By Joanne Williamson
A young Egyptian prince, cheated of the throne, is swept from Egypt to Jerusalem and finds himself inside the Bible's account of Hezekiah, Isaiah, and the siege that God turned back.
Taharka is the youngest, least-considered son of the Pharaoh, and when his father dies he expects to be named the next god-king of Egypt. Instead the throne is seized by his older brother, and Taharka is bundled out of the country to keep him from becoming a rival. His journey lands him in the middle of one of the great crises of the ancient world: the Assyrian empire under Sennacherib is on the march, swallowing kingdom after kingdom, and it has set its sights on Jerusalem, where King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah are holding out. Taharka witnesses the siege from inside the city and sees its astonishing end, when the vast Assyrian army is struck down and the city is spared. It's built directly on the biblical account in 2 Kings and Isaiah, told through the eyes of a boy who begins as an outsider to the God of Israel.
For a homeschool unit that pairs the ancient world with Scripture, this is a clean, exciting way to make a Bible story feel like world history, because that's exactly what it is. Williamson threads a made-up boy through real events, so your child meets Hezekiah and Isaiah not as flannel-board figures but as rulers in a terrifying political moment, and the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem lands as the climax of a genuine adventure. It moves at a good clip, the geography is vivid, Egypt, the sea, the siege lines outside Jerusalem, and Taharka's outsider's-eye view lets a reader ask the same questions he does about the God the people of Judah trust.