The Shadow Women

by Angela Hunt

First published 2002

Amazon

4.5(1,445)

Moses’s life is retold through the women who preserve, raise, challenge and accompany him: his Hebrew family, the Egyptian princess who adopts him, his sister Miriam and his Midianite wife Zipporah. Their viewpoints connect forced labour and royal privilege to desert exile and the divine call that sends Moses back to Pharaoh.

The women do not experience liberation in the same way. Miriam carries memory of the enslaved community, Zipporah bears the cost of Moses’s vocation, and tensions between them expose rivalry within a family serving a public mission. Christian and Jewish themes of deliverance, obedience and sacrifice are central, while the novel acknowledges how much a retelling must imagine beyond the biblical text.