Chapter 3 and 4 are out!

If you’re subscribed to my mailing list, you received chapter 3 and 4 yesterday. I try to pick a unique banner every time. I pick the photo and my wife creates the banner. She is doing an amazing job.

I always release them in two ways – as a pdf you can download, and directly in the body of the email. I have noticed two small but annoying glitches:

1) The pdf documents says “chapter 1” and “chapter 2” no matter what. This is a problem with Scrivener, the software I’m writing in. When I ask it to print specific chapters, it just starts the chapter count from 1, no matter what. A bit annoying, but not a disaster.

2) When I paste the chapters into the body of the email, all the cursive text becomes normal. It’s annoying, but not the end of the world. I try to use cursive text whenever a foreign word is used, as in “let’s go, it’s time to pray mincha, the midday prayer”, or when I express a character’s thoughts as direct quotes. So for example “Menachem wondered what it would feel like to jump into the water” vrs “The water looks so cool and refreshing, Menachem thought. I wonder what it would feel like to jump in.”

In chapter 4, the place known as Skhakha, is today known as Qumran, which is an Arabic name given to it in medieval times. As I mention in the chapter, this place was inhabited since the time of Joshua, which is a reference to Joshua 15:61.

The book “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Study of Scripture” by Magnus Riska, published by the Caspari Center was a great help in writing this chapter.

In addition, I should probably also mention some of the resources that I’ve used throughout the book generally, and that have helped a lot:

-The Bible (duh).

-Josephus Flavius “The Wars of the Jews”. Most descriptions of wars and battles etc are following Josephus’ descriptions – he is the only eye witness who wrote it down. Even though I have added my own fictional characters into the story, the arch story of the wars and battles follows Josephus’ narrative.

-The academic works on early Christian Jews by Dr. Ray Pritz and Rev. Risto Santala. Their insights have enriched me a lot, and I highly recommend them. Santala’s work is even available for free online, as far as I know.

Now I am working on preparing chapter 5 and 6… my wife has already made the banner artwork for it, so now I feel pressured to get it done… 😉