Seven days to the Sea
by Rebecca Kohn
Paperback
Price: £7.99
Publisher:Penguin from Gardners Books
Published:20 July 2006
ISBN:0-141-02051-2
GoodBookStall Review:
Some imaginative preachers manage to produce a story-telling sermon, in which a first-person narrative by some biblical character is sustained for some 15-20 minutes. Rebecca Kohn intertwines two such stories over 500 pages! Miriam, Moses’ sister who enterprisingly liaised on the river bank between the Egyptian princess and a required wet-nurse (his mother), tells her story, or rather gives her account of Moses’ story. And that contrasts with the narrative given by his wife, Zipporah, first met at the well in Midian. (Remember Charlton Heston beating off those yobs?). The tensions within each character (the prophetess uneasy with Yahweh’s demands, and the priest’s daughter torn by her two religions) and between the two women (as each tries to support their impossible man!) provide a fascinating exercise for a well-informed imagination. Such a novel is not, in my view, a departure from the word of scripture, but an illumination of it. And the supplementary questions for a reading group are just as challenging as those raised in a conventional bible study!
Reviewer: Mike Topliss (08/11/06)
Some imaginative preachers manage to produce a story-telling sermon, in which a first-person narrative by some biblical character is sustained for some 15-20 minutes. Rebecca Kohn intertwines two such stories over 500 pages! Miriam, Moses’ sister who enterprisingly liaised on the river bank between the Egyptian princess and a required wet-nurse (his mother), tells her story, or rather gives her account of Moses’ story. And that contrasts with the narrative given by his wife, Zipporah, first met at the well in Midian. (Remember Charlton Heston beating off those yobs?). The tensions within each character (the prophetess uneasy with Yahweh’s demands, and the priest’s daughter torn by her two religions) and between the two women (as each tries to support their impossible man!) provide a fascinating exercise for a well-informed imagination. Such a novel is not, in my view, a departure from the word of scripture, but an illumination of it. And the supplementary questions for a reading group are just as challenging as those raised in a conventional bible study!
Reviewer: Mike Topliss (08/11/06)
