100 books like Today's Handbook of Bible Times and Customs

When I pulled this book off my library shelves, I discovered it was still bookmarked with about 40 Post-it flags. This was one of my go-to books for research about life and times in first-century Palestine. The book is divided into sections with labels such as "Family Life," "Religion and Magic," and "Labour and Trade." Each section contains detailed discussions on subtopics related to the main section. For example, under "Family Life," you will find information on clothing, marriage, and divorce, jewelry, food, housing, etc. There are wonderful illustrations and drawings. At the end of each chapter, there is a list of suggested reading and a full bibliography. I spent hours pouring through the resources here when researching my own novel.

Part of my job when writing historical fiction is to know the "lay of the land." That means understanding regional maps, the geography, the climate, and the flora and fauna of the era and location of my story. I turned to this book so often that some of the pages are falling out. Beautifully illustrated with color photos, maps, and drawings, this book describes the history and main features of twelve main geographical regions in the Holy Land and connects them to major events in the Old and New Testaments. It's an accessible resource that functions more as a cultural atlas than simply as a map atlas.

As its title implies, this book is accessible to the entire family and would be a great resource for Sunday school teachers who want to provide their students with a larger understanding of the life and times of peoples in ancient Palestine and Rome. The book is broken down into easy-to-find categories such as "The Home," "Warfare," and "Travel and Communication," to name a few. There are stunning photographs on every page with detailed and clear explanations. The back of the book has timelines of the Bible and a map of Palestine in New Testament times with highlights of key events in the New Testament. There is also an alphabetical index that makes it easy to find information on specific topics.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe context is everything, and this book provides a scholarly discussion of the beliefs and practices of the period that inspired Christianity. In order to understand the teachings of Jesus, it can be extremely helpful to understand where Jesus came from, including the culture he grew up in. This book draws upon recent archaeological findings and translations to discuss in the detail the philosophical and psychological foundations of Jesus' ideas and beliefs. As a contextual biography of Jesus' life, it offers a readable and compelling story of Jesus' world.

A fascinating novel that depicts, in unsettlingly flat style, a historic gang-rape of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers. Cut to the present day and a nameless, obsessive narrator becomes an amateur sleuth, preoccupied with understanding what took place. A brilliant meditation on memory, agency, and our relationship with history.

I absolutely love thrillers and stories filled with suspense.

The problem with that is, all I can ever seem to find are thrillers about washed-up detectives, which are fine and all, but sometimes I want to read a suspenseful story in a different genre. If a story can do that and weave in history, war, and the Bible, I’m in.

Ted Dekker checks every box with A.D. 30, and he’s just a master of storytelling. Dekker keeps you on the edge of your seat and brings together unlikely worlds in unexpected ways that are just so much fun to read.

Even better, this book really made me think about different cultures and the things we all have in common. 

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. If this had happened today it would have been called "ethnic cleansing". Totally debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers stunning archival evidence to show that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population.

My first encounter with Israeli soldiers was in Ramallah during the second intifada. I was alone on the road late one night after curfew when a dozen Israeli soldiers, sons of Russian immigrants, dragged me from my vehicle and put a pistol to my head in a mock execution for their entertainment. My impression of Israeli soldiers was never great after that. Years later I met Miko Peled after reading his book about his time in the Israeli defence force and his relationship with his father, a highly decorated Israeli general who turned from hawk to dove in search of peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians. Miko took up the same struggle after his father's death. We have so far, without success, tried to make a movie of that family struggle.

Students of Middle East studies learn a lot about Ottoman history, specifically about the Ottoman Empire's last decades, before WWI. But historians gave very little attention to the Arab provinces of the empire in comparison to Istanbul and the imperial center. In this book, Campos presented the fascinating case of Ottoman Palestine. Campos shows the most convincing rebuttal for the theories that attributed no Ottoman identity in the peripheries. The fantastic picture of Jerusalem during the last years of the empire can teach us a lot about the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine, the understanding of national and imperial frameworks at the turn of the century, and the optimistic reader may find ideas to deadlock conflicts in the 21st century.

Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani eloquently leads his reader along ancient roads and across Israeli military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and utter.

Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian memory in exile. In probing poets' writings, this work investigates how struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge, language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world, entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold… show more.