Merry Christmas, Gentle Readers!
A Fair Trade Book
Title: Whence Came a Prince
Or you could buy the four-book series where this book is volume three, photograph showing volume four:
Author:
Liz Curtis Higgs
Author's web page (Wordpress, unfortunately): http://www.lizcurtishiggs.com/
Date:
2005
Publisher:
Random House
ISBN:
1-57856-128-0
Length:
537 pages of text plus notes, glossary, and discussion questions
Quote: “If
you find even a single coin of your gold in our possession, I will run my sword
through the heart of the one who stole it.”
Having
recast many Bible stories as contemporary short stories, Liz Curtis Higgs was
invited to try historical novels: the legal loopholes that allowed greedy
Laban to marry both of his daughters to the same man at the same time would
also have been just within the bounds of possibility in eighteenth-century
Scotland. Hence the series that began with Thorn
in My Heart, in which the one thing that nags at the reader’s suspension of
disbelief is that Jamie McKie and his wives (and first cousins) Rose and Leana
are reenacting the Bible story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, and, though members
in good standing of the Church of Scotland, none of them notices.
Thorn in My Heart 
was about Leana’s
falling in love with her cousin. Fair 
Is
the Rose was about Rose’s falling in love with the same boy. Whence Came a Prince is mostly Jamie’s
story, about separating himself from his money-grubbing uncle Lachlan and going
home to inherit his father’s estate, becoming a man and a father and a Scottish
“laird.”
was about Leana’s
falling in love with her cousin. Fair Is
the Rose was about Rose’s falling in love with the same boy. Whence Came a Prince is mostly Jamie’s
story, about separating himself from his money-grubbing uncle Lachlan and going
home to inherit his father’s estate, becoming a man and a father and a Scottish
“laird.”
In the
Bible Jacob, Leah, and Rachel lived in their bigamous and incestuous
relationship for most of twenty years; Jacob worked seven years to earn each
sister’s dowry and a few more years for shares of the profits. During this time
each sister, trying to produce more babies and thus qualify for a bigger share
of the family’s wealth, also ordered a trusted maidservant to make a few babies
with Jacob, which babies were “born on the knees” of the rightful wife and
recognized as adopted children of hers. At least twelve healthy babies were
born—eleven sons and a daughter—and some speculate that these four women may
have produced other children, as well, whose names were not recorded because
they weren’t heirs. Only at the end of this time did the family move, with poor
baby-craving Rachel dying in childbirth, giving birth to the twelfth and last
(documented) son, along the way.
In some
languages time is counted not by full years but by seasons. In the other books
of the Bible time is clearly counted in full years. In Genesis, however, people
seem to age at exactly twice the normal rate. Some scholars, considering the
ages at which Abraham and his descendants do various things in Genesis,
speculate that the word later used to mean years once meant seasons, of which
there were typically two in a year. It’s pertinent to mention this because, if
the word used to measure age is translated “years” as it is in most English
Bibles, Jacob had no relationships with women prior to those two decades of
frenetic baby-breeding, and those four young ladies were fighting over his
attention, when he was between the ages of seventy
and ninety. (And he and Leah lived many years after that.)
The Bible
suggests that Jacob was considered to have matured slowly because he was a bit
of a “Mama’s boy.” That was why his father preferred his brother Esau, who
was history’s first recorded “redneck,” with red hair all over, a hasty temper,
little sense of responsibility, no thought of the future, little spiritual
intelligence and apparently no outstanding quantity of practical intelligence,
but at least Esau was bold and tough. Old Isaac, a gentle man, relished Esau’s
hunting adventures as much as he did the game Esau brought home.
The
brothers were twins, though far from identical. Smooth-skinned,
slick-talking, clever Jacob was a scientific farmer who studied different ways
to breed livestock for the traits he wanted, but had to give God the credit for
his successes in breeding for minority traits while working for shares of
Laban’s profits. He just knew (and so did his mother know) that he was better
qualified to inherit the bulk of the estate and the social status that went
with it, but since Esau was born first, Jacob had to play tricks on both his
father and his brother to become the heir. After playing these tricks he worked
on his uncle’s estate to give the righteous indignation time to cool off.
Esau’s threat to kill Jacob might have been idle drunken bluster. Then again it
might not. Both brothers were wealthy ranchers who employed a lot of young men
to supervise their herds of animals. Herdsmen had to be prepared to fight off
predators, so if Esau seriously wanted to kill Jacob, each brother was the head
of a small army; the “fight” for the estate could have become gory. It didn’t,
because Jacob’s “wrestling with God” gave him the grace of humility. As adults
Jacob and Esau don’t seem ever to have been close, but they managed to coexist, with Jacob as head of the clan.
In Hebrew
sar, a prince, or sarah, a princess, are the noun forms
that go with a verb, yisar, meaning
“he fights or wrestles.” Thus when Jacob reached his full status as heir, sheikh, patriarch, he received the title
“Israel,” which can be understood to mean either “prince of God” or “he
wrestles with God.” (In youth his grandmother, Sarah, had apparently earned a
pejorative nickname, Sarai, which ought logically to have meant “my princess”
but seems to have been understood to mean “quarrelsome.”)
Higgs’
attempt to re-create a man’s spiritual coming-of-age is still told primarily
through the eyes of his wife. For me this gives the story more credibility
(Higgs has done most research on the home lives and women’s work of
eighteenth-century Scotland, which are of course what the “pioneers” brought to
the Eastern States). For men, does it inherently, inevitably, keep a story told
by a woman, for women, mostly from a woman’s point of view, somewhat off the
mark? Possibly. Would a practical,
even scientific man like Jacob tell a story of spiritual maturation in more
detail than Whence Came a Prince?
What the Bible tells us about Jacob’s spiritual journey consists of a few
sketchy dreams he shared with his family, plus the record of how people remembered his everyday dealings with other
people.
So…eighteenth-century
Scotland is not the ancient Middle East. Jamie McKie matures into a “bonnet
laird,” not technically a prince…but Jamie McKie is still only in his twenties,
and he’s still Leana’s Prince Charming. And Higgs spares us the murky business
with the maidservants, although the names of Eliza and Annabel seem chosen as
being as close as eighteenth-century Scottish names got to Zilpah and
Bilhah. Jamie, Rose, and Leana are still
cousins, but at least, after Rose dies, only two people are sharing a bed.
I suspect
that most people who enjoy Whence Came a
Prince will enjoy it for the social history. Leana is still using the herbs
and recipes, guided by the superstitions, reciting the poems and singing the
songs, and dressing everybody in the clothes, of eighteenth-century Scotland.
If these novels are on the long side, that does them no harm; anyone who’s read
the Bible knows how the story has to come out (although, as noted, Higgs has
taken some liberties) so readers are lingering for the atmosphere, quaint yet
somehow homelike, of our great-great-great-grandmothers’ time. We want to know
when and how people used the herb called lady’s-mantle, what lullabies parents
sang to babies, what remedies herdsmen applied to injured sheep. Higgs tells
readers all these things, and evidently, judging by the popularity of this
series, they relish every bit of it.
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