A QUICK ANSWER TO A BIG QUESTION
The period I've chosen to set my novels in is full of a bewildering array of important, bizarre and fascinating material. In my first radio interview, I described it as Game of Thrones without the dragons. That was not an exaggeration.
As a result, my readers often ask me some version of the following question: "are these books true history?"
Short answer: yes. Everything is as accurate as it is within my power to make it. If my books were movies, I could start them with "Based on a True Story" or something similar, and that would cover it.
So yes, it is all true. If that is all you were interested in knowing on this topic, this post is now over for you. You don't need to read the longer answer that's going to follow.
Thanks for reading this far!
A LONGER AND MORE WRITERLY ANSWER TO THE BIG QUESTION
Okay, clearly, not everything is true. Using Keziah's Song to illustrate, surely incest was not as rampant in Egypt as I made it out to be, and Zoilus is obvious fiction, and no one used elephants in Israelite wars—right?
Wrong. All those bits were true. Zoilus included. The bizarre Galilean armour plot to kill a general. The Pharisaic denunciation of King Hyrcanus and subsequently violent split between Pharisees and Sadducees. How long it took to travel between places. How war elephants were trained. The lushness of ancient Galilee as compared to Jerusalem. The cultural differences between regions. The starving of a queen. Even the significance of red pottery exposed during Keziah's breakdown. This all comes from ancient literary sources or modern archeological research. My physical travel to these locations was perhaps the least helpful in this regard. Even shorelines today are not what they were twenty-one hundred years ago.
The novels are, however, historical fiction. Keziah's character, for example, is fictional. She was my lens with which to view the era. I made her up. But every part of her story remains as true as I can tell it. The handling of her leprous mother and her emerging puberty scandal is how her era handled these topics. Lutes were the guitar of the era, and women played them as well as men. When she moved to Galilee, her cultural disorientation was an accurate depiction of what such a move would have been like for a young, traumatized Judean.
The same principle holds true for her community in Cana. A winemaker would have a dovecote like Uri and have one for the same reason. Only sizes and construction methods varied by location. In my novel, Uri's dovecote represented an example on the larger end of the spectrum. The glassworks was period-appropriate, as were the woodworking methods, the nature of Saul's trading business and even the geographic layout of Cana itself. It is all true—even the fictional parts.
Jugurtha's character is a unique example of true fiction. We do not know what his actual name was in history. We also do not know if he was one person, a couple of influential people, or perhaps a committee. What we do know is that he (or a group of people) were the advisors that shaped Israel's final break from Seleucid control. King Hyrcanus was no Simon—he needed a lot of help to do what he did.
So Jugurtha is fiction. But he is true fiction. The specifics outlined in the novel for his character fit the known facts about slavery, manumission, ancient bureaucratic processes, ethnic diversity and even the unfolding of Seleucid history. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the historical record where Jugurtha's character fits, so I made up the details. But someone played his role, whatever his exact name and life path might have been.
So, is there anything controversial or unconventional about any of the history in Keziah's Song? Well, you can't claim that kind of perfection even from a history book, let alone a novel. But, as much as possible, my answer is "no." Historical fantasy is fun, but that is not what I'm interested in writing.
The one major point of controversy in the historical record where I had to make a judgment call had to do with the early life of Queen Salome. In my novel, she was nearly thirty when she married the teenage Jannaeus. The historical record offers two explanations. One follows how I laid the story out in my novel. The second conflates the names Salina and Salome and has the same woman playing both roles. In other words, she married Aristobulus, eventually helped kill him with poison, and then married his younger (teenage) brother Jannaeus. There is at least one ancient copy of Josephus that supports this. I chose the version I did for the following reasons:
1) if Aristobulus did marry someone named Salome, that does not make her the Salome that later married Jannaeus. At no point, even in the ancient variant manuscript that offers the name Salome in place of Salina, do any historical records identify one Salome marrying two kings. Salome was a common name for the era.
2) Jannaeus was a high priest. High priests were by law only permitted to marry virgins. So Jannaeus could not have married a widow—not even his brother's widow.
Thus, the version of Salome’s history provided in Keziah’s Song is the most plausible version among the competing accounts of the era.
A NOTE ON TEACHING HISTORY
I'm a Canadian, but half of my pre-university education was in California. American history was an annual study. I did well in school, but I hardly remember a single thing from all the different times I had to study the American Civil War. A bit of that was because I was Canadian, so it was not as personal. But there was also an issue with how it was taught. Too many names and dates. Not enough drama or connection with personal stories. One year we watched the mini-series The Blue and the Gray for history class. That I remembered. Later, when I encountered names and dates, I fit them into my The Blue and the Gray framework and could start to follow the details better. Absorbing diaries from the era would have accomplished the same goal.
A fellow author once told me, "if they had given us historical fiction novels to read in school and then the teacher discussed in class which parts were true and which were not, I would have paid far more attention and remembered a lot more of it." He's right. Humans remember stories. Facts without context, narrative, or emotion lack the hook that good stories provide.
My intention with these novels is to bring to a life a period of history rarely even talked about in school—but one with a profound impact on the fact that we even have schools today.