Читать книгу Living without Justice - Loren R. Fisher - Страница 5

I am indebted to my teachers, my colleagues, and to my students. My teachers taught me to work with ancient texts and to use multiple tools for deciphering and understanding them. My colleagues helped me to evaluate my findings. Working in this way I experienced many changes in my thinking along an exciting and adventurous road. My students reminded me that they loved their freedom. They were all different. Their strengths and interests were varied, and they resisted any attempt to mold them into a school of thought. They inspired me to follow them.

Stefan Heym’s novel, The King David Report (1973), fascinated my students, my family, and me. This novel earned a place in the bibliography for my class on The History of Israel. Many times, my students commented on the importance of this novel and suggested that we needed a few more. I thought about their suggestions and decided to write a novel about scribal life in the time of King David. Living without Justice is the third historical novel in my trilogy about the scribes of Israel. In the first novel, The Jerusalem Academy, I wrote an Afterword, which discusses the importance of historical novels for historical studies. When history is only the stage for a novel, that novel is not a historical novel. An authentic historical novel uses real people and fictional people; both are necessary. Also the places are real, and the events are actual occasions. In addition, fictional elements are essential in narrating the response of the people as they experience these events.

My wife, Jane, is an excellent writer and editor. She helps me not only with my manuscripts, but she listens to my discussions of my work that unduly dominate our table talk.

I want to thank K. C. Hanson, my editor at Wipf and Stock Publishers, whose keen insight springs from the fact that he is also a proven scholar of Ancient Mediterranean Literature.

Loren R. Fisher

Medford, Oregon

7 December 2011