By Zora Neale Hurston and Introduction by Deborah G. Plant
Amistad, 2025
Hardback: $28.99
Genre: African American Fiction, Historical Fiction
Reviewed by Sharony Green
Zora Neale Hurston, the African American anthropologist-folklorist-novelist best known for being a core member of the Harlem Renaissance, was fixated on one thing in her final years: writing a book about Herod the Great. The general public, at last, has a chance to read her novel about this Biblical character. Scholar Deborah Plant has edited the remains of Hurston’s manuscript, which was saved alongside other documents that were accidentally burned following Hurston’s death as a penniless writer in 1960. When coupled with excerpts from Hurston’s letters to friends and associates, Plant offers what seems to be one celebrated author’s most passionate writing.
Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, up the road from Tuskegee, Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, the country’s first incorporated all-black town. Her keen observational skills were initially honed as she eavesdropped on the stories of the adults gathering in front of her town’s general store. She also listened to her mother’s Sunday School lessons and sermons in the Baptist church where her father served as pastor. But Hurston was barely a teenager when she grew estranged from her father after he quickly remarried following her mother’s death.
Her interest in Herod may have been, as Plant suggests, Hurston’s attempt to sort through her past. Indeed, Hurston began to wander and eventually arrived in New York, where she became Barnard’s first black graduate and, next, a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she worked with the German Franz Boas, the Father of Modern Anthropology and a man she referred to as “Papa.” She collected folk songs, sayings, dances, and stories in the South as well as in the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Haiti. However, the career of a politically conservative and complex Hurston, a two-time Guggenheim winner, began to falter as she became more vocal about social issues and imperial nations during the Second World War. She was nearly driven to suicide following her 1948 arrest on false charges. Her passport proved she was in Honduras when an alleged unspeakable act was said to have occurred.
As early as 1945, Hurston told photographer-writer Carl Van Vechten, a white friend from her days in Harlem, about how much she was “burning” to write a story about Herod, King of Judea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. She saw linkages between geopolitics in her day and the geopolitical scene in Herod’s day. Hurston had unhappily observed Western imperialists vying for power amid concern for, among other things, the future of Asia. “There was indeed a conflict in Judea, not between Herod and the people, but the eternal struggle which is inevitable in every nation between change and tradition,” she wrote in the preface for Herod. An aside: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declined her invitation to write this preface even though she was among the scholars who doubted the Book of Matthew’s account of Herod giving any orders to slaughter all male children living in or near Bethlehem under the age of two years old in his attempt to kill Jesus, a proclaimed Messiah. Her novel asked for more contemplation on Herod’s truest cultural and political legacy.
Over seventeen chapters, some curiously shorter than others, and an Epilogue, the reader sees Herod’s power grabs. Hurston vividly writes about his encounters with well-known historical actors such as Marc Antony as well as Herod’s troubled marriages. Perhaps her ongoing longing for companionship following three failed marriages may have also roused her skillful and often witty descriptions of Herod as a handsome man for whom women swooned.
A reader who needs to brush up on Old Testament stories may want to consult Plant’s commentary at the end of Herod before reading this novel. Doing so enables one to place the book in the context of Hurston’s other writings. Indeed, Plant, who earlier edited Hurston’s posthumously published book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” which addresses the outcomes of Hurston’s 1927 interviews with the last known survivor of the Middle Passage, indicates that Herod should be seen alongside Hurston’s 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, which recasts the story of the Old Testament character. As true in that novel and her other work, Herod showcases Hurston’s often-lyrical storytelling as sometimes heard in the South she loved.
Sharony Green, Professor of History at the University of Alabama, wrote The Chase and the Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and is presently exploring Hurston’s fascination with the British during her final troubled years.
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