Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) is anything but a literary household name, not even in the richly authored African-American community, except for devoted followers of the Harlem Renaissance movement. But Deborah Plant, who literally saved THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT from permanent obscurity, has given back to the entire world a unique work that fills an important gap in a critical but under-appreciated period of American writing.

Over her 69 years, Hurston was an anthropologist, folklorist, researcher, documentary filmmaker, and writer in multiple fiction and nonfiction genres. Her work illuminated the racially fraught society of America’s early 20th-century deep south, as well as in the wider African-Caribbean diaspora. But with all her other interdisciplinary skills, Hurston was not a theologian in any conventional academic sense. Yet her best-known books were four lengthy novels based on major biblical characters and events, such as Moses and Jonah.

"...a unique work that fills an important gap in a critical but under-appreciated period of American writing.... THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT gives 21st-century readers a fascinating glimpse of a theatrical, exaggerated style that already was old-fashioned when Hurston was in her prime."

In fact, THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT was her last fictionalized biography, left incomplete at her death. It might have been lost forever if a friend hadn’t grabbed the smoldering manuscript from a garbage fire set by workers cleaning up following her death. After that, it lay in obscurity for more than six decades until Plant took up the cause, believing --- rightly as it turns out --- that the work was complete enough to prepare for publication and deserved to be shared. Even so, she wisely prepares readers for the realities of uneven plot movement, chapters of wildly disproportionate length, gaps in the narrative, descriptions that go on far too long, and other deficiencies that are just that: deficiencies, not full-blown failures.

If anything, THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT gives 21st-century readers a fascinating glimpse of a theatrical, exaggerated style that already was old-fashioned when Hurston was in her prime. More than half of the book is filled with extensive conversations and arguments among Herod, his supporters and his adversaries. At times, it reads more like a stage play, or even a film script, where prose segments serve only to join one intense and fervent outpouring of oratory to another.

But what of Herod himself? Almost without exception, anyone who has grown up in mainstream Christian culture knows the Judean Roman-sponsored king only as a monster who decreed the slaughter of countless infant male children, hoping that the baby Jesus would be among them, or for his beheading of John the Baptist.

Hurston intentionally didn’t mention either gory event in THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT. She may not have been a theologian or specialized biblical historian by training, but she was acclaimed even in her own day as a brilliant and insightful researcher. Like a growing number of early-20th-century biblical scholars, she studied the science supporting archaeological discoveries and sophisticated dating, embracing solid new knowledge that put Herod’s death at least half a decade before the birth of Christ.

In her own words, captured by Plant from personal letters to friends, Hurston became “obsessed” with her protagonist, spending years of her life meticulously constructing a reimagined Herod as a capable and often compassionate statesman and leader. She wavered frequently between fiction and biography, finally choosing the former --- a decision that she might well have reversed had she lived to see the work to its conclusion.

But despite the often uncomfortable fit of fiction with fact, especially the liberties taken in building a personality for one of history’s more enigmatic and shadowy figures, THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT pulls together between its covers an admirable sequence of actual historical events.

If magically resurrected today, Hurston’s generous, sensitive and often unconventional Judean king might even have some wisdom to offer today’s bitterly implacable combatants who are currently tearing apart the same small corner of the Middle East where he once ruled more than 2,000 years ago.