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Alice HoffmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
One of the four protagonists of the novel, Yael is the daughter of the Sicarii assassin Yosef Bar Elhanan, the sister of the warrior Amram, and mother to Arieh. Apart from Arieh, her biological child, Yael is also an adoptive mother to Levi, Noah, Yehuda, and Yonah.
Yael is courageous and strong, though she tends to believe her destiny is to suffer. She has bright red hair and reddish-brown freckles over her face and throat. Though Yael does not consider herself attractive at the beginning of the novel, over time her unusual appearance draws many people to her. Yael’s hair is often compared to a lion’s mane, and to the leaves of a flame tree. At the start of the novel, Yael is in her late teens and quiet from a lifetime of neglect. Yael’s mother died giving birth to her, and her father blames her for the death, verbally abusing her throughout her childhood. In response to her isolation, Yael forms an affinity with animals, watching how they bide their time.
The first pivotal moment of change for Yael occurs when she and Yosef are forced into exile after the Fall of Jerusalem. Headed to Masada, Yael must cross a bitter desert. The desert becomes a metaphor for Yael’s coming-of-age, since it is here that she tests her survival skills. Yael also falls in love for the first time, having a relationship with the married Ben Simon and becoming pregnant with Arieh. Although Yael knows the relationship with Ben Simon is unfair to his wife Sia, she is not ashamed of her passion, displaying confidence in her sexuality. After Ben Simon and his family die of pox in the desert, Yael is wracked by remorse over betraying Sia’s trust.
When Yael arrives in Masada, the second pivotal change in her character arc occurs. Having betrayed a woman, Yael must now find solidarity among other women and achieve a resolution. Yael finds kinship with Shirah, Aziza, Revka, and other women of the dovecotes, as well as the birds themselves. She also aligns herself with the enslaved Wynn, a captive. Through her relationships with women, animals, and marginalized people, Yael recovers her sense of self. She seeks forgiveness from Sia and releases Sia’s ghost that has been haunting her, a manifestation of her own guilt. She then gives birth to Arieh.
Although Yael herself did not spend time with a maternal figure—except for a brief interlude with Shirah during her childhood—she eventually becomes a mother to the surviving children of lost mothers. This marks a full-circle moment for Yael’s character. In an important episode, Yael frees a captured lion the Romans have brought to the siege. Yael has always dreamt of lions and believed the lion symbolizes a man. However, at this moment, she realizes the lion is the symbol of her own courage and resilience.
At the end of the novel, Yael inherits Shirah’s book of spells and her magic and survives the Siege of Masada. She cannily bargains safe passage for herself, Revka, and five children with the Roman General Silva, which shows her survival skills. Assuming Shirah’s identity, she settles in Alexandria with her chosen family, honoring the legacy and memory of her lost friends. A dynamic character, Yael grows considerably over the course of the text, demonstrating The Solidarity and Resilience of Women.
Known to most people as the Witch of Moab, Shirah is a protagonist of the novel, representing feminine power and intuition. Shirah is the mother of Aziza, Nahara, Adir, and Yonah, and the beloved of Eleazar ben Ya’ir. Dark-haired, with eyes as blue as lapis stones, Shirah is exceedingly beautiful, and her presence generates awe and fear. Shirah wears two gold amulets given to her by her mother Nisa, which symbolize her mother’s powers and protection. She gives both amulets to Yael at the end of the novel.
Shirah is a practitioner of kepashim, the secret magic of women, performing spells and divining the future. She is covered in red henna tattoos over her throat and breast, a mark of her being kedeshah, a woman trained to sexually serve priests. Though being kedeshah is seen as unclean, it frees women like Shirah from domestic duties, allowing them to learn languages, writing, and crafts.
Like the other protagonists of the text, Shirah has a history of trauma and displacement. After she is sent from Alexandria to Jerusalem for her protection, she never sees her beloved mother again. She is cast out of Jerusalem as well after Aziza’s birth, and she finally leaves Moab for Masada. In every location except Alexandria, Shirah is viewed as a foreigner and faces prejudice. She also experiences sexual violence in Moab. Thus, she understands that in a male-dominated world, her biggest power is her spellcasting. Magic becomes a way for Shirah to gain control over a slippery world.
Shirah’s desire for control influences how she behaves as a mother. For instance, after baby Aziza faces the threat of sexual violence, Shirah intervenes and brings up Aziza as a boy. Fearing Aziza’s secret may be discovered if she forms romantic relationships, she tells Aziza that divination has revealed love means doom for her. She eventually learns that she cannot control her children when Nahara leaves her to join her lover despite her objections.
Shirah’s native element is water. She has the ability to bring rain, such as when she is shackled and set upon a cliff. Shirah’s charms are powerful enough to restore the speech of Revka’s grandsons. One of the most unique features of Shirah’s magic is that it is rooted in her Jewish faith. Thus, it is not “dark” magic, but a woman’s interpretation of religion and spirituality. However, Shirah combines Judaic beliefs with pagan ones, worshiping not just Adonai but also the goddess Ashtoreth, showing that her faith is syncretic, feminine, and personal.
At the end of the novel, Shirah finds a balance between destiny and free will. Though she accepts her own death, she ensures the survival of her friends and children by hinting they should hide in the cistern. Shirah also passes on her book of spells to Yael, in the hope that her memory and magic can live on.
Sixteen years old at the start of the book, Aziza is one of its protagonists and point-of-view characters. Aziza is the oldest child of Shirah and Ben Ya’ir, sister to Nahara, Adir, and Yonah, and the beloved of Amram and Yoav. She has long black hair, pale grey eyes, and dark olive skin. Aziza is a dynamic character with a strong transformation arc in the text.
Aziza is youthful and passionate, with her experiences often illustrating The Solidarity and Resilience of Women. Raised as a boy during her childhood and early teen years, Aziza escapes many of the gendered constraints of women in her time, which leads her to form a unique, questioning attitude. Though Aziza does not reject her femininity, she does reject traditional expectations of women. For instance, she resists the notion that all women must witness and help in childbirth. Since Aziza was only three years old herself when she helped Shirah deliver her baby sister Nahara, she cannot stand the sight of blood from childbirth, believing she prefers the blood of the battlefield. Aziza voices objections to the subservient status of women, such as claiming that the injunction that women avoid weapons is borne out of male fears of women’s identities.
While Masada represents sanctuary and liberation for women like Yael and Revka, for Aziza it can be claustrophobic because she is again forced to live a girl’s life. Aziza’s discomfort in her early days in Masada shows that she is not at peace yet with her femininity. Her transformation toward a more centered femininity begins when she actually does go into battle, dressed as her brother Adir. Although an expert archer and warrior, Aziza is repulsed by the bloodlust of the men around her, including her beloved Amram. It is at this moment that Aziza realizes that war and male violence are not as heroic as she thought and turns from Amram to the more somber and less-violent Yoav.
Another episode that transforms Aziza is her beloved sister Nahara’s decision to leave their family and join the Essenes. Aziza is pained by the passive, subordinate life Nahara seems to have chosen, repeatedly asking her sister to return. Nevertheless, at the end of the novel, Aziza accepts Nahara’s choice, painful as it is to her. Aziza dies at the hands of Amram, encapsulating the final effects of male violence and war upon the female characters.
The oldest of the four protagonists of the novel, Revka is the mother of Zara, the mother-in-law of Yoav, and the grandmother of Levi and Noah. Revka describes herself as plain-looking, noting that her daughter Zara’s beauty is unlike her own. Seen through Yael and Aziza’s eyes, Revka initially appears watchful and sharp-tongued. However, as the narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that Revka is a fierce ally to the women of the dovecotes and a true survivor.
Out of all the protagonists in the novel, Revka has the most tragic backstory. Not only is she a survivor of rape, she has also witnessed Zara being raped and tortured. To end Zara’s suffering, Revka hastens her death by cutting her throat. Revka then poisons the men who tortured Zara and forces her traumatized family to keep moving toward safety. Her firm decisions in the face of extreme peril show Revka’s practicality and resilience, foreshadowing her survival after the Siege of Masada.
Revka clings to routine to maintain a sense of control and to cope with her pain. She performs her daily duties religiously because she lives for her grandsons, who have fallen speechless after they witnessed the attack on their mother. If Revka stops functioning, her grandsons will suffer. Thus, her stoicism is an act of love and sacrifice. Revka is also identified with silence in the novel, since she understands that the biggest virtue silence affords one is the ability to listen. She shares this affinity for silence with animals and with Yael.
The watershed moment for Revka’s character arrives when she finally expresses her overwhelming grief, first to Yoav, and then to Shirah. She confesses her guilt over the murders and her terrible sorrow to Shirah, cultivates patience, and forms a fresh bond with Shirah, Yael, and Aziza. Before this transformation, Revka views Yael with suspicion, resenting Yael’s friendship with Wynn. However, Revka soon becomes a quasi-mother figure to Yael and a fierce defender of Shirah. Revka intercedes with Channa to free Wynn, which shows the extent of her evolution. Revka also keeps Shirah’s secret till the very end, not revealing her love affair with Ben Ya’ir. Her survival of the Siege reinforces her as an exemplar of The Solidarity and Resilience of Women in the text, representing survival and hope in the face of extreme trauma.
The daughter of Shirah and Sa’adallos, and the sister of Aziza, Adir, and Yonah, Nahara is an important character in the novel. At the beginning of the text, Nahara is a lively, helpful, and innocent 13-year-old girl, beautiful like her mother and older sister Aziza. However, after Shirah forbids her from meeting Malachi, a devout Essene man, Nahara leaves her mother and sister, plunging them into sorrow. She also leaves the dovecotes, which represent female solidarity and friendship, to join the more conservative world of Malachi.
Nahara’s loss is a key turning point for Aziza and Shirah, because it forces the women to accept that they cannot control whom they love. Nahara is massacred by the Romans, along with the rest of the Essenes at the end of the novel. For Shirah, Nahara’s desertion and death provide more evidence that everyone she loves is doomed; however, Nahara’s determination to choose for herself implies that she, too, wishes to assert her own agency as a woman.
The beloved of Shirah, the husband of Channa, and the father of Aziza and Yonah, Ben Ya’ir is the charismatic and silver-tongued leader of the Zealots at Masada. Like most warrior Zealots. Ben Ya’ir wears his hair long and braided. Yael describes him as grey-eyed and captivating without being particularly tall or handsome. What makes him attractive is his obvious physical strength and his commanding presence.
Ben Ya’ir is a complex character, since his decisions are often morally ambiguous. For instance, Aziza notes that he instructs the Zealots not to take women and children captive, which is a code for killing them. On the one hand, he does not believe in torture and enslavement, but on the other, he is too eager to dispense death. He also does not stand by the young Shirah when she gives birth to Aziza. Torn between his parents and wife and Shirah, Ben Ya’ir loses sight of the fact that Shirah is barely 13 at the time and very vulnerable to social ostracism. Shirah forgives Ben Ya’ir when he invites her to Masada and does not hide his love for her anymore. They rekindle their passionate affair.
As the Siege of Masada nears its end, Ben Ya’ir urges his people to choose an honorable death by suicide instead of surrendering to the Romans or falling prey to them as captives. He kills Shirah and then himself, with Shirah, in her final moments, contrasting Ya’ir’s belief that all humans are born to die with her own belief that all humans are born to live.
Yoav, or the Man of the Valley, is filled with unexpressed grief and trauma. After losing his beloved wife Zara to violence, Yoav, a shy, peaceful rabbi, transforms into a silent, self-destructive, and ruthless warrior. At Masada, he keeps away from his mother-in-law Revka and his sons Levi and Noah, who have stopped speaking after the attack on their mother. Revka notes that Yoav tortures himself by wrapping his forearms in wires of sharp-edged bronze—a form of self-flagellation forbidden to the Jewish people—and that his hair has turned prematurely white with grief.
Yoav’s self-destructive behavior lessens a little after his sons begin to speak again and he falls in love with Aziza. He refuses to slaughter women and children, unlike the other Zealots. Yoav realizes Aziza is a woman yet keeps her secret. This shows Yoav has the capacity to change, which makes him a dynamic character.
By Alice Hoffman
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