As a historical novelist, I’ve been able to time-travel to many different times and places. One of my favorite eras to visit has been Biblical Jerusalem, and I discovered one research rabbit hole after another when I was studying this fascinating era in history.
The idea for Woman of Stones came after I read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. I was so fascinated by her retelling of a famous Bible story from a woman’s point of view that I wanted to do something similar. I decided to tell the story of the woman caught in adultery because that tale has one of the most important lessons we can learn: that those without sin should cast the first stone.
To say that I knew next to nothing about the Biblical era would be an understatement, and before I could even conceptualize the story I needed to learn more about that place and that time. Before long, I was spending hours at a stretch reading and taking notes.
I’ve written before about research rabbit holes. Over the years, I’ve come to think of them as one of the great joys of writing historical fiction, especially for a history buff like me. Writing Woman of Stones required me to immerse myself in an ancient world, and at first my research was entirely practical. I took notes about the geography, the architecture, the political landscape, and the daily rhythms of life. I learned about religious practices and music and food. The more I learned about life then, the more extraordinary it became.
I had endless questions. How did people move through the crowded streets? What would they have smelled as they walked through the marketplaces? What kinds of conversations unfolded in courtyards and narrow alleys? How did the geography influence the lives of the people who called the city home? At some point, my research stopped feeling like preparation for a novel and became an education in its own right.
Through historical fiction, we can imagine people who once lived ordinary lives in places that now belong to history. As historical novelists, it’s our job to bring those people to life. Our past was someone else’s present. The people of ancient Jerusalem, or of any other time, didn’t think of themselves as historical figures; they were simply living their lives. The more I researched the era, the more fascinated I was by those daily lives that, on the surface at least, seem so different from our own. Although the vast majority of my research didn’t make it into the novel, the information still formed my own background knowledge, and that knowledge became the foundation beneath the story. Here’s some of what I learned about what they ate in Biblical Jerusalem, and here’s what I learned about daily life in Biblical Nazareth, which also features in the story.
History Lives in the Sensory Details
It’s so easy to focus on the monumental architecture such as Herod’s great Temple or the imposing stone gates. Still, grand structures alone don’t make a scene come alive. While digging through reports on daily life in ancient Judea, I stopped looking at the stones (although stones are important to the story, hence the title) and started searching for the real city beneath. I learned about things as varied as the extraordinarily crowded streets, which I didn’t expect from an ancient city, the overwhelming smell of charcoal fires needed for baking bread, and the olive oil lamps lingering in the cramped alleys. I also learned about the constant soundtrack of grinding stones processing grain, the bleating of livestock kept in ground-floor courtyards, and the murmur of multilingual crowds. There’s too much more for me to list here, but I found life in ancient times fascinating.
Geography Dictates Conflict
I spoke about this in my post about how to write about place. The ancient city and its surrounding areas weren’t a flat canvas, and the geography includes a high ridge defined by steep ravines such as the Kidron, the Tyropoeon, and the Hinnom Valley. This means that moving through ancient Jerusalem was a workout. Moving from the Lower City up to the Temple Mount meant climbing steep, stepped streets flanked by crowded, terraced homes. The geography divided people socially and economically as much as it did physically. The wealthy lived in spacious homes on the upper hills catching the breeze while the working poor were packed into the crowded lower slopes.
If you want to think about this for your own writing, study your setting meticulously. When you understand the physical elevation and spatial limits of a city, your story automatically gains friction. The terrain dictates how tired your protagonist is, who lives next door to whom, and where a secret meeting can actually take place without being overheard.
Day-to-Day Life
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about ancient Jerusalem is what happened below street level or on top of the roofs. Whenever I study an era in order to write a historical novel, I’m always most fascinated by people’s daily lives no matter which era of history I’m studying. Life inside the mud brick homes was tight. Roofs were considered living spaces and places to dry flax and catch a rare quiet moment. Beneath the city lay a subterranean world of aqueducts, ancient water channels, and carved limestone cisterns designed to keep a mountain city alive through dry summers. It’s all kind of cool to learn about, really.
Respecting the Realities Behind the Myth
Researching a place with as much historical weight as ancient Jerusalem forced me to strip away modern assumptions so that I could respect the reality of how people actually cooked, washed their clothes, stored their water, and navigated their political tensions. As historical fiction writers, our job isn’t just to report where the walls stood, but also to walk those ancient streets alongside our characters so that we can bring our readers along on the journey.
It’s been a few years since I wrote Woman of Stones, and I don’t remember every source I consulted. I’m not even sure I still have the notebooks with my color-coded notes. But I do remember the joy of discovering something unexpected, which is a feeling I experience often when I’m researching any period in history. History is always more complex and interesting once I start digging into the history books, the articles, and the cultural research. What always comes back to me, no matter how many different eras I study, is that people have always been inherently the same. It’s like that old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you’d like to read my interview with ManyBooks about Woman of Stones, you can find that here.