Customer Reviews

Zipporah, Wife of Moses: A Novel (Canaan Trilogy)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This book was much better than Sarah, the first book in the Canaan Trilogy. Zipporah was a much more sympathetic character than Sarah, and Moses more so than Abraham.

Zipporah was a proud woman who knew her destiny with a defiant certainty. She knew her role besides Moses, even before they had met. Their courtship is passionate (apparently Moses was a sexy thing) and Moses is accepted into Zipporah's family with great trust and love. Her father, Jethro, is a wise and influential figure throughout the novel. It is easy to see where Zipporah gets her wisdom and patience.

When Moses realizes his mission to free the Hebrews, Zipporah is his most trusted advisor, his strength and encouragement, though no one would accept her as anything other than a stranger because of her dark skin. She bears the weight of Moses' doubts, his troubled past, and his lack of confidence. Moses becomes the hero he is because of Zipporah's love and trust in Yahweh. However, the Hebrews will always be slaves in their hearts, and once they are free they cannot accept their lives or Zipporah's influence. It is a tragic conclusion to what should have been a glorious liberation.

This novel was much more emotional and well-written than Sarah, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series, in hopes that Halter's momentum continues.

To see my opinion of the entire trilogy, view my review of Lilah.

Old Testament women certainly deserve biographies, but with information so scanty their stories will have to be imagined in fiction. Marek Halter makes a good try.

He speculates that as adoptees, Zipporah and Moses were attracted, or maybe fated. He also poses that Jethro, Zipporah's father belies the patrifocal stereotypes of desert patriarchs.

Halter illustrates Jethro's caring for his blood and adopted daughters by Jethro's allowing them to chose their husbands and a lack of any mention of paying another family to take them (i.e. dowery). If a suitor is a king, Jethro accepts a daughter's saying no.

It may be his love/respect for his daughters, and this lack of pressure on them to leave, that gives Zipporah the strength to resist marriage until Moses commits to returning to Egypt as she feels he must do. Once in Egypt, Zipporah maintains her dignity, perhaps because her adoptive father respected her in a way that Aron and Miriam (siblings to Moses)never could.

Once Moses leads the slaves to freedom, Halter gives practical examples of their ingrained slave mentality. They cannot manage the details of their lives and come to Moses for the petty grievances against each other. They can be an unruly mob... so unruly that they can trample the weak.

I don't know the accuracy of this account of the death of Zipporah and their sons. She and the sons do disappear from the texts. Halter gives a plausible story as to how it may have happened.

There is a lot of potential to this book. It is heavy in dialog, which I felt was stilted, but then, how else to frame the speech of such hallowed Biblical figures? The unrealistic dialog could be an artifact of what might be a second language for the author.

I applaud Marek Halter with his courage to delve into the unknown. I think that this book was well written and gave a well rounded view of the times. I am very happy that this book did not give into the "bibilical storytelling" that we have all become used to but instead gave a voice to passions, values, and predjudces that we still find ingrained in today's society. I will continue to read his books and am sorry for those who do not recognize this for the gem that it is.

...but this novel with help you understand ancient Biblical figures if you are. I stumbled upon this book in a bookstore and read it in a day. This book is at once heart-breaking and inspiring, even though there are a few awkward passages on the part of the writer. None-the-less, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and will read the other Cannaan trilogy books.

I loved Halter's Book " Sarah" and immediately ordered Zipporah when I finished it. I was bored and practically forced myself to finish the book. Story line was weak and the characters were not defined well enought to like them. I will try another of Halter's books when available.

Marek Halter's biblical fiction promises a lot, but the executions are disappointingly ingenuous, not rich in style or content, and in my opinion not very stimulating....a sort of quick read combination of fictionalized history and bodice-tearing romances. I think Zippie deserves better.

The topic of Zipporah, Moses' black African wife, fascinated me, so this book supplied a want. What we know from the Bible is Moses married a black African woman and had two sons (Gershom and Eliezer) by her. She and her sons pretty much disappear thereafter.

That could be the basis for a happy story, a heroic story - heck, even a comedy. Author Marek Halter, however, inexplicably chose to turn what might have been "Much Ado About Nothing" into "King Lear meets Titus Andronicus".

On the one hand, you have Halter's excellent story telling ability. On the other hand, you feel that Halter perversely abuses his protagonist, Zipporah. Halter breathes considerable life into Zipporah, a sensitive Dickensian underdog character, and then, instead of exalting her with triumph for her moral integrity - as Dickens would do - Halter instead has her husband abandon her, destroys her children in front of her eyes, and disembowels her. If you feel there is something grossly perverted with Halter's conception, then you and I concur.

This Marek Halter story fails aesthetically on multiple levels.

1. Rather than a loyal submissive wife (standard for that time, I'm surmising), Zipporah is an endearing shrew.
2. Zipporah's death and the death of her two sons was totally unnecessary; indeed, the unnecessary bloodiness reminds you of the black comedy of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
3. Moses is depicted as vacillating and weak, when in fact he was a prince of Egypt who "was trained in all the wisdom of Egypt, was great in his words and works", and had encountered God personally.
4. The idea that Moses would knuckle under to vicious peer pressure and unceremoniously dump his loyal wife is totally incongruent with Moses' known character and his boldly confronting a ruler of a great kingdom. Indeed, if any man would do such a thing we would call him, and rightly so, a despicable coward.
5. Aaron and Miriam, Moses' brother and sister, behave more like characters from some sick reality show than devout godly souls.
6. Likewise, Zipporah's murder by her own family when she returns broken-hearted to Midian - again, this is in such bad taste that it boggles the mind.

NB. There is no biblical basis for any of those authorial choices. None. Whatever.

I feel Marek Halter succumbed to the trite (but effective) authorial subterfuge of killing a protagonist to deliver cheap drama, rather than working drama into the story via well-conceived imaginative plot elements.

I will say this for this story. It left me wanting to write my own improved version. Because the story leaves you feeling that several really noble souls have been gratuitously, sickeningly slandered by Marek Halter. Few books affect you that strongly.

I do not recommend this book.

This is just a very good story - it is an easy read and something you wont want to put down. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read the entire thing in less than 2 days.

Unlike the other reviewers, I did not expect or care if this book faithfully portrayed the story of Moses and his wife. This book is a work of fiction not fact and never claims to be anything else. If you want to know what the Bible says read the Bible. If you want an enjoyable novel that is, for the most part, captivating then read this book. I give the book four stars instead of five because it is a bit dry at times.

I was very excited to read this book when it came out, as I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Sarah...but I was severely disappointed. While as a novel it wasn't terrible, it veered so far from even the little bit we know about the wife of Moses that it mostly served to frustrate me. The whole story was basically made into a story of race, and I believe that Halter could have written an interesting novel about this woman without trying to make her tale more "exciting".