N.A. Hart's Blog

You don’t have to have a stunning display with professional sets and lights and live animals to tell the story of Jesus well. You just need a few volunteers willing to corral all the participants, and actors willing to put on a costume and go in front of the congregation. We’ve all got a role to play in telling the wonderful story of the coming of Christ into the world, no matter our age or physical or intellectual disability.

These five plays take no more than 10 minutes to perform, so they fit well within a Sunday morning service. They tell the Christmas story in slightly different ways, but each is biblical, and requires little memorization and few rehearsals. Three plays were designed to be performed in person, and two virtually, but there are tips for how to make each work in the other performance style.

Jesus’s Family Tree

Jesus’s Family Tree is inspired by Isaiah saying the Messiah will come from a shoot of Jesse’s stump. We meet a number of people in Jesus’s family tree: Rahab, Ruth, David, Zechariah, and Mary. At the end, the narrator will note that now we have all been adopted into God’s family, so we are all part of Jesus’s family tree, and invites non-speaking costumed characters (like the shepherds, sheep, Magi) to come forward.

A Message! A Message!

In A Message! A Message! we follow the angels as they travel from heaven to earth to give messages from God to Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds.

What Are You Waiting For?

What Are You Waiting For? is a newscast. A roving reporter asks people what they are waiting for and, in the process, finds all about this Messiah who is about to be born. The reporter meets Isaiah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, sheep, and Magi.

Do Not Be Afraid

Do Not Be Afraid is the most narrator-heavy play. The narrator talks about all the times the people in the story of the birth of Jesus were told not to be afraid. Interspersed with this narration are actors giving the same line: “Do not be afraid.”

The Light to Live By

The Light to Live By focuses on John 1:1-14. The words are beautiful, but the concepts can be difficult for many people to grasp, so this pageant includes a lot of questions from the actors. The story focuses on the idea that Jesus has moved into our neighborhood, and that he is the light that we live by.

33 pages

8.5″ x 11″

$4.99

Available as a digital download.

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[image error]From The Hidden Crown, PBS series, 2013
Neither the armor nor the crown are correct to Saul’s time period, but the mood is perfect.

“It wasn’t much of a crown, but it was the only one he had, taken from the bounty of his first defeat of the Ammonites, back in the days when He was happy. If He had let Saul keep the bounty from King Agag, he wouldn’t be stuck with Nahash’s battle back-up; he’d have the most impressive solid gold, jewel-encrusted crown. Not thin gold hammered over copper and dotted with gems like this piece of second-rate metalwork.”

This references two of Saul’s battles. 1 Samuel 11 tells of his first victory after being quietly anointed king, against King Nahash of Ammon. And 1 Samuel 15 details the victory that will haunt him, when he wasn’t sufficiently obedient to what the Lord had told him to do, and Samuel told him that the Lord had already found someone else, someone better to be king. The He is the Lord, but at this point Saul can only refer to the Lord with bitterness, which I try to convey via italics.

[image error]From Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity
The Clothing of the Middle and Lower Classes

“Everyone was watching Abner lead a boy through the room. His tunic was of the plainest brown wool, stained, rough, and threadbare in spots, as if it had been handed down through many sons. He did not act like a servant, and he definitely did not look like a tribal visitor, but Abner was leading him. And then it dawned on Saul: the boy was the singing shepherd.”

This paragraph from Chapter 2 of The Giant Slayer shows a couple of storytelling assumptions I make:

“Many brothers” Whether you take the 1 Samuel 16:10-11 number of 8 sons or the 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 number of 7 sons — that’s a lot of brothers for David’s clothes to go through before getting to him!

plain, stained, threadbare In the Bible, David insists that he and his family are lowly, but the Talmud and other researchers think this is an exaggeration. I like the idea of taking David at face value, so I kept them as a family that is richer in sons than in goods. This may also have been inspired by the two large families I’m familiar with: my mother was one of 12 kids, and my dad one of 7 (6 of them boys). My mother’s father was a factory worker and a farmer and a fixer of electronics; my father’s father was a minister. Everyone worked hard from a young age and resources were just spread thinner.

A musician. All this buildup for a lousy musician? Not a witch or a healer who knew of some rare herbs nobody had tried yet? “A singing shepherd?”

The servant’s face was transformed. “My lord, when he sings, you forget all your troubles. Every new moon feast, he sings songs of praise that get the old men leaping up and raising their hands. His songs of lament get everyone weeping.”

Click through to the video of someone playing a replica of a biblical-era lyre–they are plucked and strummed with two hands simultaneously (and look very different than the image above)!

[image error]The cliffs near Michmash
https://www.bibleplaces.com/michmash/

Saul angled his head nearer to Jonathan. “Remember what the Lord did to the Philistines at Michmash?”

“Made them panic until they were swinging their swords like blind men trying to kill bees.” Jonathan laughed quietly. “How could I forget?”p.

1 Samuel 14 tells the story of Jonathan’s famous exploits, climbing a cliff to get to the Philistine outpost and setting off a satisfying victory for the Israelites–until David and Goliath, one of the most heroic battle stories of Saul’s kingship.

This is also a good time to talk about swords.

[image error]Late Bronze Age Khopesh swords
http://www.bronsereplika.no/BA%20Sword%20Tell%20Apek.html

Until David was king of both Judah and Israel, the Israelites did not have what we think of as a standing army, and even then the army probably didn’t supply weaponry. Whenever they went to battle, the leader (whether prophet or king) would travel around, rousing people to the cause, and soldiers (aka farmers and shepherds) would have taken whatever weapon, shield, and armor the family owned. In fact, in that famous battle at Michmash, Saul and Jonathan were the only two Israelite soldiers who had a sword or a spear (1 Samuel 13:22).

You’ll notice that, while only the king and his first-born son had swords, many Philistine soldiers did (although the Lord took away that technological advantage).

Any swords would have been made of bronze, because that was the metal available to Israelites. According to 1 Samuel 13:19-22, the Philistines has a lock on blacksmithing, and therefore on iron, and they wouldn’t make swords or spears for their enemies (and overcharged for sharpening farm implements). Bronze isn’t the strongest metal, and doesn’t hold an edge as well as iron, but it was what they had. As a result, their swords would have been not much more than two feet long. Their best weapons would have come from plunder when they defeated better-equipped armies–the more they won, the better equipment they’d have.

Swords used in the region at that time would have been khopesh swords from Egypt (like in the illustration above), straight by the handle and then curved half-way up, that would have been sharpened on the outside edge. These would be useful for hooking the arm or leg of an enemy soldier or their horse, and then cutting. There may also have been sickle swords that have the same shape but have the sharp edge on the inside. Straight swords with edges on both sides were also found in the region, like the one below.

[image error]Near Eastern short sword c. 1500 – 1000 BCE; 12½ in (32.3 cm)
https://owlcation.com/humanities/A-Visual-History-of-Ancient-Egyptian-and-Mesopotamian-Swords-and-Blades

I’ve been sharing research images for The Giant Slayer on Facebook (and gathering them on Pinterest) to help curious and studious readers get even more accurate in their imaginings about life 3,000 years ago.

This post collects all my notes about Chapter One: Bethlehem. Late summer, 1028bce in one handy location.

David carried himself as stiff and straight as a dried stalk of white squill…

Page 1

All his brothers had gotten to spend their twelfth year at Father’s side. This was supposed to be his year.

Page 1

This idea was based on a sermon I heard that talked about how, for a boy, that year between 12 and 13 was an important one. It was his last year before he’d take on a status that wasn’t quite man, but wasn’t boy anymore, either. There was no formal education with a school that children would go to at this point in Israelite history, so education would be done by the parents, in the course of doing the work the children would be engaged in.

The trip to Uncle Jonathan’s took twice as long as usual.

Page 1

Later in David’s life, when he is king of all Israel, we get this in 1 Chronicles 27:32, “Jonathan, David’s uncle, was a wise counselor to the king, a man of great insight, and a scribe,” so I planted the seeds of that relationship from his childhood, and made Uncle Jonathan a wise advisor already in his boyhood.

“I like to mix thorns in with the mud. Make it less pleasant for whatever dug this in the first place.” Uncle Jonathan pointed at a pile of thornbush several paces away. “Your first job is to break off the thorns, and then gather them and put them in this slurry. Use the fat end of my staff and your feet.”

Page 1

[image error]poterium spinosum from https://galeri.uludagsozluk.com/r/poterium-spinosum-390626/

Thornbush is the descriptive name I give to a very common plant in wilder parts of Israel, Poterium spinosum (also called Sarcopoterium spinosum or Thorny burnet). I can just imagine stomping on that and getting a thorn in the ankle (which is what happens to our hero, and doesn’t help his emotional state when he’s already feeling rejected by his father).

“You’re the youngest of eight sons. Stop acting like you’ll ever have anything of your own…. Stop trying to prove that you’re better than your brothers. After I’m gone, you’ll be in one of their households….If you don’t stop showing off, I wouldn’t blame them for pulling a Joseph on you and selling you to slave traders.”

Page 2

David is hurt and angered by these words from his father, but the thing is, according to the customs of the time, his father is correct. The youngest son had little standing in the family, and the sooner David gets used to that, the better. Moreover, this family has no patience for the youngest to rise above his siblings. In fact, it feels wrong when he does. Israelite society is not individualistic, so rising above the group and “being a star” is not a value for them like it is for us. This also sets the reader up for understanding how Jesse could not immediately send for David when Samuel asks to see his sons: even if he didn’t actually forget about David, this Jesse could plausibly avoid calling the little show-off down from the hills for fear that he’d overshadow his older brothers yet again.

Also, there is debate whether David is the youngest of 7 or of 8 sons. Here is the list of children of Jesse and Nitzevet (the Bible does not name the wife of Jesse, but the Talmud does, so I went with that name):

EliabAbinadabShimeaZeruiah (daughter and mother of David’s bff Joab)Abigail (daughter)NethanelRaddaiOzemElihu (this brother is not listed in all genealogies of David)David

The issue lies in two passages of Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:10-11 which describes the anointing, and Samuel rejecting 7 sons of Jesse and asking for any more and Jesse admits that the youngest is in the hills with the flock, making David the youngest of 8, and 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 which names only 7 sons of Jesse. So what do we do with that? I don’t know. Perhaps one brother died before the writer of Chronicles made his record. But in any case, I chose to go with the 1 Samuel number.

The hills were the one place David was supposed to be free from his older brother. Eliab always said he’d go to Sheol before he’d set foot there again.

Page 5

Sheol is the pit; a place where the dead go, deep in the earth. At this time in the biblical literature, sheol is not the same as the Greek understanding of Hades or the Christian understanding of Hell. It is a place of darkness, of bleakness, where the dead are.

It was never smart to keep Eliab waiting, so he tore down the hill, leaping over rocks and skidding on loose sand and gravel, his tunic flapping between his legs.
“Don’t get your loincloth in a bunch,” Eliab said.

Page 6

The basic item of clothing would be a tunic: two rectangles or squares of cloth sewn up the sides, leaving arm holes and a neck hole. My theory is that they often wouldn’t have sewn sleeves; that way, the tunics could have been passed among family members of different sizes and you wouldn’t be cutting away any of the precious fabric you’d worked so hard to produce. David and his family were small town, rural people, so their clothes would have been woven by Nitzevet and the wives of the many brothers at home out of the fleece of the sheep and hair of the goats that the family kept. A working tunic would probably have been knee-length, or at least adjusted with the belt to be knee-length so David would be free to walk around the hills. The loincloth would have been their version of underwear.

[image error]

Ozem jerked his shoulder away. “Don’t have to rub it in.” He snatched the thick, knotted end of David’s staff.

Page 6

We like to think of a shepherd’s staff as having a crook on the end, but this is another possibility, given the materials they’d have ready to hand: a shoot from an olive tree, with the knot end remaining to give the staff some heft for poking slow sheep and tossing the staff ahead of the shepherd to show the sheep where to go.

[image error]http://www.theslowadventure.com/2012_10_21_archive.html

“What’s going on is there’s a feast but Father stuck me with the flock.” Ozem yanked the staff away and stalked up the hill. “Did you fat tails miss me? I didn’t miss you!”

Page 6

Poor Ozem. When Samuel came to town, they wouldn’t have waited for David to drive the flock into Bethlehem, so one of his brothers would have had to replace him out in the hills. The sheep wouldn’t have been the ones we’re used to seeing here in the West, but the fat-tailed breed that still makes up 25% of sheep bred in the world. Ferrel Jenkins shot a lovely photo in April 2019 of a fat-tailed ewe and lamb just outside of Jerusalem. Go here to see it.

[image error]https://www.ec21.com/product-details/Fat-Tail-Awassi-Sheep-for–9942772.html[image error]Leviticus 3:9 details how priests are to prepare the fat of these sheep: “The priest must present the fat of this peace offering as a special gift to the Lord. This includes the fat of the broad tail cut off near the backbone.”

“There are lions.”

Page 6

David warns his brother Ozem, who’s going to be left with/stuck with the flock as oldest brother Eliab drags David off to meet Samuel. Here is the kind of lion he’d be talking about: the Persian lion, panthero leo persica.

[image error]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_lion

“Came in this morning. Scared Father and the elders half to death.” Eliab snorted. “You should’ve seen them, wringing their hands, worrying like old women. My wife’s father piled dirt on his head.”

Page 7

Several verses in the Bible talk about this practice of throwing or piling dust on one’s head during times of great distress (Ezekiel 27:30, Lamentations 2:10, Job 2:12, Joshua 7:6, 2 Samuel 15:32, 2 Samuel 1:2, Revelation 18:19). Referencing the practice here is a fun way of illustrating how the Bible describes Bethlehem’s reaction to Samuel’s arrival: “the elders of the town came trembling to meet him. ‘What’s wrong?’ they asked. ‘Do you come in peace?’”

“Remember when Grandfather Obed would tell the old stories?”

Page 7

David is the son of Jesse, who is the son of Obed, who is the son of Boaz, and Boaz was the son of Rahab–which means that Obed would have some great family stories to tell. Like how his mother Ruth had left her people in Moab to travel to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law Naomi, saying, “Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God.” Like how his father Boaz had noticed Ruth in the fields and then discovered her sitting by him in the middle of the night and then married her. Like how Boaz’s mother Rahab was saved by the Israelite spies when the walls of Jericho came down. Pretty exciting family tree.

Eliab cut him off with a glare and walked past the well.
David stopped to wash himself, but Eliab grabbed him by the upper arm and hauled him away.
“But I need to—”
“I’ll make sure you’re purified, alright.” Eliab’s smile was mean. “Who knows what you’ve been touching out there by yourself all day. We need moving water. Burak Spring still has some runoff.”

Page 8

This is Eliab using Israelite customs to bully David, treating him as if he’d done something to make himself ritually unclean while he was in the hills with the flock. I have them go to Burak Spring, which probably doesn’t exist. There was a stream called Ain Burak that fed the Solomon Pools in Jerusalem, that had water that went all the way to Bethlehem (according to a Wikipedia article), so that was enough information to make up a tiny spring that burbled out of the ground near Bethlehem.

David had been summoned by the prophet who’d brought Israel and Judah back to good standing with the Lord.

Page 9

Samuel had been the assistant to the priest Eli, and lived at the Tabernacle, since he was a little boy. Eli let his two sons take charge of many priestly duties and they were cheaters and frauds, so the people of God suffered. Eventually, God allowed their enemies to steal the sign of his presence: the Ark of the Lord. The Israelites got it back, but, as 1 Samuel 7:2 picks up the story, for 20 years after that, “During that time all Israel mourned because it seemed the Lord had abandoned them.” After that 20 years, Samuel put out the word: ““If you want to return to the Lordwith all your hearts, get rid of your foreign gods and your images of Ashtoreth. Turn your hearts to the Lord and obey him alone; then he will rescue you from the Philistines.” They did, and the Lord followed through on his promise, and Samuel became Israel’s judge (until they demanded he give them a king).

We’re only a little lower than angels,
yet You crown us with glory and honor.

Page 9

This is Psalm 8:5, except put in first person (we) instead of third person (him), as most translations render it.

When they were within sight of the threshing floor at the edge of town, Eliab squared his shoulders and stuck out his chest. He dug his thumb between David’s shoulder blades. “Make an effort.”

Page 9

Threshing floors were open spaces where farmers would take the stalks of grain they’d just harvested; they’d spread them over the ground and lead their oxen or donkeys to walk over the grain, often around and around in a circle. Then, when the kernels have been separated from the stalks, they’d use pitchforks to remove the stalks and toss the remaining material in the air so the wind would take away the unusable parts, called the chaff, leaving the heavy, usable kernels behind. When not in use, they were often excellent meeting spaces for village gatherings, particularly when edged by a low stone wall.

[image error]http://www.bibleplaces.com/newsletter/hr/Nazareth_Village_threshing_floor,_tb102704363.JPG

His father stood and waved from under the big tamarisk tree. The stranger next to him must be the prophet.

Page 10

[image error]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Tamarisk_Tree_in_Israel_(5759425470).jpg

In 1 Samuel 22:6 and 31:13 big things happen under tamarisk trees in areas near Bethlehem, so I make the anointing happen under one. It’s interesting, because in so many photos, it’s still the only tall tree around, which it sounds like it was in Bible times too, otherwise it wouldn’t have been notable enough to be named in the biblical record.

Nobody had taught him how to address a prophet. A bow was always appropriate, but he bent all the way over, because a dip of the head didn’t feel like enough.
In the middle of David’s bow, the prophet removed an ox horn from his belt. David straightened. “I’ve washed in the spring, my lord.”
“Hush.” Samuel raised the horn above David’s head and tipped it.
It wasn’t water; it was oil.

Page 10

Recent analysis of 2,900-year-old cattle remains found in Israel showed that the oxen then were a mix of zebu and taurine breeds with short horns, so picture Samuel pulling a horn like one of these off his belt, fairly short, not a sharp curve.

[image error]A typical taurine cow Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, Wikimedia Commons[image error]A typical Zebu, built for heat. Pavanaja, Wikimedia Commons

The oil was warm, and surprisingly heavy. It smelled like cinnamon and tree sap. David closed his eyes as something he couldn’t explain seeped through him. It uncoiled from the top of his head, down through the center of his body to every finger, every toe, through every hair. He flexed his hands.

Page 10-11

The oil itself, various translations describe as “olive oil” or just “oil.” In other places in the Bible and in cultural records contemporary to that time, anointing oil is described as being perfumed, so I chose to have it smell different from the olive oil David would have at home, to emphasize that something unusual is happening.

Without planning on it, he found himself walking to Samuel. “Excuse me, my lord.”
Samuel turned around and clucked at him. He took the cloth that covered the bread platter and sopped up the oil still pooled on David’s hair. “Adonai himself will tell you when the time is right.” He wiped David’s face and neck more tenderly than his own mother ever had.

Page 13

Christian writers and speakers use the names God and Yahweh for their Holy One, but Jewish writers and speakers never spell out or pronounce those names, using G-d and YHWH instead. Although I am a Christian writer, I wanted to, as faithfully as I could, present a more ancient Israelite mindset. So when I attended an event and heard a crowd of Jewish people reciting Psalms and calling the Lord Adonai, I thought it sounded lovely and intimate, and I knew I had the name that David and Samuel (and sometimes Saul) would call the Lord–the name that would indicate a more personal relationship with the Spirit of the Lord, and not just a formal cultic relationship.

To endure decades of tending the flocks?

Page 13

My bad! I tried so hard to weed out all the contemporary measurements of time and space but this one snuck through. The ancient Israelites did not have our metric system of counting years in multiples of tens, or decades. I’ll have to take that out of a future version.

One of the major difficulties in writing an imaginatively expanded version of the story of David from the Bible (and trying to still keep it biblical) is the utter lack of precision in the source materials when it came to time. When did all this stuff happen?

Not having the exact dates is fine for general Bible study or children’s worship purposes; we don’t need to know what year David was anointed to teach about how God isn’t impressed by the things our culture is impressed by, but by what he sees in our hearts. But when you’re trying to immerse people in a particular time and place, TIME is a crucial part of the equation. A teenager might be vague about when they’ll be home from hanging out with friends, but I wasn’t even going to try writing a story that was vague about how old David was at any point in the story. How can you immerse yourself in someone’s life if you have no idea, for 300 pages, how old they are?

So that meant making choices based on very little concrete information.

The Bible is clear on few things:

David and his band of followers (600 strong) “lived among the Philistines” for one year and four months–this is how long he was a mercenary/pretended to be a mercenary at the end of his time on the run from Saul.David was 30 when he became king of Judah.He became king of all Israel and reigned from Jerusalem 7 years after that.He ruled for a total of 40 years (7 from Hebron, 33 from Jerusalem).He was 70 when he died.

Because there was no standardized calendar, all timekeeping was relative: this event was 3 years after this other event, that happened in the 5th year of So-and-so’s reign. So biblical historians do a lot of approximating from events that are both mentioned in the Bible and have additional evidence that allow us to give it a date.

But even this is an imprecise science. See the list below of dates that various experts have assigned to David’s life and rule:

Ancient History Encyclopedia c.1035 – 970 BCE
 ruled 1010 – ca.970 BCE
Jewish Virtual Library ruled 1010 – 970 BCE
Chabad.org lived 2854 – 2924 (907 – 837 BCE)
Wikipedia “Historians of the Ancient Near East agree that David probably existed around 1000 BCE, but that there is little that can be said about him as a historical figure.”
My Jewish Learning ruled c. 1009/1001 – 969 B.C.E.
NIV Study Bible lived 1040 – 970 BCE

Some sources are only willing to give dates to when he reigned in Israel; others will give other dates, admitting that they are approximate. The NIV Study Bible goes so far as to give a date for David’s anointing, although there are no textual hints or clues as to his age, only that he’s the youngest of his siblings and that he was in the hills with the sheep. This one clue has led some children’s picture book authors to imply that David was as young as 10 when he was anointed, because kids that young would be given responsibility over a flock. Others argue that David was probably already of military service age when he became a musician for Saul and was anointed by Samuel, otherwise why would Saul have been so threatened as to want to murder him?

Frankly, both are plausible. As is my timeline. (I hope.)

I went with the majority and had his death date at 970 BCE, which makes him born in 1040 BCE.I like the idea that he was anointed young but not too young, at 13. He may have gone through a cultural rite of passage to manhood, but his life is not significantly different.He goes into Saul’s service at 14, but gets sent back home when Israel goes to war because he’s not yet at fighting age (which burns after awhile).He kills Goliath at 16.The Giant Slayer ends with him at age 20, when he’s finally figured out why he was anointed seven years earlier, and starts his 10 years on the run from the murderous King Saul.

Each one of those is a choice that I have to make plausible. Not to mention other crazy things like making it plausible that Saul has to be introduced to David right after he’s killed Goliath, despite the fact that David has been his musician for some time. And that David remained in Saul’s service after Saul had tried to kill him with a spear.

I think I managed to give solid character-seated reasons for each of those, but only my readers can be the judge of that 🙂

Speaking of which, if all that intrigues you, you can download the first couple of chapters and find information about where to order The Giant Slayer here.

This all started over 3,000 years ago, when the story of David and Saul took place–Saul was born around 1076BCE, and David around 1040BCE. But this particular retelling started in 2011, when I reached the story of David in 1 Samuel in my read-the-Bible-all-the-way-through project.

I was engrossed by what I was reading and regularly went way beyond my usual chapter or two a day. I’d been reading middle grade and young adult fiction for many years (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Benedict Society), and I kept seeing echoes of those stories in David’s. Why couldn’t my then-12-year-old son experience the Bible as exciting as I was seeing it? David was the original Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Percy Jackson–the boy plucked out of obscurity because of his connection to something larger than himself to do what nobody else could do when he was still so young. But the Bible is written in formal language without the level of detail that kids connect to.

So I thought I might take my love of middle grade fiction, my love of the Bible, my love of research, and my skill in telling Bible stories to kids and re-tell the story of David, adding in some of those feels-like details, some expanded and natural dialogue, some internal dialogue, and other things that would make it feel like a fully fleshed-out story for contemporary kids.

I thought it might take me 6 months. Ha!

The more I wrote, the more details I craved, the more precision I needed. It took two years to write and edit it and work with my Old Testament consultant, and then another two years of submitting to agents and publishers and dealing with rejection before choosing myself and deciding to independently publish it. If you’re good at math, you’ll notice that 2011 + 4 = 2015, and we are now in 2019.

Well, traumatic life events intervened and I wound up (to push the David comparison too far) wandering in the wilderness for four years. But I persevered, and here is the result: a story about fear and faith, trouble and trust told in alternating points of view. It is the first in what will be a trilogy, following David from a boy of 12 until his death.

Born to serve, destined to lead…

Twelve-year-old David, a skilled musician and bold risk-taker, tends his flocks in a rural backwater of ancient Samaria, eager to prove himself and join his brothers on the battlefield. A youngest son who would never have a household of his own, no one is more shocked than David when a powerful prophet summons him for a cryptic blessing, hinting that he–and not his brothers–is destined for greatness. So begins David’s epic adventure. As the nation readies for war against an age-old enemy, David secretly trains as a soldier. He soon comes face to face with a terrifying foe and ultimately finds himself in the center of a life or death struggle that will alter the course of history for Israel–and the world.

A hero’s journey and young adult coming-of-age novel, The Giant Slayer imaginatively retells the Biblical story of David’s meteoric rise from shepherd boy to fearless warrior and future king.

Read an excerpt NOW!

To stay up-to-date with publication plans for First Kings | Book Two: The Noble Outlaw, and to download a couple of freebies (a timeline of The Giant Slayer, two maps, and sneak peek of The Noble Outlaw), please join my email list.

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You don’t have to have a stunning display with professional sets and lights and live animals to tell the story of Jesus well. You just need a few volunteers willing to corral all the participants, and actors willing to put on a costume and go in front of the congregation. We’ve all got a role to play in telling the wonderful story of the coming of Christ into the world, no matter our age or physical or intellectual disability.

These five plays take no more than 10 minutes to perform, so they fit well within a Sunday morning service. They tell the Christmas story in slightly different ways, but each is biblical, and requires little memorization and few rehearsals. Three plays were designed to be performed in person, and two virtually, but there are tips for how to make each work in the other performance style.

Jesus’s Family Tree

Jesus’s Family Tree is inspired by Isaiah saying the Messiah will come from a shoot of Jesse’s stump. We meet a number of people in Jesus’s family tree: Rahab, Ruth, David, Zechariah, and Mary. At the end, the narrator will note that now we have all been adopted into God’s family, so we are all part of Jesus’s family tree, and invites non-speaking costumed characters (like the shepherds, sheep, Magi) to come forward.

A Message! A Message!

In A Message! A Message! we follow the angels as they travel from heaven to earth to give messages from God to Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds.

What Are You Waiting For?

What Are You Waiting For? is a newscast. A roving reporter asks people what they are waiting for and, in the process, finds all about this Messiah who is about to be born. The reporter meets Isaiah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, sheep, and Magi.

Do Not Be Afraid

Do Not Be Afraid is the most narrator-heavy play. The narrator talks about all the times the people in the story of the birth of Jesus were told not to be afraid. Interspersed with this narration are actors giving the same line: “Do not be afraid.”

The Light to Live By

The Light to Live By focuses on John 1:1-14. The words are beautiful, but the concepts can be difficult for many people to grasp, so this pageant includes a lot of questions from the actors. The story focuses on the idea that Jesus has moved into our neighborhood, and that he is the light that we live by.

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5 Biblical, low-memorization, low-rehearsal plays that include everyone who wants to participate.

You don’t have to have a stunning display with professional sets and lights and live animals to tell the story of Jesus well. You just need a few volunteers willing to corral all the participants, and actors willing to put on a costume and go in front of the congregation. We’ve all got a role to play in telling the wonderful story of the coming of Christ into the world, no matter our age or physical or intellectual disability.

These five plays take no more than 10 minutes to perform, so they fit well within a Sunday morning service. They tell the Christmas story in slightly different ways, but each is biblical, and requires little memorization and few rehearsals. Three plays were designed to be performed in person, and two virtually, but there are tips for how to make each work in the other performance style.

Jesus’s Family Tree

Jesus’s Family Tree is inspired by Isaiah saying the Messiah will come from a shoot of Jesse’s stump. We meet a number of people in Jesus’s family tree: Rahab, Ruth, David, Zechariah, and Mary. At the end, the narrator will note that now we have all been adopted into God’s family, so we are all part of Jesus’s family tree, and invites non-speaking costumed characters (like the shepherds, sheep, Magi) to come forward.

A Message! A Message!

In A Message! A Message! we follow the angels as they travel from heaven to earth to give messages from God to Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds.

What Are You Waiting For?

What Are You Waiting For? is a newscast. A roving reporter asks people what they are waiting for and, in the process, finds all about this Messiah who is about to be born. The reporter meets Isaiah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, sheep, and Magi.

Do Not Be Afraid

Do Not Be Afraid is the most narrator-heavy play. The narrator talks about all the times the people in the story of the birth of Jesus were told not to be afraid. Interspersed with this narration are actors giving the same line: “Do not be afraid.”

The Light to Live By

The Light to Live By focuses on John 1:1-14. The words are beautiful, but the concepts can be difficult for many people to grasp, so this pageant includes a lot of questions from the actors. The story focuses on the idea that Jesus has moved into our neighborhood, and that he is the light that we live by.

According to this great TED talk by Andrew Stanton (of Toy Story and WALL-E fame), Mr. Rogers carried this quote around in his wallet: “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love, once you’ve heard they story.”

In the last twenty years, readers have definitely grown to love all kinds of characters who’ve traditionally been villains: vampires, thieves, werewolves, etc. I certainly found this to be true while writing the first David and Saul book: writing Saul, the “villain,” the “failure” of the piece, made me more sympathetic to him. In the first book, anyway, I find him a more interesting character than the upright David. (David gets more interesting in the 2nd book, when he has to compromise his very high principles in order to survive.)

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Saul “fought against his enemies in every direction — against Moab, Ammon, Edom, the kings of Zobah, and the Philistines. And wherever he turned, he was victorious. He did great deeds and conquered the Amalekites, saving Israel from all those who had plundered them” (1 Sam. 14:47-48). Yet he’s remembered as a failure. The book of Chronicles (the point of which is to detail the reign of the kings of Israel) contains only the story of his death, nothing about the 42 years of his kingship.

The more I wrote in his point of view, the more compassion I felt for him. His main qualification for being king, other than God choosing him, was that he was tall, head and shoulders taller than everyone else. He seems to have been a good son and a hard-working farmer, but when he and his servant went out looking for some lost donkeys, the servant was the one who thought of seeking out a seer and who had silver to offer Samuel. After Samuel privately anointed Saul and told him the Lord was appointing him leader of all Israel, God had to change Saul’s heart (1 Sam. 10:9) to get him with the program.

Even after this and after all the signs Samuel predicted came true, after prophesying (and being made fun of for prophesying) and having the Spirit of God fill him, he didn’t tell his family what had really happened. The next time he’s anointed, it’s going to be at an official ceremony, but Saul hides in the baggage. And I don’t blame him. Who else gets to start his coronation by hearing how upset God is that the Israelites wanted a king, how God felt it was them rejecting him? Not exactly a rah-rah endorsement.

At first, Saul does the smart thing. “When Saul returned home to Gibeah, a band of men whose hearts God had touched became hi constant companions” (1 Sam. 10:29). There were some haters, but Saul ignored them. When there’s a threat to an Israelite town, he answers in dramatic fashion: cuts up the oxen he’s plowing his father’s field with and sends it around Israel as an incentive to get people to come and fight. They do. There’s a tremendous victory and another public ceremony to crown him king.

Depending on what the “then” in 1 Samuel 12:1 means, it could be that right after Samuel re-re-re-anoints Saul, Samuel gives a long speech detailing precisely what is wrong with the Israelites for the extreme offense of asking for a king. (Or it could take place at some unknown time later in Saul’s reign. Storytelling in the Old Testament is not necessarily linear.) Samuel gets the Lord to send thunder and rain and the people are terrified and cry out, “Pray to the Lord your God for us, or we will die!…For now we have added to our sins by asking for a king.”

No matter when the above scene happens, Saul is most likely standing right there. No matter what kind of character you bring to the situation, that’s a lousy position to be put in.

So I feel for the guy. He was given a job that he didn’t want, that he was unprepared for and that the people were unprepared for. No wonder he so often responded to situations out of fear and insecurity.

At the beginning of this post, I put quotes around “villain,” because I don’t think of Saul as a villain. I write him more as a foil for David because I have pity for him.

So the quote Mr. Rogers carried with him is true from the positive side, but also from the negative side. A couple of years ago, my book club read Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan. It takes place in post-WWII Mississippi, telling the story of a landowning white family and an African-American sharecropping family who each have a son who comes home from the war. There are a half-dozen points of view, half white, half black. It is a deep and gripping story. But there is a villain. The father of the landowner is evil. He isn’t given any redeeming characteristics that I can recall. He makes everyone’s lives miserable and sets into motion horrifying events. As we were discussing the book, one of us noted that the author had originally included some passages in that man’s point of view. My reaction was immediate and visceral: I was glad she took them out. I didn’t want his point of view, because that would make him human. I didn’t want to know his motivations or how his upbringing and experiences brought him to where he was at the time of the story. I just wanted to be free to hate him.

Are there stories you can think of that got you to feel sympathy for the villain? How about villains you’re happy to be free to hate?

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From The Hidden Crown, PBS series, 2013
Neither the armor nor the crown are correct to Saul’s time period, but the mood is perfect.

“It wasn’t much of a crown, but it was the only one he had, taken from the bounty of his first defeat of the Ammonites, back in the days when He was happy. If He had let Saul keep the bounty from King Agag, he wouldn’t be stuck with Nahash’s battle back-up; he’d have the most impressive solid gold, jewel-encrusted crown. Not thin gold hammered over copper and dotted with gems like this piece of second-rate metalwork.”

p.

This references two of Saul’s battles. 1 Samuel 11 tells of his first victory after being quietly anointed king, against King Nahash of Ammon. And 1 Samuel 15 details the victory that will haunt him, when he wasn’t sufficiently obedient to what the Lord had told him to do, and Samuel told him that the Lord had already found someone else, someone better to be king. The He is the Lord, but at this point Saul can only refer to the Lord with bitterness, which I try to convey via italics.

From Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity
The Clothing of the Middle and Lower Classes

“Everyone was watching Abner lead a boy through the room. His tunic was of the plainest brown wool, stained, rough, and threadbare in spots, as if it had been handed down through many sons. He did not act like a servant, and he definitely did not look like a tribal visitor, but Abner was leading him. And then it dawned on Saul: the boy was the singing shepherd.”

p.

This paragraph from Chapter 2 of The Giant Slayer shows a couple of storytelling assumptions I make:

“Many brothers” Whether you take the 1 Samuel 16:10-11 number of 8 sons or the 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 number of 7 sons — that’s a lot of brothers for David’s clothes to go through before getting to him!

plain, stained, threadbare In the Bible, David insists that he and his family are lowly, but the Talmud and other researchers think this is an exaggeration. I like the idea of taking David at face value, so I kept them as a family that is richer in sons than in goods. This may also have been inspired by the two large families I’m familiar with: my mother was one of 12 kids, and my dad one of 7 (6 of them boys). My mother’s father was a factory worker and a farmer and a fixer of electronics; my father’s father was a minister. Everyone worked hard from a young age and resources were just spread thinner.

A musician. All this buildup for a lousy musician? Not a witch or a healer who knew of some rare herbs nobody had tried yet? “A singing shepherd?”

The servant’s face was transformed. “My lord, when he sings, you forget all your troubles. Every new moon feast, he sings songs of praise that get the old men leaping up and raising their hands. His songs of lament get everyone weeping.”

p.

Click through to the video of someone playing a replica of a biblical-era lyre–they are plucked and strummed with two hands simultaneously (and look very different than the image above)!

The cliffs near Michmash
https://www.bibleplaces.com/michmash/

Saul angled his head nearer to Jonathan. “Remember what the Lord did to the Philistines at Michmash?”

“Made them panic until they were swinging their swords like blind men trying to kill bees.” Jonathan laughed quietly. “How could I forget?”

p.

1 Samuel 14 tells the story of Jonathan’s famous exploits, climbing a cliff to get to the Philistine outpost and setting off a satisfying victory for the Israelites–until David and Goliath, one of the most heroic battle stories of Saul’s kingship.

This is also a good time to talk about swords.

Late Bronze Age Khopesh swords
http://www.bronsereplika.no/BA%20Sword%20Tell%20Apek.html

Until David was king of both Judah and Israel, the Israelites did not have what we think of as a standing army, and even then the army probably didn’t supply weaponry. Whenever they went to battle, the leader (whether prophet or king) would travel around, rousing people to the cause, and soldiers (aka farmers and shepherds) would have taken whatever weapon, shield, and armor the family owned. In fact, in that famous battle at Michmash, Saul and Jonathan were the only two Israelite soldiers who had a sword or a spear (1 Samuel 13:22).

You’ll notice that, while only the king and his first-born son had swords, many Philistine soldiers did (although the Lord took away that technological advantage).

Any swords would have been made of bronze, because that was the metal available to Israelites. According to 1 Samuel 13:19-22, the Philistines has a lock on blacksmithing, and therefore on iron, and they wouldn’t make swords or spears for their enemies (and overcharged for sharpening farm implements). Bronze isn’t the strongest metal, and doesn’t hold an edge as well as iron, but it was what they had. As a result, their swords would have been not much more than two feet long. Their best weapons would have come from plunder when they defeated better-equipped armies–the more they won, the better equipment they’d have.

Swords used in the region at that time would have been khopesh swords from Egypt (like in the illustration above), straight by the handle and then curved half-way up, that would have been sharpened on the outside edge. These would be useful for hooking the arm or leg of an enemy soldier or their horse, and then cutting. There may also have been sickle swords that have the same shape but have the sharp edge on the inside. Straight swords with edges on both sides were also found in the region, like the one below.

Near Eastern short sword c. 1500 – 1000 BCE; 12½ in (32.3 cm)
https://owlcation.com/humanities/A-Visual-History-of-Ancient-Egyptian-and-Mesopotamian-Swords-and-Blades