Sarah: A Heroine Of The Old Testament
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
People may know that Abraham, the great Patriarch of the Old Testament, was the first man to spread God's word. But how many know of his wife, Sarah? How she was born into a wealthy and powerful family in the Sumerian city of Ur? Or how, at the age of twelve, escaping her own wedding ceremony, she ran to the banks of the Euphrates river and into the arms of a young stranger camped on the outskirts of the city. His name was Abraham and, although he was a member of a poor nomadic tribe, their encounter that night was enough to convince Sarah that their future lay together. And so Sarah abandoned everything - wealth, family and status - to follow Abraham and his alien God; a God of whom no one had ever heard; a God who was invisible and who appeared to communicate solely through her husband; a God who, one day, would command Abraham to kill their beloved son in his name, and before whom Sarah would beg for mercy...
Set against the epic backdrop of the Sumerian cities of Ur and Babylon four thousand years ago, and in the arid wastelands of the Arabian desert, Marek Halter brings an ancient world vividly to life through the eyes of a beautiful and passionate woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yet another entry in the burgeoning subgenre of fictional portraits of biblical women (see, for example, Rebecca Kohn's retelling of the story of Queen Esther in The Gilded Chamber, Forecasts, Mar. 15), Halter's novel (the first in a trilogy) adheres to a by now familiar formula: frank sexual and emotional revelations presented against a backdrop of burnished interiors. Halter's Sarah is born Sarai, the daughter of one of the most powerful lords of Ur. At the age of 12, she is pledged in marriage to a man she has never met, and despite the finery of her bridal chamber ("Everything was new.... Linen rakutus as smooth as a baby's skin"), she flees in distress. Dragged back to her father's house, she doses herself with an herbal concoction that leaves her barren and is made a priestess of Ishtar, Ur's goddess of war. Six years later, an encounter with her childhood love, the handsome Abram, furnishes her with the chance she's been waiting for: she escapes with him and joins his nomadic tribe. Her contentment is short-lived, because Abram is called by God to leave his tribe and set out for a new land, whereupon the familiar (but freely adapted) Bible story unfolds. The misery Sarah feels at being barren, the indecent love her nephew Lot expresses for her, her encounter with Pharaoh and her quarrel with Hagar, the slave woman who gives Abram a child, shape the novel's second half. Halter isn't afraid to present headstrong Sarah as bitter in her old age, and his complex portrait of the biblical matriarch gives this solid if predictable novel a dash of freshness.
