By Joanne Williamson
A Hittite boy whose family is destroyed by sea raiders is sent to Canaan and ends up caught in the Bible's story of Deborah, Barak, and the battle against Sisera.
Uriah-Tarhund is a young Hittite whose world falls apart in the book's first chapters, when raiders from the sea, the Sea Peoples sweeping the ancient Mediterranean, destroy his home and kill his family. His dying father sends him south to seek refuge, and Uriah's road takes him through the tangled world of the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, and the Israelites during the time of the Judges. He gradually becomes bound up with an Israelite family and their strange, invisible God, and he lands in the thick of a real biblical moment: the war led by the prophetess Deborah and the general Barak against the Canaanite commander Sisera. Written by the author of God King, it uses one boy's wandering to stitch together the peoples of the ancient world around the events of the book of Judges.
This is the book on the shelf that shows how many different peoples shared the ancient world at once, Hittites, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites, so it's a gift for a history unit that wants more than one civilization on the map. Uriah is an outsider to Israel and its God, which makes him a natural guide for a reader meeting the Judges period for the first time: he asks the questions, he's skeptical, he slowly comes to understand. The Deborah-and-Barak storyline gives the book a real battle to build toward, and the geography and cultures are drawn with enough care that a child comes away actually understanding who all these ancient groups were.