The Talpiot Find
Book Details
Author(s)Garvey, John Evan
ISBN / ASIN1475218664
ISBN-139781475218664
AvailabilityIn Stock.
Sales Rank11,784,445
CategoryFiction
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Praise for John Evan Garvey's prequel novel Secreta Corporis:
Prepare to think: The Talpiot Find challenges and entertains the reader with its offbeat approach to the familiar archaeological-find-rewrites-history theme. Readers of the novel will confront the Big Questions in a no-big-deal atmosphere and will find themselves musing more than once "I never thought of it that way before." While following the thought-journey of a very likable protagonist with a bias for humor and irony, readers will explore whether their own world-view is based on a need for comfort and feeling useful, or on a desire for everything to make sense. Anyone with an interest in programs like Science Channel's series Biblical Conspiracies will enjoy The Talpiot Find.
Grad-student Marc isn't hoping for a spectacular archaeological discovery to catapult his career right from the start. He just wants to graduate. His assignment on this dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, near the alleged Jesus ossuary tomb, hardly seems likely to produce anything of note, much less spectacular. An ancient garbage pit had been discovered the previous summer while the dig team excavated a twelfth-century well. Marc is now down in the well methodically uncovering unexceptional pottery sherds and animal bones left over from meals consumed twenty-six centuries ago. But then he finds a human skeleton. When the human bones turn out to be as old as the rubbish around them, the archaeologists wonder if the person, apparently dumped into the pit, was a murder victim. And then Marc finds clay tablets, right next to the skeleton, carbon-dated to the same time frame as the skeleton and the surrounding trash. The tablets turn out to be sort of a spectacular find, a portion of Torah written in ancient Hebrew Canaanite, seventh century BCE. Are they related at all to the skeleton, and the murder? Or is their location just coincidental? What are the tablets doing in a garbage pit? Bearing the tetragrammaton, they should have been placed in a genizah. Why were they discarded? In a garbage pit? Near a corpse? Of a murder victim?
A subplot set in ancient Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah follows a slave manager as he covertly completes tasks given him by Shaphan, the head scribe of the Temple, concerning a mysterious scroll that he must bury and an odd set of clay tablets that he, inexplicably, must discard in a garbage pit.
"A RICH AND DETAILED LANDSCAPE... I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT."
--Michael Nava, author of the Henry Rios novels and The City of Palaces.
(Michael Nava, a successful attorney who studied law at prestigious Stanford Law School, has been highly praised as a novelist by the New York Times and described as "one of our best." Here is his full review of John Evan Garvey's Secreta Corporis: "Secreta Corporis is, in the tradition of The Name of the Rose, a marvelously erudite novel that brings the past to life in all its complexity while engaging the reader's sympathy in the love story of Rolant and Audric, Knights Templar, as they travel in and around the Holy Land at the end of the 12th century. Garvey's book immerses the reader in Rolant and Audric's world while never losing sight of the deep bond between them that is the heart of the story. This is not the cartoon version of the past readers get in so many historical novels but a rich and detailed landscape in which the reader can happily lose him- or herself. I highly recommend it.")
The Talpiot Find, the sequel to Secreta Corporis
Prepare to think: The Talpiot Find challenges and entertains the reader with its offbeat approach to the familiar archaeological-find-rewrites-history theme. Readers of the novel will confront the Big Questions in a no-big-deal atmosphere and will find themselves musing more than once "I never thought of it that way before." While following the thought-journey of a very likable protagonist with a bias for humor and irony, readers will explore whether their own world-view is based on a need for comfort and feeling useful, or on a desire for everything to make sense. Anyone with an interest in programs like Science Channel's series Biblical Conspiracies will enjoy The Talpiot Find.
Grad-student Marc isn't hoping for a spectacular archaeological discovery to catapult his career right from the start. He just wants to graduate. His assignment on this dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, near the alleged Jesus ossuary tomb, hardly seems likely to produce anything of note, much less spectacular. An ancient garbage pit had been discovered the previous summer while the dig team excavated a twelfth-century well. Marc is now down in the well methodically uncovering unexceptional pottery sherds and animal bones left over from meals consumed twenty-six centuries ago. But then he finds a human skeleton. When the human bones turn out to be as old as the rubbish around them, the archaeologists wonder if the person, apparently dumped into the pit, was a murder victim. And then Marc finds clay tablets, right next to the skeleton, carbon-dated to the same time frame as the skeleton and the surrounding trash. The tablets turn out to be sort of a spectacular find, a portion of Torah written in ancient Hebrew Canaanite, seventh century BCE. Are they related at all to the skeleton, and the murder? Or is their location just coincidental? What are the tablets doing in a garbage pit? Bearing the tetragrammaton, they should have been placed in a genizah. Why were they discarded? In a garbage pit? Near a corpse? Of a murder victim?
A subplot set in ancient Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah follows a slave manager as he covertly completes tasks given him by Shaphan, the head scribe of the Temple, concerning a mysterious scroll that he must bury and an odd set of clay tablets that he, inexplicably, must discard in a garbage pit.
More Books in Fiction
