Ideological structure, her ninth grade teacher had called it years ago, just before using the term in a test question.

Just beyond, her gaze settled briefly on a jutting slab of ink black basalt-the famous architectural apposition of Darkness against Light. She noted again its fluid shape, meant to evoke the ancient jar lids that once sealed the beloved scrolls now housed inside. Her gaze rose into the cobalt blue Judean sky where the Shrine’s celebrated dome thrust its odd, milky white swirl. You’ve been here a dozen times.Īs if to punctuate her statement, she glanced about the monument.

Why, Hadassah, this is the Shrine of the Book. Despite the wrinkles that had lately etched their way across his face, she could still recognize the sly smile that always signaled his toying with her.

The old man turned shakily upon his cane, paused at the top step and looked toward his daughter while still panting to catch his breath. While it's partly due to the deep, beautiful writing and to my previous experience with the novel, it's also partly because reading this book has again shown me something so important about myself. I'm not okay with genocide.It may be additionally ironic that I still consider this work of Biblical Fiction to be one of my all-time favorites. Of course, I know why, but I'm not okay with it. An Amalekite is out to exterminate Jewish (Hebrew) men, women, and children-a mission stemming from a time when Israelites (Hebrews) were out to exterminate Amalekite men, women, and children.Yet, only one of these extermination missions is really painted in a negative light here. And despite what Hadassah/Esther comes to feel for the king, this novel isn't a romance.While I in no way need this to be a romance or a fairy tale, one of its key ironies didn't strike me earlier in my life, but it strikes me now. And Tenney's intent stands out in the spiritually driven metaphors that speak to close relationship with a King.Even so, the metaphors will never make a hero out of the cruel, vulnerable, weary, changeable man of excess and war, Xerxes. It has so much of what makes historical/period reads engrossing to me. The flawed heroine's journey in this novel that's part thriller, part fictional memoir based on the biblical book of Esther was a needed balm for me during a dark season in my life.Reading the novel for the second time years later, I again have found it to be a rich, nuanced, violent, poignant, deftly written story. Nevertheless, her ascension to the throne turns out to be a timely rise to meet impending danger in Hadassah: One Night With the King by authors Tommy Tenney and Mark Andrew Olsen.The first time I read this book over a decade ago, it became one of my all-time favorites. Perhaps a young Jewish woman, a peasant in Susa, should have been the most unlikely possibility, the most unlikely candidate to be the next Queen of Persia.

Tommy tenney one night with the king