Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of the history in the Bible.

My guest today is Daniel Liebenson from the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and the website, Judaism Unbound.

We're going to be discussing the novel The Secret Book of Kings by Yochie Brandes.

Hi, Dan.

Hi, Gary. Good to be here.

Good to have you here.

Now, let's get right into the book.

It's by an Israeli author.

It's been available in Hebrew for a while, and it's just been released into English. And it's by Yoki Brandes. Is that how you pronounce that name?

Yeah, you'd have to give it a heart, Joki Brandis.

Okay, yeah. I've given up on Hebrew gutterals. So I'll let you pronounce it from now on.

Now, she's a very well-known and

popular author in Israel, but until I counted this book, I'd never heard of her. Could you give

us first some background on the author? Sure. I mean, sure. Yochi Brandis is one of the biggest

best-selling authors in Israel, I think one of the top three or top five, she grew up in an

ultra-Orthodox home. Her father was actually a Hasidic rabbi of a very small Hasidic community.

And but she, when she grew up, she left that community and became basically, I would say, a liberal, traditional Jew,

but not an Orthodox Jew or an ultra-Orthodox Jew anymore.

And in her early novels, she wrote mostly about ultra-Orthodox women.

And only with the Secret Book of Kings, which at the time was called Malachim Gimel or the third book of kings, did she turn her attention to Jewish history in the ancient sense.

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