Ben-Hur Read online

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  Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

  BEN-HUR © 2016 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. and Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover and insert photographs copyright © 2016 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. and Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover photograph of travertine stone copyright © silverspiralarts/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of metal plates copyright © Andrey Kuzmin/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of golden background copyright © Hillman/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Interior photograph of marble tile copyright © Gray wall studio/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Book cover and interior design by Nicole Grimes

  Edited by Erin E. Smith

  Published in association with Dupree/Miller & Associates, Inc.

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All Rights Reserved.

  Scripture quotations in chapters 1, 2, and 3 are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,® NIV.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

  Scripture quotations in the extra features are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All Rights Reserved.

  Ben-Hur is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wallace, Carol, date. | Wallace, Lew, date. Ben-Hur.

  Title: A tale of the Christ / Carol Wallace ; based on the novel by Lew Wallace.

  Description: Carol Stream, Ill. : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015033841| ISBN 9781496411051 (hc) | ISBN 9781496411068 (sc) | ISBN 978-1-4964-1107-5 Collector’s Edition

  Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Fiction. | Tiberius, Emperor of Rome 42 B.C.-37 A.D.—Fiction. | Bible. New Testament—History of Biblical events—Fiction. | GSAFD: Christian fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3573.A42563 T35 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033841

  Build: 2016-05-09 16:14:03

  In memory of my father, William Noble Wallace, the family historian

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Part 1 Chapter 1: Wonderment

  Chapter 2: The Road to Bethlehem

  Chapter 3: Glory

  Part 2 Chapter 4: Youth

  Chapter 5: Disaster

  Chapter 6: Water

  Chapter 7: Shuttered

  Part 3 Chapter 8: Afloat

  Chapter 9: A Slave

  Chapter 10: Chains

  Chapter 11: Flaming Sea

  Chapter 12: Adrift

  Chapter 13: Roman

  Part 4 Chapter 14: Broken

  Chapter 15: Many Gods

  Chapter 16: A Damsel

  Chapter 17: Darkness

  Chapter 18: Secret

  Chapter 19: Oasis

  Chapter 20: In the Tents

  Chapter 21: Dust

  Chapter 22: Luck

  Chapter 23: Horses

  Chapter 24: Unveiled

  Chapter 25: Son of Hur

  Chapter 26: Who?

  Chapter 27: The King Who Will Come

  Chapter 28: A Jew

  Chapter 29: Sons of the Wind

  Chapter 30: Odds

  Chapter 31: Crowds

  Chapter 32: Speed

  Part 5 Chapter 33: A Message

  Chapter 34: Surprise

  Chapter 35: Doubt

  Chapter 36: Return

  Chapter 37: Unclean

  Chapter 38: Free

  Chapter 39: Home

  Chapter 40: Stones

  Chapter 41: Caves

  Chapter 42: The Living Dead

  Chapter 43: Sword and Shield

  Part 6 Chapter 44: The Desert

  Chapter 45: Iras

  Chapter 46: Jordan

  Chapter 47: Jerusalem

  Chapter 48: Clean

  Chapter 49: Passover

  Chapter 50: Gethsemane

  Chapter 51: Golgotha

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Image Credits

  Film Stills from the Motion Picture

  Acknowledgments

  It was my nephew Tom Burns who prompted me to read Ben-Hur in the original form. John Kilcullen of LightWorkers Media then performed some magic and introduced me to Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, executive producers of the magnificent new film.

  Thanks go to my agent Emma Sweeney for her clearheaded advice and to Jan Miller and Lacy Lynch of Dupree/Miller & Associates for finding the right home for the project.

  I am deeply grateful to the team at Tyndale House: Karen Watson and Jan Stob on the acquisitions side; Nicole Grimes and Dean Renninger in the art department; Ruth Pizzi for the maps; Caleb Sjogren, Danika King, and Sarah Mason Rische, wizard copy editors; Midge Choate, who kept us on schedule; Cheryl Kerwin and Katie Dodillet for getting the word out. I especially loved working with editor Erin Smith, who has been meticulous, humorous, tenacious, and unbelievably fast.

  The General Lew Wallace Study and Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, was a major resource for our book, so we are all grateful to director Larry Paarlberg and associate director Amanda McGuire.

  Richard Bayles, with a casual suggestion, gave me the ending—just one more instance of his generosity.

  My husband, Rick Hamlin, has, as always, been endlessly encouraging, supportive, and practical. I depend on his judgment in so many ways.

  And my father, William Wallace, an author like his great-grandfather Lew, a devotee of American history, would have been tickled pink to see this book.

  Foreword

  Maybe you grew up with Ben-Hur. Maybe your family watched the movie every Easter. You’ve probably come across clips of the chariot race on TV award shows—they’re certainly all over YouTube. Maybe there’s an image in your head, right now, of the 1959 film’s logo, those massive stone letters spelling out Ben-Hur.

  I grew up with Ben-Hur too, but in a different way, because my great-great-grandfather wrote the original book. Ben-Hur was published in 1880 and, for over fifty years, was the bestselling novel in America. That meant there were copies of it everywhere in our house because people kept giving them to us.

  It didn’t mean we read the novel, though. We were a bookish family and happily devoured almost anything between covers, but Ben-Hur was too much of a challenge. It stood to reason that there was a story in there somewhere—why else would it have been adapted for the stage and the movies? We just couldn’t find the excitement buried in Lew Wallace’s old-fashioned prose.

  A first printing, first edition copy of Ben-Hur

  But recently I picked up an old dark-blue hardcover (with an inscription dated 1892 on the inside cover) and sat down to read in earnest. It was work, I have to admit. The plot moves very slowly and
the dialogue was obviously written to sound antique. Characters swear in Latin, for instance. What’s more, the descriptions of settings and scenery last much longer than they need to. In 1880, before much of the Middle East had been photographed, those details were new and exotic. Now they just get in the way of the action.

  All the same, I finally understood the durable appeal of Ben-Hur. It’s both exciting and moving. Lew Wallace, an Indiana lawyer and author, was inspired to write the novel as an exploration of his Christian faith. The adventures of the heroic Judah Ben-Hur dramatize the moral and spiritual choices so urgently presented in the early days of Christianity. In the original novel, the famous chariot race is certainly the most iconic scene. But it lasts only eleven pages and occurs two-thirds of the way through the book, which means there’s much more to our hero’s story. Judah Ben-Hur’s heart and soul are at stake.

  BEN-HUR SCREEN ADAPTATIONS

  MGM has made Ben-Hur into a major motion picture three times: a silent film in 1925, the award-winning epic in 1959, and a 2016 movie. The 1925 and 1959 films were the most expensive movies of their times, costing $4 million and $15 million respectively.

  The story was also developed as an animated feature in 2003 and as a miniseries (in a limited release) in Canada and parts of Europe in 2010.

  As a writer, I could see the potential in my great-great-grandfather’s much-loved book. It could be brought up to date with some cutting, some rearranging, more depth for the female characters, faster pacing, and contemporary language.

  So here it is, a lively retelling of a story that has excited and enlightened millions of readers around the world for over 125 years.

  Carol Wallace

  Lew Wallace under the beech tree outside his Indiana home, where he wrote much of Ben-Hur

  When I sit down finally in the old man’s gown and slippers, helping the cat to keep the fireplace warm, I shall look back upon Ben-Hur as my best performance.

  LEW WALLACE, 1885

  Saturday Night, an original Lew Wallace sketch

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  WONDERMENT

  Was this it?

  He sighed and shifted his weight, which the camel took as a signal to stop. Did the camel sigh?

  No. It stood still with perfect patience at the top of a gritty rise. The dry, hot wind teased shards of sound from the bells on its harness. As Balthasar sat motionless in the howdah, other noises came to him: the rattle of pebbles from the camel’s last step, the fluttering corner of the howdah’s awning. Anything else?

  The wind itself. No more than that.

  Balthasar shaded his eyes and squinted into the distance before him. It was inaccurate to say there was nothing there. The ground rose and fell slightly. Thornbushes grew low to the ground. The color of the sandy soil changed from ivory to gray to russet, dyed by the minerals in the rocks that the wind, over thousands of years, had ground down to sand.

  Camels with howdahs

  But this was not the place. Once again the camel began to move, obeying a signal Balthasar had not given.

  He tried not to sigh again as the camel plodded onward. He tried not to wonder. He tried not to think of solitude in the desert and the hard quality of the sky at noon. He tried not to fret about water. Water had always appeared on this journey. Strange, untouched puddles materialized—once even a leather flask rolling as if just dropped. He had been cautious at first, dismounting and tasting each new supply in case it were brackish or tainted, but the water was always clean and fresh. And cool.

  No one knew better than an Egyptian the value of fresh, cool water in the desert.

  If there was one form of reassurance on this lunatic voyage, it was the water. Balthasar had prepared as much as possible for the journey, and the camel bore ample provisions for both of them. Water was the insoluble problem, and he had set out with no firm notion of how he would find it. But that was because he did not actually know where he was going. Just . . . north.

  Nor did he know now, as the sun began to tilt away from its brazen vertical peak. He only knew that he had felt compelled, and still did. He thought perhaps he was traveling to find something. He only hoped he would recognize it.

  Three days later the vegetation had changed from thorny scrub to the repetitive waves of sand dunes. He and the camel had trudged past a dry riverbed in which a broad band of clear water glittered. There had been one lonely palm tree. After they had passed it, Balthasar had turned around several times to reassure himself it was really there. Men went mad in the desert. Perhaps he was one of them. Yet at the same time he began to feel anticipation. Something would happen, and soon. The desert had been veiled in mist that morning, and now as the sun climbed higher, Balthasar felt something new in the vast currents of air around him. He scanned the horizons—nothing. Though the camel seemed more alert.

  When the sun was right overhead, the camel stopped, as it had done every day, and knelt with its usual plunging awkwardness. Balthasar climbed stiffly out of the canopied howdah and walked around the camel, feeling the firm, hot sand shifting beneath his feet as the sun hammered his shoulders. He unstrapped his pack and fed the camel, then used some water from a flask to sponge the camel’s eyes clear of dust. This was another mystery: despite their endless days in the desert, neither he nor the camel seemed to suffer hardship. Balthasar had traveled before; he knew how a thorn could fester, how sun could parch skin. But the camel’s coat was still white, the hump still solid despite inadequate rations. Balthasar himself felt strong and well, though crossing the desert at his age was a ridiculous project.

  And now he began to unpack the tent. Until today he had been content with the shelter provided by the howdah. At night he slept at the camel’s side, though he suspected the camel didn’t like it. But the camel had all along seemed immune to his doubts, Balthasar thought. Whatever strange errand he was performing, the camel believed in it wholeheartedly.

  Or perhaps that was fanciful. Still he erected the tent. By the time he had the red-and-white fabric stretched over the center pole and pegged into the sand, his shadow followed him like a black rind on the ground. Still he continued working. As the camel watched, he brought out wicker baskets and set them on the carpet laid in the tent’s shade. There were dates and pomegranates, smoked mutton, unleavened bread, and three small flasks of wine.

  Three. Food and drink for three. There in the middle of the desert. But that, too, was part of the compulsion. Balthasar had known from the start that he would meet two others. Out here. On the same mission. Or he had believed it, at least. At the beginning. And apparently now.

  He stepped out of the tent. Everything was ready. This was the place and, he thought, the hour. He had made his voyage in faith. He shaded his eyes and looked eastward. The sun burned through the patterned kaffiyeh wrapping his head and the white cotton of his long, sashed kameez. He turned away, then looked back at the eastern horizon. There was a nick in it. A dark fleck—oh, tiny!

  Then, surprisingly fast, not so tiny. Nor so dark. It was another white camel. Carrying another man. Balthasar’s knees suddenly felt weak, and a chill went through him despite the hot, dry breeze. It was true, then? For an instant he felt shock, even revulsion. Somehow he grasped that his world had just been upset by a wholly new force. True, he had obeyed unreason to set out alone on this undefined mission—but he had retained a thread of skepticism. And fatalism; if he were to die in the desert, so be it. God the most knowing willed it thus.

  But the sight of the distant man on the camel felt uncanny. Balthasar turned away, half-hoping to make the man vanish. The touch of God, it seemed, was no comforting thing. And it was insistent, too—for another moving fleck had appeared, this time traveling from the north.

  When the two travelers converged at Balthasar’s tent, only the camels were unperturbed. They accepted each other as peers, magnificent ships of the desert. Each one alone would have attracted admiration in any bazaar from Carthage to Damascus; the three, with their pri
ncely howdahs and glittering harnesses, were worthy of an emperor. But unlike the camels, each man seemed prey to the same strong emotions: wonder and fear and gratitude, along with the dawning of tremendous hope.

  TRADITIONAL NAMES OF THE MAGI

  While the Bible does not specify how many magi visited Jesus, nor their names, the tradition of the three men named Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar comes from two early manuscripts: a sixth-century Greek document and an eighth- or ninth-century text of Irish origin, attributed (probably wrongly) to Bede the Venerable.

  The first arrival clambered down from his camel, crossed his hands on his chest, and bent his head in obvious prayer before approaching Balthasar. He was a Hindu, it appeared, wearing the turban and red leather slippers of the eastern lands. The two turned to face the third arrival, whose fair skin and golden hair identified him as a Greek. The three embraced formally, and Balthasar led his two guests into the tent, where he washed their feet and hands as good hosts do. Then they sat down, looking at each other. After a moment’s hesitation, all of them bowed their heads to bless the meal, saying, “Father God, what we have comes from you. Accept our thanks and bless us to do your will.”

  Then they looked up and their eyes met in shock. Each man had used his own language, unknown to the others. But they had understood each other perfectly. Again Balthasar felt that icy touch of the truly strange.

  The Hindu was named Melchior; the Greek, Gaspar. Each man had the same experience as Balthasar: a spiritual search lasting a lifetime, intense study, and finally the mystical call. As Melchior put it, “I saw a light. I heard a voice, and it told me that redemption for mankind was at hand.”