Untitled Nonfiction for 2026
A narrative nonfiction book in progress
This book traces a three-thousand-year experiment in meaning. It follows ancient prophetic texts as they pass through empires, languages, and belief systems, revealing how ideas reshape as circumstances change.
The narrative begins by meeting the prophets of the Hebrew Bible in their own world. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deborah, and others emerge not as figures frozen in parchment, but as people embedded in urgent political crises, their words grounded in the immediate realities they addressed.
From there, the book tracks those same words across borders and centuries. They pass through scribal communities where small copying choices accumulate lasting consequences. They enter translation settings where a single word choice opens interpretive paths that can split religions. They reach later readers who recast ancient political commentary as prediction aimed at their own circumstances. Meaning shifts at every turn, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately, shaped by many hands.
The final movement brings the story into the present. These texts did not stop changing once canonized. They continue to be reread and reapplied in settings as distant from their origins as any earlier one. By tracing that process, the book examines not only how the texts changed, but how meaning itself travels when inherited ideas meet unfamiliar worlds.
Approach
The book turns scholarly material into a page-turner. The historical record tells a far deeper and more interesting story than any Sunday school version ever could. But most of that material is inaccessible and largely incomprehensible to non-specialists.
The book delivers that material through momentum rather than exposition. The narrative moves briskly across places and centuries. The figures encountered: prophets, scribes, translators are human and often surprising. Research and analysis arrive in context rather than as lectures. Brief scenes, historical pivots, modern enactments, and carefully chosen examples orient the reader while keeping the story moving.
The goal is simple: to engage readers with complex ideas in a way that sustains attention and rewards curiosity.
Project Status
The manuscript is in active development. Key sections are complete, including a polished prologue and multiple chapters. Research is solid and grounded in mainstream biblical scholarship. The framing is working. Early readers confirm there's an audience for this approach.
I'm currently seeking literary representation.
Related Work
Abjad: The Translator's Challenge – An interactive game that lets you experience the difficulties ancient translators faced working with consonant-only Hebrew text.
Writing in Dangerous Territory – An essay about the challenges of writing about texts people consider sacred.
Additional essays and tools will appear on this site as the project develops.
