My granddaughter, at seven years old, told me she had just read her first chapter book. She bounced up and down as she said, “I want to write books when I grow up!”
I thought to myself, “I thought the same thing when I was her age.”
Since I had just had a brush with breast cancer, my next thought was “If I’m going to do that, I’d better get started.” And I did.
WHY DID I WRITE ABOUT THE GIBEONITES OF JOSHUA 9 & 10?
Annually, I’d been using the chronological read-through-the-Bible plan provided by Dr. Charles C. Ryrie in his Ryrie Study Bible, Moody Publishers, for several years. Every year, I kept stopping and saying to myself there is so much more to the story of the Gibeonites of Joshua 9 and 10.
Their words are quoted, but they have no names. As a people group, they are mentioned only one other time—four hundred years later in the time of David. Who were they? What motivated them to approach Joshua not knowing if they would live or die? What is their story?
And now the sequel and “the rest of the story:”
A Jewish young man suggested a Hebrew word for what I did with the story of the Gibeonites: midrash. He says I filled in the gaps where God’s word is silent. I do not claim it’s inspired, and calling my story midrash would probably be quite presumptuous of me, but God surely enabled me in finding great source material and getting to go to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank to stand on the hill where the Gibeonites stood.
View from Gibeon
Jerusalem on the horizon