Thanks for reading The Queen’s Handmaid! I hope you enjoyed the story.  Read on, for some background and behind-the-scenes info about the setting and the writing of the book!

THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA

Thank you for reading The Queen’s Handmaid. I hope you enjoyed Lydia’s tale. The story you have just finished has been my most ambitious to date, both in scope and in the amount of historical fact wedged between the lines of fiction.

The idea for this book really began with my lifelong curiosity about the magi who came to Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus. Where did they come from? How did they know they sought a king? These are questions I still plan to address in another book, but I found myself wanting to take a step backward in time from that pivotal moment in history, to understand the religious and political climate in which it took place. When I happened upon the little-known fact that Herod the Great was a close friend of Marc Antony’s, and that he made an enemy of Cleopatra by refusing her manipulative advances, I had an episode for fiction that was too good to pass up.

The meeting of Cleopatra and Herod the Great, both incredibly powerful world leaders, became a natural opening for the story. I traveled the length of their relationship, watched empire-shaking events take place over the course of a decade, and arrived at an ending point for my story with the death of Herod’s wife.

LYDIA IS BORN

Now I needed a pair of eyes through which to see these events. Casting about, it soon became clear that most of the major players in this drama were corrupt or dead by the end of it!

So it became necessary to invent a character as my “witness.” I wanted to begin in Egypt, to meet the future Caesar Augustus in Rome, and to travel to Judea to focus on Herod, and thus Lydia was born as a servant in the palace of Alexandria, Egypt. I decided to make Lydia an orphan because I wanted to examine some issues of identity. What is it that makes us worthwhile and valued? Is it our parentage? Our own efforts at pleasing others and making ourselves needed? Our achievements? Or is it something else, a firmer foundation on which we can truly build a life?

A NEW PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

So I had lots of history and a sympathetic character through whom to witness it, but my character herself had no story. All of the considerable and factual excitement was happening around her. She needed something to be busy about herself. It was not long after this point in the story development that a closer reading of the book of Daniel showed me something I had never seen before. The last few chapters of the book are concerned chiefly with “the time of the end” and in chapter 12, verses 4 and 9, the angel Michael, speaking to Daniel, tells him to “roll up and seal” the words of the scroll until the time of the end. What were these words, I wondered? If the reference is only to the book of Daniel itself, then it was apparently unsealed before the time of the end. Is it possible that other words, other scrolls, exist somewhere still sealed with unknown prophecies? It was enough of an intriguing idea that I decided to place these scrolls in Lydia’s hands, and charge her with returning them to the guardians who had lost them generations before.

SO MANY KINGDOMS IN TURMOIL

With the major elements in place, it was time to decide which historical events and characters to include. As I mentioned, this story relies more heavily on true events, of which there were many. The Maccabean revolt that placed the Hasmonean family on the throne occurred 120 years before the start of The Queen’s Handmaid, and eventually that feuding family invited Rome into the conflict in hopes of settling it. Instead, in 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey nearly destroyed Jerusalem and made Israel a client kingdom of the Roman Republic. Pompey restored the Hasmonean Hyrcanus (Alexandra’s father) as High Priest, but placed the Idumean Antipater (Herod’s father) on the throne as king. The Idumeans had been forced to convert and incorporated into Judaism years before but were still resented.

Antipater was a shrewd politician, a friend to Julius Caesar, and he paved the way for his son Herod to eventually become king. Factions within Jerusalem were still supporting the dethroned Hasmoneans, in the person of Hyrcanus’s nephew Antigonus. In 37 BC, with the help of the Romans who had already declared him king, Herod defeated Antigonus in Jerusalem and took Judea for himself, hated by nearly everyone but his close friend Marc Antony.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN ROME…

In Rome, Marc Antony and Octavian, two of the three members of the Second Triumvirate, were falling out. The marriages and divorces outlined in my story are factual, but in the end these alliances solved nothing, and Marc Antony’s growing allegiance to Cleopatra alienated him from Octavian and from Rome. By the summer of 30 BC, he and Cleopatra were both dead at their own hands.

There are too many incidents of history woven through The Queen’s Handmaid to detail here. Suffice it to say that much of the story, like the attempted escape of Aristobolus and Alexandra in coffins, the drowning of Aristobolus in Herod’s swimming pool, the murder of Cleopatra’s various family members, the murder of the Sanhedrin members, the deaths of Cleopatra, Marc Antony, Hyrcanus, Joseph, Sohemus, Caesarion, and Mariamme are all factual. The circumstances of the death of Ptolemy’s brother, king of Cyprus, is factual, but details of his wife’s identity are unknown, and I fictionalized her connection with Judea.

A DEPARTURE FROM HISTORY

I have taken one liberty, which I hope my readers will forgive for the sake of the story. It concerns the timeline. From the start of the story in 39 BC, through to the point where Lydia’s identity becomes known, the story follows a strict timeline. At that point, however, I needed to account for four years until the death of Mariamme. Originally, I wrote a chapter to cover this span, in which Lydia hides out in Rome with Antony’s wife Octavia, biding her time while the major players battle it out. But my editors and I agreed that it slowed the story too much, and needed to be trimmed. So in that section you will find Lydia impatiently waiting for history to unfold, with the amount of passing time unspecified, but nothing like four years implied. During these four years a major earthquake occurred in Judea, but I needed to skip that event as well. By the time of her death, Mariamme had given Herod four children, but in my truncated version, I was only able to fit in two.

I have been privileged to travel to most of the locations in this story—Alexandria, Rome, Jerusalem, Masada. I hope you’ll check out my travel journals to read more about the locations of the book, to see travel photos, and to read stories of my adventures.

BUT WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

And what of the story beyond the story? As hinted in the final pages, after Mariamme’s execution, Herod’s obsession with her led to increasing insanity. Historians tell us that Herod had been a master politician, charming, and well-liked. The madness we see in him twenty-five years later at the birth of Jesus apparently began in this moment, at the death of Mariamme. Not long after, he has Mariamme’s mother, Alexandra, executed as well.

Herod will continue to terrorize Judea for many years to come, with his sister, Salome, at his side, and come to be known as “Herod the Great,” mostly due to his extensive building projects in Judea, including the Temple Mount that still stands today.

Octavian becomes Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of the newly forming Roman Empire. The New Testament contains a confusing mix of Herodians, but of highest interest are probably one of Herod’s sons (by a wife after Mariamme), Herod Antipas, who kills John the Baptist; Herod Agrippa, his grandson, who arrests Peter; and Herod’s great-grandson, Agrippa II, who listens to Paul’s defense in Acts.

So I leave this story in 29 BC with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and zealots arguing and the city in poverty under the reign of a madman. With the prophets silent for centuries and the rabbis despairing that their Redeemer will never come to break their bondage. With a star, rising unknown on the horizon, and the Chakkiym watching in the East. There will still be two decades of sorrow, suffering, and questions. But the darkness will not last forever.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

READ THIS NEXT! 

Will her solitude cost her everything?

For twenty years, Sophia has guarded the Lighthouse of Alexandria, alone in her task and in her heart.

Her pain and loss keep her hidden and isolated, even as the elderly scholars she funds in the famed Library try to coax her into the world.

But Julius Caesar and his Roman legions are bearing down on Cleopatra’s Egypt.

And when a Roman centurion marches his troops into her lighthouse, endangering the city’s best scholars and their secret invention, Sophia’s peace is shattered.

As the historic war erupts, tangling Sophia in its chaos, she finds the Roman centurion instructed to invade her lighthouse is also invading her heart.

Now Sophia must do whatever it takes to keep him out—even if it costs her everything.