The Road to Rephidim

THE ROAD TO REPHIDIM imagines a late summer in Egypt’s eastern delta, in a year of failed crops and unexpected storms, a year when little green frogs fell from the sky, a year when the superstitious Egyptians turned against the Israelite tribes that they had grudgingly tolerated, and drove them from the King’s lands. 


The story takes us with these people, these victims of ethnic cleansing; the farmers with their flocks, the lawyers, scribes, and landowners, tramping the roads side-by-side with the peasants and brick makers. 


We see that most commonplace of events, a boy and girl falling in love, though in this case the boy is a Bedouin, and the girl a high-born daughter of the house of Simeon. 


As their relationship develops, we live through events that will become legends – the emergence of a great national leader, the day of starvation when they ate the sticky deposit manna left by insects on the tamarisk, the day at the pass of Rephidim itself, when the brickmakers of Korah fought an Egyptian formation to a standstill, though hardly a man survived. 


And we see the remnants pass finally through the Sinai mountains, heading slowly to Canaan, the promised land… 


THE ROAD TO REPHIDIM is a novella, taken from the multi-stranded timeslip thriller SINAI. 


William Smethurst is an award-winning British historian and novelist who has scripted and produced programmes on the Middle Ages for film, BBC television, and Radio 4. 


“A sensitive love story of the time of the Exodus, when a refined, sophisticated Jewish girl encounters a kindly, supportive Bedouin boy.” 

JEWISH CHRONICLE 


"All of us know the fairy-tale story of Exodus. William Smethurst tells us what it was really like for an ethnic group to flee social upheaval in Egypt… this is an authentic take, an exciting read." 

AMAZON US 

Review of Sinai