‘The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel’ by Zora Neale Hurston

Review followed by an editor Q&A.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African American novelist, scholar, and filmmaker, was born to a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher in Alabama. In 1894, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where her father was elected mayor, and she discovered an early love for literature. The first of her family to attend college, she attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where she became active in the student newspaper and in the literary club. After earning her associate’s degree, she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College of Columbia University, the first Black student to attend (Chen 2025). While there, she took classes in anthropology from Franz Boas and worked alongside fellow students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She received a Bachelor of Arts in 1928 but continued to study at Columbia for two more years. During this time, Hurston published short stories and essays, becoming a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance alongside other African American scholars and artists, such as Alain Locke, Duke Ellington, and Langston Hughes, all challenging negative stereotypes of African Americans and celebrating their traditional cultures (see Charles Rivers Editors 2018; Murrell 2024). In 1937, she published her now-acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, set in Florida, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica, resulting in the ethnography Tell My Horse ([1938] 1990). In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and during the 1940s lived in Honduras, where she researched the cultures of mixed Indigenous and African communities like the Garifuna and Miskito. Hurston went on to publish an impressive number of empirical studies and ethnographic fictions; she also wrote plays like Color Struck ([1926] 2022) and (with Langston Hughes [1931] 2008) Mule Bone; and she made films to capture African American life in her hometown of Eatonville. Though these works attracted some attention during her lifetime, her later years found her in financial difficulty, and by the 1950s she supported herself by freelance writing, substitute teaching, and working as a maid and public assistant. After Hurston’s death in 1960, the quality of her work went largely unnoticed until Alice Walker published her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine (1975), stimulating new appreciation of her many contributions to both anthropology and literature. 

Clearly, Hurston led an exciting life, and her work was undoubtedly influenced by many individuals, from family members in Eatonville to colleagues in Harlem and contacts made in her international travels. As an anthropologist interested in the history of our discipline, I’m especially fascinated by the ways in which her writings—particularly her just-published The Life of Herod the Great—were shaped by Boas, a legendary teacher, and so it is that influence I focus on in this review. Readers who seek to know more about others who affected her work can consult her own account (Hurston 2010) and/or the various biographies that have built upon Walker’s efforts (see, for example, Hemenway 1980; Hurston et al. 2004), particularly those by Deborah G. Plant, an independent scholar of African American literature and co-founder of the University of South Florida’s Department of Africana Studies, who has devoted much of her career to exploring and preserving Hurston’s legacy in works like Zora Neale Hurston (2007) and Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom (1995)—works which led to Plant’s selection as editor of Herod and other Hurston works like Barracoon (2018). Those accomplishments are also what led me to invite her to share her perspective in the Q&A that follows this review.

According to Plant (2025), the manuscript for Herod was found among Hurston’s belongings at her Florida home after her death; it was about to be burned by a hired man when her friend, a local sheriff, intervened and put out the fire. Most of the novel was saved, though some pages were singed and several closing chapters lost. After restoration, it was published in January 2025, sixty-five years after its author’s passing.

One of Boas’s legacies to his students was the idea that human behavior should be studied scientifically—that is, using an empirical, nomothetic, and replicable approach. Commitment to the empirical inspired Hurston to research the life of King Herod (c. 72–4 B.C.E), whom she suspected had been unfairly maligned as the perpetrator of the “slaughter of the innocents” in the Book of Matthew. She therefore embarked on fifteen years of research into the world of the first century B.C.E, sifting through the works of ancient historians like Flavius Josephus (c. 37–100 C.E.), and concluding that, far from being the killer of infants, Herod had been a gifted and inspiring ruler of Galilee and Judea, a conclusion now accepted by most modern scholars (see, for example, Marshak 2015; Plant 2025). Hurston acknowledged that he had ordered some adult rivals and enemies killed but insisted that this was a common practice among politicians of the day and should be weighed in that context—an attitude embodying Boas’s concept of cultural relativism (Boas [1940] 1982). To bring her findings to a wide audience, she incorporated them into a novel, and the result was The Life of Herod the Great, which traces Herod’s development from a boy into a skilled soldier, dashing lover, and benevolent ruler, and never a killer of Jewish infants.

Another major theme in Boas’s work was the independence of race, language, and culture (Boas [1940] 1982). Hurston demonstrates this in Herod again and again as she traces the rise, fall, and melding of human groups in the Middle East as they interacted with the empires of Greece and Rome, their behaviors explainable by history and culture rather than by genetics. Herod’s own mother, Cypros, was a Jordanian Arab, and according to beliefs of the day, Herod could not be Jewish, since Jewish identity was matrilineal. However, he was raised as a Jew, self-identified as such, and was recognized as the ruler of Judea—a product of “nurture” more than “nature.” At the same time, he was deeply influenced by his relationships with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony of Rome and Cleopatra VII of Egypt, showing again that humans are shaped by cultural forces more than by biology.

As a work of fiction, Herod sometimes suffers from its author’s commitment to the empirical. Reluctant to ascribe thoughts and feelings to persons she has never observed or interviewed, she rarely gives deep insight into her character’s minds or hearts, giving the tale a rather dry, detached air. Her wish to chronicle the interaction of ethnic groups and their leaders as she shows the independence of race, language, and culture sometimes results in passages that are befuddling to the modern reader, for example: “now as the Damascenes, the people of Batanea and Auranitis, suffered greatly from the Trachonites, they finally complained to Varro, the President of Syria, and entreated him to write to Caesar about Zenodorus” (Hurston 2025, 303). Such passages also tend to slow the action and add more dry detachment to the narrative. However, at other points, she allows her role as novelist, as opposed to as scientist, to emerge when Herod is driven to have his second wife Marianne killed, and when, out of loyalty to his friend Antony, he rejects the amorous advances of Cleopatra. There, for a few pages, she allows herself to “get inside” her character’s thoughts and feelings, and her prose becomes significantly more propulsive as a result.

These examples illustrate a question that is inevitably raised when Hurston’s place in anthropology is considered, i.e., whether she should be identified as “an anthropologist” given her lack of a doctorate. There is no doubt that she followed Boas’s insistence on in-depth fieldwork through participant-observation; she did such research in the American South, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas, collecting rich troves of African American folklore and empirical data on dialects and customs. Some she published as non-fiction (see Hurston [1935] 1990; 2018), but much of it served as material for her novels (for example, Hurston 2006; 2008). Some scholars feel that ethnographic fiction does not “count” as true anthropological work; others, like myself accept it without reservation (see McClaurin 2014; Rutsch 2017; and Freeman Marshall 2023). But there can be little doubt that carefully researched works like Herod constitute real contributions to our understanding of ancient cultures, and hence to anthropology broadly defined. Therefore, despite not having a doctorate and producing work in non-scholarly genres, she is commonly recognized as a pioneering anthropologist (see Harrison and Harrison 1998).

To me, one of the most intriguing aspects of Herod stems from Hurston’s apparent wish to be nomothetic, again following her teacher Boas’s example. In her commentary in the book, Plant states that “Hurston was ‘burning to write’ the story of the 3,000 years of struggle of the Jewish people for democracy and the rights of man” (2025, 333), and that Herod was intended as part of that story. Around 1947 she had submitted a proposal to her editor for a book called Just Like Us. In her pitch, she argued that “(the Jews) were fighting and dying in swarms for the thing in our own Bill of Rights thousands of years before the discovery of America, and so looked at without the veil of theology, can be said to be the very first Americans” (quoted in Menand 2025). In short, in her view, the “us” in her title are Americans (Menand 2025). During Herod’s reign, the people of Israel were continually fighting off incursions by the powers that surrounded them—a struggle for self-determination that persists to this day. Knowing this, it becomes possible to read her accounts of Herod as he defends Israel, extends protections to Jews in the diaspora, and extends rights to both Jews and other peoples living under his rule first in Galilee and then in Judea, as forerunners and models for American laws. Though Hurston never overtly identified with the Civil Rights Movement, it is certainly possible that she equated Jewish struggles for security with those of African Americans. Comparing the two cultures, an observer can draw a nomothetic generalization: namely, that extending human rights tends to increase satisfaction and productivity in populations that vary widely in time and space—a conclusion certainly relevant to today’s world, and an important one to try to replicate. As Boas once wrote, “a knowledge of anthropology enables us to look with greater freedom at the problems confronting our civilization” ([1932] 2021, xxiii). Undoubtedly, Hurston’s commitment to Boas’s principles was reinforced by her association with her fellow students, including Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Melville Herskovits, all of whom went on to contribute significantly to the discipline and to manifest Boas’s influence in their own unique ways (King 2019).

In conclusion, it’s my view that Herod is not a perfect novel. If its author had lived to revise it and to replace the final chapters that were lost to fire, it might well have been a better piece. But it remains a well-researched book and fascinating example of the ways in which Hurston’s knowledge of anthropology as conveyed to her by Boas shaped her literary works—one which stands today as an inspiring model for those interested in writing ethnographic fiction. As such, it should be read and enjoyed by all who value Hurston’s and Boas’s many contributions to our field.

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Editor Q&A

Conducted by Karen L. Field (KLF) with Deborah G. Plant (DGP) over phone in February 2025

In recent times, whenever I write a book review, I try to enlist the book’s author or editor to do a brief Question-and-Answer session eliciting their own perspectives on their work. I have found that readers enjoy this feature and say that it helps to “humanize” the work. Deborah G. Plant, the Hurston scholar who edited and wrote a commentary for The Life of Herod the Great, kindly agreed to do a phone interview on February 6, 2025, before I had completed my review. I then allowed her time to review my notes and make corrections, and I added the citations as needed. I know that I found her insights fascinating, and I hope you will too.

KLF: When did you first find out that you’d be editing the work, and how did you feel about the idea?

DGP: Well, I had known that the manuscript was in the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections for quite a while, and I first looked at it in 2006 or 2007. Around that time, I had gotten tentative approval to begin the process of preparing the manuscript for publication. Other scholars had seen the manuscript and had concluded that it wasn’t publishable because it had too many flaws and the content was too dense to appeal to general readers, but that was not my impression at all. In 2018, I submitted a formal proposal to the Zora Neale Hurston Trust to edit the manuscript for publication. In 2020, I submitted a revised proposal, which was finally accepted. In spite of the intervening years, my reaction was absolutely positive—I felt that all things unfold in a manner that seems ordained! I was really compelled by Hurston’s passion for this work; in one of her letters, she wrote that she was “under the spell of a great obsession.” Maybe that was because she’d been wondering about Herod ever since, as a child, she heard stories about him from her father, who was a preacher and pastor, and her mother, who taught Sunday school.

KLF: Now that you’ve delved deeply into the work, what do you think of Herod as Hurston portrays him?

DGP:  Hurston states in one of her letters that in most circles Herod was once viewed as a “mean little butcher.” This one-dimensional profile of Herod was constructed by certain members of the Jewish priesthood who felt threatened by the social and political changes unfolding at the time. A major factor in Herod’s ill-repute was the charge that he ordered “the slaughter of the innocents.” Based on her research findings, Hurston concluded that this heinous story of Herod’s failed attempt on the life of the Christ child was a complete fabrication. Thanks to Hurston, I see Herod differently. Like Hurston, my negative image of Herod came from the church. Not only was I persuaded by Hurston’s argument, but I also found her perspective affirmed by contemporary historians like Adam Marshak (2015), Czajkowski and Eckharddt (2021), Gaza Vermes (1981) and Martin Goodman (2024). I also tend to agree with Hurston’s view of Herod as a “beauty-loving soul…” Look at the fabulous palaces and temples he had constructed, which are evidenced in the excavation of Herodium in the 1960s and ’70s, revealing the lavish self-adornment in which Herod indulged. I also perceived him as a skilled soldier, politician and administrator who worked to remove bandits from Galilee and bargained with Rome to the benefit of Judea, eventually bringing peace and prosperity to the nation and surrounding territories. All in all, Herod is a remarkable figure of the first century B.C.E. Certainly, I recognize that he committed violent acts—like having some of his political rivals and enemies killed. No matter the rationale, I personally don’t condone acts of violence. And yet, this was par for the course in Herod’s day. And as Hurston pointed out in her preface and introduction to the novel, Herod cannot he separated from the social and political milieu into which he was born and in which he reigned

KLF:  Where do you see The Life of Herod the Great fitting into the body of Hurston’s work, especially her anthropological work?

DGP:  I see it as the most recent part of the “arc” of her anthropological work, an arc that begins with her research for Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (2018), which was a work of ethnographic genius. Barracoon is about one of the last enslaved Africans to be “illegally” brought to America and enslaved in Alabama. As it documents the journey of Oluale Kossola from Bante, West Africa, to Alabama, it also documents the (sometimes painful) process of acculturation. Assimilation and acculturation were also at the heart of the social and political upheavals in Judea during Herod’s reign. The research she conducted for The Life of Herod the Great allowed her to put together a fascinating account of how Jews of that era were being exposed to Greek, Roman, and Persian cultural influences. She highlights a newer religious sect, the Essenes, who promoted a more inclusive view of religion, one in which “God is the Father of all people.” Jewish beliefs and attitudes had become more cosmopolitan, setting the stage for the diversity among Judeo-Christian institutions today. In Herod’s day, this movement was anathema to the Jewish priesthood, which responded by scapegoating King Herod as an embodiment of the perceived odious influences. As the Jewish priestly scribes would demonize Herod, early Christian “church fathers” would maintain the charge of infanticide, thereby subjecting Herod’s rule and reign to historical erasure. But as we know now, that didn’t work, and new groups like the Essenes promoted a more inclusive view of religion, one in which “God is for all people.” Jewish beliefs and attitudes became more cosmopolitan, setting the stage for the diversity it accepts today.

KLF:  Of course, there’s no way you can ask Hurston questions about her work, since she passed away in 1960.  But suppose you could—what questions would you like to ask?

DGP:  “Is she satisfied with the book we just published?” “Does it represent her vision?” “Is she pleased with us…?”  And with me, for I have dedicated myself to her work?  But you know actually, I don’t think I’d want to ask her anything. It’s really not necessary. If she were present, I think I’d prefer to just be in her presence. Maybe observe her… where she goes, what she does… listen to her talk to others. And maybe, not even that. Maybe just enjoy the silent and still presence. 

KLF:  Finally, what projects are you currently tackling, or are hoping to tackle in the future?

DGP:  I’m working on a book about Fort Pierce, Florida. That place was important to the great cosmic being that was Zora Neale Hurston; Fort Pierce and Eatonville are like bookends holding her life, but while a lot of her admirers travel to Eatonville, they’re much less aware of Fort Pierce. She had a home there, she’s buried there, and there are still at least two folks living there who knew her personally. And, that’s where she worked on her last draft of Herod. So I think it should also be a destination for those who revere her, and I hope my book will inspire them to go there.

KLF: On behalf off all of us at History of Anthropology Review, thank you so much!

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Works Cited

Boas, Franz. [1940] 1982. Race, Language, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

______. [1932] 2021. Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Routledge.

Charles Rivers Editors. 2018. The Harlem Renaissance: The History and Legacy of Early Twentieth Century America’s Most Influential Cultural Movement. North Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.   

Chen, Emily. 2025. “Inaugural Zora Neale Hurston Summit Celebrates Hurston’s ‘Life, Legacy, and Work’.” Columbia Daily Spectator, February 10, 2025.

Czajkowski, Kimberly and Benedikt Eckhardt. 2021. Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeman Marshall, Jennifer L. 2023. Ain’t I An Anthropologist? Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Goodman, Martin. 2024. Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Harrison, Ira B., and Faye V. Harrison, eds. 1998. African-American Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hemenway, Robert E. 1980. Zora Neale Huston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hurston, Lucy, and the estate of Zora Neale Hurston. 2004. Speak So You Can Speak Again. New York: Doubleday.

Hurston, Zora Neale. [1935] 1990. Mules and Men. New York: Perennial Library.

______.[1938] 1990. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Perennial Library.

______.[1926] 2022. Color Struck: A Play. Bristol: Read & Co. Books.

______.[1937] 2013. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Amistad.

______.2018. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” New York: Amistad.

______.2025. The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel. New York: Amistad.

Hurston, Zora Neale and Langston Hughes. [1931] 2008. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. New York: Amistad.

King, Charles. 2019. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. New York: Doubleday.

Marshak, Adam. 2015. The Many Faces of Herod the Great. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

McClaurin, Irma. 2014. “Zora Neale Hurston: The Making of an Anthropologist.” Savage Minds, 27 December 2014. https://savageminds.org/2014/12/27/zora-neale-hurston-the-making-of-an-anthropologist/.

Menand, Louis. 2025. “Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews.” The New Yorker, 20 January 2025.

Murrell, Denise. 2024. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plant, Deborah G. 1995. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

______.2011. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 

_______.2025. “Commentary: A Story Finally Told” in Zora Neale Hurston, The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel. New York: Amistad.

Rutsch, Poncie. 2017. “Novelist Zora Neale Hurston was a Cultural Anthropologist First.” WHYY, 18 March 2017.

Vermes. Geza. 1981. Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

This piece was edited by Bethany G. Anderson and Allegra Giovine.