Book Review; Destiny's Call

NOTE: I was not paid to review this book. It is an unbiased and objective review. If you have a book with Jewish or Israel related content and would like me to write a review, contact me for details of where to send me a review copy of the book.

Book Review: Destiny's Call

I received the book, "Destiny's Call" by Ben-Tzion Spitz a while back. Destiny's Call, Book One - Genesis is a book in the category called "Biblical Fiction".

Biblical fiction is taking characters out of the Bible and creating stories around them. Biblical fiction is a tricky category for a religious audience. I know many people who are opposed to the idea of biblical fiction, and rate it almost near heretical levels. Other people, on the other hand, are fine with it. The reason why some oppose biblical fiction is because by creating stories around the characters of the Bible, basically humanizes them and endows them with the same faults, the same desires, the same challenges that we face and experience.

Destiny's Call is a small book. It has one story per parsha from Sefer Breishis, and each story is just a few pages long. At the end of each story is a bibliography of sources from where Spitz created the details of the story. At the end of the book is about 10 pages of questions for discussion based on the topics embellished on through the book. And after the questions is an essay explaining why he wrote the book in this style.

The book itself contains fascinating stories. Spitz is a talented story-teller. When I read the parsha, I imagine a bit how an incident might have developed. Spitz really weaves an entire tale to describe the situation and it all makes so much sense and fits so well together. And it reads like a great story, fiction or not. Of course, whether it is accurate or not is irrelevant, as it is Biblical Fiction, and not being sold as historical truth, but it does jog a persons imagination to picture a bit more fully the setting in which the stories happened.

The book is a fairly quick read. The stories are short and interesting. A person could spend much more time concentrating on the questions for discussion then he might on the stories themselves.

Personally, I enjoyed all the stories, but I particularly enjoyed the story entitled "Joseph's Egyptian Attorney". This was the story for Parshat VaYeishev, and it describes how Joseph might have been tried for his "attack" on the wife of Potiphar.

Destiny's Call is a fairly light book, an easy read, and a good book to read with one's children. It gives one a picture of what might have been, in a fuller sense of the picture, and encourages one to try to imagine the incidents of the Bible as if they were actually happening.

NOTE: I was not paid to review this book. It is an unbiased and objective review. If you have a book with Jewish or Israel related content and would like me to write a review, contact me for details of where to send me a review copy of the book.

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