I Wish I Were a Historical Novelist

A real historical novelist writes fiction that takes place in historical times, where there are nice things like primary sources by people who witnessed historical events — the Civil War, the European discovery of Timbuktu, the collapse of the Han dynasty — and then wrote about what they’d seen. And there are even nicer things like secondary sources by historians who analyze the information from primary sources and compose theories about why certain things happened, what the constraining circumstances surrounding those incidents were, and which events pushed other events into being.

I write about the Exodus episodes in the Hebrew Bible, so I can’t have nice things.

That’s because there are almost no primary sources at all from the time of the Five Books of Moses, most of which were written centuries after the events they describe, according to archaeologists and biblical scholars. In many cases, the authors of these narratives (and there were multiple authors) wrote about people and places that were contemporary for them in the 7th or 8th centuries BCE — not the 13th century BCE when we know from independent sources that Ramses II, who many consider to be the unnamed pharaoh of the biblical Exodus stories, ruled Egypt.

The discrepancies between the seeming history of the Bible and actual, verifiable history recently caused a predicament for me. I was deciding how to include a battle with a people called the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8–11) in Book II of my novel, which takes place in the wilderness between Goshen and the Mountain of God. The combat is not described in any detail except to say that as long as Moses’s arms were raised above his head, the Israelites prevailed — and since no one can keep their arms raised for a full day of conflict, Moses’s brother Aaron and his advisor Hur helped him hold up his arms. (The text does not address whether Aaron and Hur needed breaks from holding up their arms to help hold up his.)

No one has a clue of why the Amalekites, who are identified as stalwart enemies of the Israelites (and whose name the current prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has invoked to justify tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza), would have attacked the fleeing former slaves on their way to Sinai. In fact, there don’t seem to be any extrabiblical references to Amalekites at all, even after centuries of scholarly searching. However, an apparently closely related people named the Amorites almost certainly existed, even if there is some mystery surrounding their precise identity.

So do I go with an attack on the tribes and clans of Israel by the Amorites, who I can be pretty sure existed, or the Amalekites, who are the group named in the biblical verses but who might be utterly fictional? (I’ve already dealt with the “miracle” of victory as long as Moses’s arms are held up: It’s a signal to Israelite guerrillas to launch an ambush. The whole point of my book is to retell these narratives without resorting to the miraculous.)

Ultimately, I’ve decided to stick with the Amalekites for this draft. As biblical archaeologists always say, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Maybe someday some inscribed pottery shard or stamped brick will be unearthed that mentions this perpetual enemy, and I’ll breath a sigh of relief.

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But there is one part of writing historical fiction that I do get to participate in. I have to make sure that my characters’ words, and even their thoughts, comport with the limitations of their time. I recently wanted to use the word “magnified” in describing how worries about one’s own life and the lives of one’s family might grow to encompass fears for the entire people of Israel. But did magnification exist in ancient times?

It turns out that it did. There is a famous artifact that is sometimes on display in the British Museum called the Nimrud Lens. It’s a polished disc of quartz crystal that was probably able to magnify an object by two or three times, found on a dig in the territory that used to be Babylon and is now Iraq. No one is quite sure, however, if it was a tool of some sort — either a magnifying lens or a fire lens used to focus sunlight onto kindling — or if it was simply a decorative gemstone. Moreover, it has been dated to the 8th century BCE, far too late for my characters to have had a thought about it.

But there is a reference to a fire disc in an ancient text that is definitely old enough for my protagonists living in the 13th century BCE. It’s called Ishtar and Izdubar, or The Epic of Babylon, and it is apparently an early version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. One verse describes Izdubar sparking a ritual fire:

The King then rises, takes the sacred glass,

And holds it in the sun before the mass

Of waiting fuel on the altar piled.

The cent’ring rays — the fuel glowing gild

With a round spot of fire and quickly spring

Above the altar curling, while they sing!

There is, of course, plenty of controversy about when this was originally written — but it was almost certainly before the 14th Century BCE, meaning that magnification had been around for a while before Ramses II’s time. Of course, common people like my protagonists would never have possessed such a valuable object. But it’s plausible that they might have known about it, just as I know about private jets and marble armrests. 

For me, plausibility is the highest historical standard I can aspire to. That probably wouldn’t do it for Hilary Mantel or Colm Tóibín, but it’s what I’ve got.