlife) to not wanting her exploits emulated by the young women in Egypt (similar to King Xerxes' advisors' fears in Esther 1). Speculation on why Hatshepsut grabbed the throne is just as occluded, ranging from being a power-hungry woman to not believing her stepson had what it took to run the country.
It is a time in history where much is shrouded in mystery, but also a lot is known. We know a lot about the life of the workers in Egypt. We know what slavery was like. We know what life was like for the common woman.
All of these points, and more, I tried to include to breathe life into the land of Khemet.
Not only is there added pressure to get things right--we biblical fiction writers are usually writing very well-known stories--but there is the added concern that our readers will take our words and give equal weight to them as to the original source material, the biblical account. It is enough to keep writers awake at night.
There is also additional pressure in a book like this, using actual, historical figures—famous and powerful figures. Not much is known about this time in Egypt's history, the co-reign of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut, when the king was just a boy. For most of history, Hatshepsut was an unknown entity. Her stepson, after her death, proceeded to try to erase her from history completely. His reasons, Egyptologists speculate range from his extreme hatred of his stepmother and wanting to erase her from the afterlife (Egyptians believed that anything written down--especially written in stone--would happen again in the Afterlife) to not wanting her exploits emulated by the young women in Egypt (similar to King Xerxes' advisors' fears in Esther 1). Speculation on why Hatshepsut grabbed the throne is just as occluded, ranging from being a power-hungry woman to not believing her stepson had what it took to run the country.
It is a time in history where much is shrouded in mystery, but also a lot is known. We know a lot about the life of the workers in Egypt. We know what slavery was like. We know what life was like for the common woman.
All of these points, and more, I tried to include to breathe life into the land of Khemet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Going into this project, I knew I would ruffle a few feathers. From not focusing on the battle between Pharaoh and Moses to having the characters view all of the gods on an equal footing, or using strange Egyptian names, to not capitalizing pronouns, there are a lot of things that I know people will find fault with.
The complete bibliography, as well as a timeline of events, are available in drop-down menus under the God of Chaos tab above.
Here are some of the questions I have been asked about in the different sages of the writing process. I will be adding to this periodically as I receive more questions from readers. (Contact form below)
1. Why do you not use the more traditional YHWH/"I Am" for the name of God in your book?
The name of the Hebrew god in God of Chaos, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh comes from The Five Books of Moses, a literal translation of the Hebrew text by Everett Fox. Exodus 3:13-14 reads:
Moshe said to God: Here, I will come to the Children of Israel and I will say to them: The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they will say to me: What is his name—what shall I say to them? God said to Moshe: EHYEH-ASHER-EHYEH/I will be-there howsoever I will be-there. And he said: Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel: EHYEH/I-WILL-BE-THERE sends me to you.
The other literal Hebrew translation I used, from the website chabad.org, also uses Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, but translates it as "I will be what I will be."
Because names were of the utmost importance to the Egyptians—and were very powerful magic—to be used in every possible instance they could, I shortened the name simply to Ehyeh.
2. Why do the Israelites worship the gods of Egypt?
Writing historical fiction is sometimes very difficult. We have to put our preconceived notions behind us, and everything we have learned before and do our best to start with a clean slate. So, I had to think about what we knew about the Hebrew people. We knew that they were in Egypt for a while (scholars disagree; times range from 215 to 430 years, but Exodus 12 says they were in Egypt for 430 years). Joshua, one of the last Hebrews to have grown up in Egypt, implied in his farewell address that the gods of Egypt were worshiped while in slavery as well (Joshua 25).
3. Why doesn't the story focus on Moses and Pharaoh like all of the other Exodus stories?
In a word, because all of the other stories do. Writers are told to look at things differently and try and find a hook, especially when telling a story similar (or the exact same story) to one that has been told before. Also, there were two different perspectives looking at these events. Even though the Hebrews were, in effect, Egyptians (having lived there for at least four generations), they still had a different way of viewing the plagues. Moses and Aaron went to the Hebrews first to tell them what would be happening. They would have seen the plagues as a delivering action, even if uncomfortable at the time.
But the Egyptians would have been devastated, confused, and scared. I chose to add both perspectives. But, since I obviously needed Moses and Pharaoh to have their confrontations as well, so I had to have someone close enough to the king to be able to view all of the interactions between the two of them. Enter Hapiseneb, or Seneb for short.
The plagues affected so many more people than just Pharaoh, his officials, and Moses and Aaron. That is what I wanted to portray in the book... the affect the plagues had on everyone in Egypt.
4. Why did you place the story when you did? Why did you not use Pharaoh Ramses?
Finding a time period to set the story was one of the hardest things about getting started. I knew I wanted to have two main characters from the beginning. I knew that they were going to come from different backgrounds, and, of course, I already had an outline and knew how the story was going to end. But I didn't know who was going to be king.
I did the necessary research using the traditional timelines. There are two schools of thought when it comes to trying to date the Exodus--a earlier timeline (around 1500 BCE) or a later one (1200s BCE). Some have even made Hatshepsut (circa Most people who consider the later date as the time frame (with Pharaoh Merenptah) as the pharaoh of the Exodus do so because in Exodus 1, it states that the Hebrews built two cities, one of them named "Pi-Ramses." However, Pi-Ramses is built close to the site of an older (and abandoned by that time) city, Avaris (Hut Waret in ancient Egyptian). Avaris was the capital city of the Hyksos (invaders from the Levant), and in the region of Goshen.
The older date puts the Exodus at the time of the Hyksos' expulsion from the Nile Delta (around 1550 BCE). The Hyksos, Canaanites who had conquered Lower Egypt and ruled it for about 100 years, were defeated and Egypt reunified by Pharaoh Ahmose.
The Biblical account tells of a "Pharaoh who did not know Joseph" and what Joseph had done for Egypt in the past and subjugated the Hebrews to slavery and harsh work. If the Egyptians were good at one thing, it was remembering. So, I thought that, perhaps, the first Hyksos ruler was that Pharaoh.
Going from that starting point--then, the Pharaoh who had ordered the baby boys thrown into the river could be the Pharaoh Ahmose, who was doing so in an effort to subjugate these inherited slaves. It worked, as a timeline, so I looked ahead to what would be the time of the Exodus, and 80 years later was the last year of the co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III before Hatshepsut took the throne.
It seemed like a good time to place the story, then I began to look deeper and everything solidified. Thutmose III, when he regained the throne 20 years later, seemed to have an extreme hatred of the people living in Canaan. History tells us he conquered Canaan and laid it to waste. Hatshepsut focused her reign on rebuilding Egypt's wealth (most famously, she sent an expedition to the land of Punt) and repairing crumbling temples. Why, I wondered, would Egypt need to rebuild its wealth if it was already the most prosperous country in the world? Why would Thutmose send troops to lay siege to the major cities in Canaan? Egypt's borders already stretched that far, thanks to the efforts of Thutmose I and his predecessors.
Perhaps Egypt's wealth and religion had to be rebuilt because their gold was in the hands of the Hebrews? Perhaps Thutmose III was trying to get back at the people he believed had wronged him and had, ultimately, stolen his throne for 20 years?
And then, with those "what ifs," it was settled. The most important part of the story was done: I found a time period that fit both the archaeological evidence and the biblical narrative less like a square peg in a round hole (as I had been expecting going into the project) and more like a hand in a glove.
5. Was that a dragon?
Late at night, early in the writing process, while transcribing the story of Aaron's staff from the Greek translation of the Exodus, the Septuagint, into my notes, my eyes happened to glance to the Greek text and I picked out a word that I hadn't seen since my Greek class in college... drakon. I, like a lot of others, had never really thought about the first sign before Pharaoh. Moses' staff had been turned into a snake twice before (at the Burning Bush and as a sign for the Hebrews), and so it was easy to glance over and believe that Aaron's staff was nothing more spectacular than a staff turning into a snake (which was spectacular enough) as well. But, after seeing those six letters, I was on a mission. I pulled out my concordances, went through various word studies, and came to the conclusion that the animal that Aaron's staff transformed into was a different creature than Moses' staff-snake.
In the original Hebrew, the word, tannin, is used only one other place, in Job 41, to describe Leviathan. While most footnotes in the modern Bibles call Leviathan a crocodile, certain phrases such as "Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils... Its breath sets coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth" make an interpretation of "crocodile" unlikely. Tannin (Greek: ophis) was not the word used with Moses' snake.
While using the traditional interpretation of "snake" would have worked just as well, or perhaps even better, in conjuring up images of Apep, a dragon is, let's face it, just more fun. The magician priests of Egypt, according to Exodus 6, also conjured drakontes, but, in keeping with the traditional interpretation—and to add to the action—I chose to keep them serpents.
Because, at the time, my son was obsessed with the movie How to Train your Dragon, I made Tannin intelligent as well, and not simply a dumb creature. Because this was a magical, spiritual creature and not just a dumb brute, I gave him a sense of self-awareness. I wrote him as I pictured animals might have been in the Garden of Eden before the Fall—able to interact with humanity without fear or malice and being able to communicate easily with and wanting to bring honor to its Creator.
He may be a bit more poetic license than some people are comfortable with, but Tannin was one of my favorite characters to write.
6. Why does Moses allow for the existence of other gods? Wouldn't he, of all people, know better?
In his younger years, Moses, as a member of the Egyptian royal household, would have been expected to participate in the priestly functions of the family. There would be no way he would be able to get out of it, it was what the people expected from the royal family. It was, in their belief, what caused the sun to rise in the morning, the Nile to flood each year, and the stars to move in the Heavens.
Jewish tradition states that during Moses’ time as a prince of Egypt, he was a great military leader, winning many campaigns in Nubia (Sudan). He was recognized as being blessed by the god(s). Egyptian troops, however, would not have followed a general—no matter how victorious and strategically minded—that insisted on following a god that was not Egyptian. That would have meant drawing the wrath of the god of war (and fertility), Min-Montu.
The Bible says that Moses was raised in a Hebrew home until he was “weaned.” We don’t know how long that is, but estimates range from about 3 years (when Egyptian children were officially considered weaned) to 12 years (the coming of age for Hebrews). Most, though, say Moses joined the king's household around age 4. Even if Moses joined his Egyptian family as a 12-year-old almost-man (Egyptian coming of age was 13), that would mean he would have been living in various palaces, with the Egyptians, knee-deep in Egyptian theology, for at the very least 28 years before his misunderstanding with an uncle or nephew.
If we have learned nothing from the last half of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Judges, it’s that, left on their own, the Hebrew people were not the best at keeping God’s commands. This is, also, assuming Moses had been taught monotheology at home when he was with his Hebrew family. Joshua 24:14 says pretty clearly that the Hebrews had, at some point, worshipped the gods of Egypt. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Moses didn’t start following YHWH until he was married and he took the religion of his wife’s family (descendants of Abraham and his second wife).
So, Moses knew, intimately, the theology of Egypt and was, most likely, at one point a willing participant in it.
But why did I write him still acknowledging the gods of Egypt?
Moses (and Aaron) never once said in the biblical text that the god of the Hebrews was the only god in the universe. Honestly, it surprised me, too. In every one of the 10 different translations I used (including the LXX), there is no mention anywhere of one God ruling everything alone and the other gods not existing at all. Not even when it would have been obvious to everyone because all of the gods of Egypt had been bested.
They did, however, use the following descriptions for YHWH: “The God of the Hebrews” (Ex. 5:3, 7:16, 9:1, 9:13, 10:3), “YHWH, in the (midst of the) land” (Ex. 8:18, 14:18), and “None like YHWH in all the earth” (9:14)
The Egyptians said about YHWH and/ or the plagues: “This is the finger of (a) god” (Ex 8:15), and “YHWH is the righteous one” (9:27).
And then, there’s Moses’ own words in Exodus 15:15: “Who among the gods is like you, LORD, who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?” (NIV) And “You shall have no other gods before me.”
While Hebrews 11 does imply that, perhaps, Moses could have always been a believer solely in YHWH from birth, it also seems (when compared to Moses’ own words in Exodus) that the human writer of Hebrews is also drawing on Jewish traditions that we do not have available to us at the moment and were certainly not canonized. That doesn’t, of course, mean they’re wrong, but in Historical Fiction, you want to get as close to the source as possible.
Moses says—through his words, actions, and omissions—the other gods are real beings. But—more importantly—he emphasizes through actions, words, and the plagues that the Hebrew God is so very much greater and more powerful than the gods of his homeland.
7. How many of the characters in the book were real people?
When you talk about biblical historical fiction, the question of "reality" gets a bit ... murky. Faith that someone existed does not out-and-out make someone real. On the flip-side, a lack of evidence of existence doesn't automatically rule out the possibility that someone existed--especially when we are talking about Egyptology. Just last year, an archaeological team discovered a Great Queen no one ever knew existed. Many factors--including political, 3000 or more years of history in the interim, and not the least of which was the ever-changing path of the Nile itself--have come together to make knowing what happened in Goshen during that time period hard to accurately ascertain.
For the purposes here, I will only list people who currently have archaeological proof of their existence. However, archaeology is changing or confirming our preconceptions of the past every day, and the next discovery could add to the list.
Hapiseneb, Amenhotep, and their son Djhutimose
Men-Kheper-Re (Thutmose III), Satiah, Beketamun and Amunemhat (Merytre-Hatshepsut became Great Queen after Satiah's death)
Hatshepsut and Neferure, in addition to all of the royal ancestors mentioned
Senenmut and his parents Ramose and Hatnefer
Minmontu the priest
Ineni the arthitect
8. What was the hardest part of writing the story?
The hardest scenes to write were the Passover sacrifice in Chapter 23 and Kheper's humbling in Chapter 24. I cried through the writing, and still choke up reading them two or three years later. I knew they were going to be hard, and if I could have changed them, I would have, but writing historical fiction means that you can't change the story, no matter how much you need to.
Because I knew they would die by the end of the book, writing Kheper's firstborn was difficult. This little boy that we meet in Chapter 2, who never did anything wrong, is dead 19 chapters and 10 months later. I chose to make him part of the story, not just a far-off character, supposedly safe back home in the palace. His parents loved him and wanted him close by.
Not nearly as hard, but still difficult was the knowledge that all of my Hebrew adults would eventually die in the desert. My Hebrew children, all under the age of 20, would all arrive, given that they did not die in battle, in rebellion, or from poisonous snakes (and I would like to think that they did), but none of their parents, grandparents, uncles, or aunts would live to see the Promised Land they were so eager to enter at the end of the book.
The complete bibliography, as well as a timeline of events, are available in drop-down menus under the God of Chaos tab above.
Here are some of the questions I have been asked about in the different sages of the writing process. I will be adding to this periodically as I receive more questions from readers. (Contact form below)
- Why do you not use the more traditional YHWH (Yahweh/Jehovah) for the name of God in your book?
- Why do the Hebrews worship the gods of Egypt?
- Why doesn't this story focus on Moses and Pharaoh like all of the other Exodus stories?
- Why did you place the story when you did? Why did you not use Pharaoh Ramses?
- Was that a dragon?!
- Why does Moses allow for the existence of the other gods?
- How many of your characters were real people?
- What was the hardest part of writing the story?
1. Why do you not use the more traditional YHWH/"I Am" for the name of God in your book?
The name of the Hebrew god in God of Chaos, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh comes from The Five Books of Moses, a literal translation of the Hebrew text by Everett Fox. Exodus 3:13-14 reads:
Moshe said to God: Here, I will come to the Children of Israel and I will say to them: The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they will say to me: What is his name—what shall I say to them? God said to Moshe: EHYEH-ASHER-EHYEH/I will be-there howsoever I will be-there. And he said: Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel: EHYEH/I-WILL-BE-THERE sends me to you.
The other literal Hebrew translation I used, from the website chabad.org, also uses Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, but translates it as "I will be what I will be."
Because names were of the utmost importance to the Egyptians—and were very powerful magic—to be used in every possible instance they could, I shortened the name simply to Ehyeh.
2. Why do the Israelites worship the gods of Egypt?
Writing historical fiction is sometimes very difficult. We have to put our preconceived notions behind us, and everything we have learned before and do our best to start with a clean slate. So, I had to think about what we knew about the Hebrew people. We knew that they were in Egypt for a while (scholars disagree; times range from 215 to 430 years, but Exodus 12 says they were in Egypt for 430 years). Joshua, one of the last Hebrews to have grown up in Egypt, implied in his farewell address that the gods of Egypt were worshiped while in slavery as well (Joshua 25).
3. Why doesn't the story focus on Moses and Pharaoh like all of the other Exodus stories?
In a word, because all of the other stories do. Writers are told to look at things differently and try and find a hook, especially when telling a story similar (or the exact same story) to one that has been told before. Also, there were two different perspectives looking at these events. Even though the Hebrews were, in effect, Egyptians (having lived there for at least four generations), they still had a different way of viewing the plagues. Moses and Aaron went to the Hebrews first to tell them what would be happening. They would have seen the plagues as a delivering action, even if uncomfortable at the time.
But the Egyptians would have been devastated, confused, and scared. I chose to add both perspectives. But, since I obviously needed Moses and Pharaoh to have their confrontations as well, so I had to have someone close enough to the king to be able to view all of the interactions between the two of them. Enter Hapiseneb, or Seneb for short.
The plagues affected so many more people than just Pharaoh, his officials, and Moses and Aaron. That is what I wanted to portray in the book... the affect the plagues had on everyone in Egypt.
4. Why did you place the story when you did? Why did you not use Pharaoh Ramses?
Finding a time period to set the story was one of the hardest things about getting started. I knew I wanted to have two main characters from the beginning. I knew that they were going to come from different backgrounds, and, of course, I already had an outline and knew how the story was going to end. But I didn't know who was going to be king.
I did the necessary research using the traditional timelines. There are two schools of thought when it comes to trying to date the Exodus--a earlier timeline (around 1500 BCE) or a later one (1200s BCE). Some have even made Hatshepsut (circa Most people who consider the later date as the time frame (with Pharaoh Merenptah) as the pharaoh of the Exodus do so because in Exodus 1, it states that the Hebrews built two cities, one of them named "Pi-Ramses." However, Pi-Ramses is built close to the site of an older (and abandoned by that time) city, Avaris (Hut Waret in ancient Egyptian). Avaris was the capital city of the Hyksos (invaders from the Levant), and in the region of Goshen.
The older date puts the Exodus at the time of the Hyksos' expulsion from the Nile Delta (around 1550 BCE). The Hyksos, Canaanites who had conquered Lower Egypt and ruled it for about 100 years, were defeated and Egypt reunified by Pharaoh Ahmose.
The Biblical account tells of a "Pharaoh who did not know Joseph" and what Joseph had done for Egypt in the past and subjugated the Hebrews to slavery and harsh work. If the Egyptians were good at one thing, it was remembering. So, I thought that, perhaps, the first Hyksos ruler was that Pharaoh.
Going from that starting point--then, the Pharaoh who had ordered the baby boys thrown into the river could be the Pharaoh Ahmose, who was doing so in an effort to subjugate these inherited slaves. It worked, as a timeline, so I looked ahead to what would be the time of the Exodus, and 80 years later was the last year of the co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III before Hatshepsut took the throne.
It seemed like a good time to place the story, then I began to look deeper and everything solidified. Thutmose III, when he regained the throne 20 years later, seemed to have an extreme hatred of the people living in Canaan. History tells us he conquered Canaan and laid it to waste. Hatshepsut focused her reign on rebuilding Egypt's wealth (most famously, she sent an expedition to the land of Punt) and repairing crumbling temples. Why, I wondered, would Egypt need to rebuild its wealth if it was already the most prosperous country in the world? Why would Thutmose send troops to lay siege to the major cities in Canaan? Egypt's borders already stretched that far, thanks to the efforts of Thutmose I and his predecessors.
Perhaps Egypt's wealth and religion had to be rebuilt because their gold was in the hands of the Hebrews? Perhaps Thutmose III was trying to get back at the people he believed had wronged him and had, ultimately, stolen his throne for 20 years?
And then, with those "what ifs," it was settled. The most important part of the story was done: I found a time period that fit both the archaeological evidence and the biblical narrative less like a square peg in a round hole (as I had been expecting going into the project) and more like a hand in a glove.
5. Was that a dragon?
Late at night, early in the writing process, while transcribing the story of Aaron's staff from the Greek translation of the Exodus, the Septuagint, into my notes, my eyes happened to glance to the Greek text and I picked out a word that I hadn't seen since my Greek class in college... drakon. I, like a lot of others, had never really thought about the first sign before Pharaoh. Moses' staff had been turned into a snake twice before (at the Burning Bush and as a sign for the Hebrews), and so it was easy to glance over and believe that Aaron's staff was nothing more spectacular than a staff turning into a snake (which was spectacular enough) as well. But, after seeing those six letters, I was on a mission. I pulled out my concordances, went through various word studies, and came to the conclusion that the animal that Aaron's staff transformed into was a different creature than Moses' staff-snake.
In the original Hebrew, the word, tannin, is used only one other place, in Job 41, to describe Leviathan. While most footnotes in the modern Bibles call Leviathan a crocodile, certain phrases such as "Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils... Its breath sets coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth" make an interpretation of "crocodile" unlikely. Tannin (Greek: ophis) was not the word used with Moses' snake.
While using the traditional interpretation of "snake" would have worked just as well, or perhaps even better, in conjuring up images of Apep, a dragon is, let's face it, just more fun. The magician priests of Egypt, according to Exodus 6, also conjured drakontes, but, in keeping with the traditional interpretation—and to add to the action—I chose to keep them serpents.
Because, at the time, my son was obsessed with the movie How to Train your Dragon, I made Tannin intelligent as well, and not simply a dumb creature. Because this was a magical, spiritual creature and not just a dumb brute, I gave him a sense of self-awareness. I wrote him as I pictured animals might have been in the Garden of Eden before the Fall—able to interact with humanity without fear or malice and being able to communicate easily with and wanting to bring honor to its Creator.
He may be a bit more poetic license than some people are comfortable with, but Tannin was one of my favorite characters to write.
6. Why does Moses allow for the existence of other gods? Wouldn't he, of all people, know better?
In his younger years, Moses, as a member of the Egyptian royal household, would have been expected to participate in the priestly functions of the family. There would be no way he would be able to get out of it, it was what the people expected from the royal family. It was, in their belief, what caused the sun to rise in the morning, the Nile to flood each year, and the stars to move in the Heavens.
Jewish tradition states that during Moses’ time as a prince of Egypt, he was a great military leader, winning many campaigns in Nubia (Sudan). He was recognized as being blessed by the god(s). Egyptian troops, however, would not have followed a general—no matter how victorious and strategically minded—that insisted on following a god that was not Egyptian. That would have meant drawing the wrath of the god of war (and fertility), Min-Montu.
The Bible says that Moses was raised in a Hebrew home until he was “weaned.” We don’t know how long that is, but estimates range from about 3 years (when Egyptian children were officially considered weaned) to 12 years (the coming of age for Hebrews). Most, though, say Moses joined the king's household around age 4. Even if Moses joined his Egyptian family as a 12-year-old almost-man (Egyptian coming of age was 13), that would mean he would have been living in various palaces, with the Egyptians, knee-deep in Egyptian theology, for at the very least 28 years before his misunderstanding with an uncle or nephew.
If we have learned nothing from the last half of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Judges, it’s that, left on their own, the Hebrew people were not the best at keeping God’s commands. This is, also, assuming Moses had been taught monotheology at home when he was with his Hebrew family. Joshua 24:14 says pretty clearly that the Hebrews had, at some point, worshipped the gods of Egypt. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Moses didn’t start following YHWH until he was married and he took the religion of his wife’s family (descendants of Abraham and his second wife).
So, Moses knew, intimately, the theology of Egypt and was, most likely, at one point a willing participant in it.
But why did I write him still acknowledging the gods of Egypt?
Moses (and Aaron) never once said in the biblical text that the god of the Hebrews was the only god in the universe. Honestly, it surprised me, too. In every one of the 10 different translations I used (including the LXX), there is no mention anywhere of one God ruling everything alone and the other gods not existing at all. Not even when it would have been obvious to everyone because all of the gods of Egypt had been bested.
They did, however, use the following descriptions for YHWH: “The God of the Hebrews” (Ex. 5:3, 7:16, 9:1, 9:13, 10:3), “YHWH, in the (midst of the) land” (Ex. 8:18, 14:18), and “None like YHWH in all the earth” (9:14)
The Egyptians said about YHWH and/ or the plagues: “This is the finger of (a) god” (Ex 8:15), and “YHWH is the righteous one” (9:27).
And then, there’s Moses’ own words in Exodus 15:15: “Who among the gods is like you, LORD, who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?” (NIV) And “You shall have no other gods before me.”
While Hebrews 11 does imply that, perhaps, Moses could have always been a believer solely in YHWH from birth, it also seems (when compared to Moses’ own words in Exodus) that the human writer of Hebrews is also drawing on Jewish traditions that we do not have available to us at the moment and were certainly not canonized. That doesn’t, of course, mean they’re wrong, but in Historical Fiction, you want to get as close to the source as possible.
Moses says—through his words, actions, and omissions—the other gods are real beings. But—more importantly—he emphasizes through actions, words, and the plagues that the Hebrew God is so very much greater and more powerful than the gods of his homeland.
7. How many of the characters in the book were real people?
When you talk about biblical historical fiction, the question of "reality" gets a bit ... murky. Faith that someone existed does not out-and-out make someone real. On the flip-side, a lack of evidence of existence doesn't automatically rule out the possibility that someone existed--especially when we are talking about Egyptology. Just last year, an archaeological team discovered a Great Queen no one ever knew existed. Many factors--including political, 3000 or more years of history in the interim, and not the least of which was the ever-changing path of the Nile itself--have come together to make knowing what happened in Goshen during that time period hard to accurately ascertain.
For the purposes here, I will only list people who currently have archaeological proof of their existence. However, archaeology is changing or confirming our preconceptions of the past every day, and the next discovery could add to the list.
Hapiseneb, Amenhotep, and their son Djhutimose
Men-Kheper-Re (Thutmose III), Satiah, Beketamun and Amunemhat (Merytre-Hatshepsut became Great Queen after Satiah's death)
Hatshepsut and Neferure, in addition to all of the royal ancestors mentioned
Senenmut and his parents Ramose and Hatnefer
Minmontu the priest
Ineni the arthitect
8. What was the hardest part of writing the story?
The hardest scenes to write were the Passover sacrifice in Chapter 23 and Kheper's humbling in Chapter 24. I cried through the writing, and still choke up reading them two or three years later. I knew they were going to be hard, and if I could have changed them, I would have, but writing historical fiction means that you can't change the story, no matter how much you need to.
Because I knew they would die by the end of the book, writing Kheper's firstborn was difficult. This little boy that we meet in Chapter 2, who never did anything wrong, is dead 19 chapters and 10 months later. I chose to make him part of the story, not just a far-off character, supposedly safe back home in the palace. His parents loved him and wanted him close by.
Not nearly as hard, but still difficult was the knowledge that all of my Hebrew adults would eventually die in the desert. My Hebrew children, all under the age of 20, would all arrive, given that they did not die in battle, in rebellion, or from poisonous snakes (and I would like to think that they did), but none of their parents, grandparents, uncles, or aunts would live to see the Promised Land they were so eager to enter at the end of the book.
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If there are any questions you had about the book that you haven't seen addressed here, please take the time to contact me and I will be sure to address your question!
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