Reviewers use all sorts of adjectives to describe inspirational fiction author Tessa Afshar’s work. Words like whimsical, intriguing, romantic, prophetic, faith-filled, daunting, grace-filled, dangerous, redeeming, heart-pumping, heart-stirring, sad and joyful – all at once.
That’s Tessa.
Hi, I’m your host, Julie Wheeler. And on this week’s show, historical fiction author Tessa Afshar talks about her latest release, The Persian King, set in Babylon in the sixth century BC.
And she shares something of her remarkable life; at 14 years of age, speaking no English, moving from the Middle East to a British boarding school, and then becoming a Christian in her early twenties and completing a Masters in Divinity at Yale.
Best-selling romance author Debbie Macomber says of her work: “No one brings the Bible to life like Tessa Afshar.”
Our Giveaway this weekOur Giveaway this week is Mystery with Romance, a group of best-selling authors once again joining together to offer a great range of books for you to choose from and download for FREE including Sadie’s Vow, Book #1 in my latest trilogy Home At Last.
DOWNLOAD MYSTERY WITH ROMANCE EBOOKShttps://books.bookfunnel.com/freebookspg13mysteryromance/tm6fhkvpt0
And remember – if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.
Links for things mentioned in this episodeSong from Psalm 137
By The Waters of Babylon Boney M: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FgDles4xq8
And Don Mclean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBy_b7z_dU
Herodotus: Greek historian and biographer; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
Philippians 2: 10 – 11 Every knee shall bow
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%202%3A10-11&version=NIV
The Medes: https://www.britannica.com/place/Media-ancient-region-Iran
The Persians: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/persian-empire/
Women Who Risk by Tom and Joann Doyle: https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Risk-Secret-Agents/dp/0785233466
The re-telling of Ruth: In The Field Of Grace – Tessa Afshar: https://www.amazon.com/Field-Grace-Tessa-Afshar/dp/0802410979
The Peasant King: https://tessaafshar.com/books/the-peasant-king/
The Hidden Prince: https://tessaafshar.com/books/the-hidden-prince/
Where to find Tessa Afshar onlineWebsite: www.tessaafshar.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTessaAfshar
Instagram: @tessaafashar
Introducing historical fiction author Tessa AfsharJenny Wheeler: But now here’s Tessa. Hello there, Tessa, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Tessa Afshar – Fiction in Ancient and Biblical timesTessa Afshar: Jenny, it’s an honor to be with you. I’m really looking forward to our time together and I hope that my New Zealand friends will enjoy our conversation, and everybody else around the world who’s listening to this podcast.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. So you know folk in New Zealand, do you?
Tessa Afshar: I don’t, it’s just one of those gorgeous countries I’ve always wanted to visit. I’ve heard so many amazing things about people from New Zealand and what I’ve seen on TV of your gorgeous country makes me want to come and hang out.
Jenny Wheeler: You’d certainly be known here to New Zealand readers because your fiction that you write, the inspirational fiction, both biblically and historically based, is described as “seriously good inspirational fiction.”
Tell us about your latest book, which is The Peasant King. That’s the one we’re going to be discussing today. It is a biblically based story and it goes right back to Babylon in the 6th century BC. A famous period, even to non-believers, that’s a famous period in history. Tell us about the background for that book.
Babylon and Biblical prophecyTessa Afshar: Yes, absolutely. I’d be delighted to. And first of all, thank you so much for telling me that the readers in New Zealand like my books. That makes me so happy.
The Peasant King, as you mentioned, is set during 6th century BC. This is about 50 years into the people of Judah being captive in Babylon. And according to the prophets at this point, we know that their captivity is supposed to end after 70 years, which is a mere 20 years from now, but no one knows how this is even possible.
Babylon is still the most powerful nation in the world and no one can beat them. So how can God’s promise be fulfilled at this point?
And we have bigger problems than the timeline when you study the Bible. You read that the prophet Jeremiah has foretold that Babylon is going to be conquered by the rulers of the Medes, but the king named by the prophet Isaiah at this point is the ruler of a poor country called Persia, not Medea.
And it’s 20 years before these prophecies have to be fulfilled and we are nowhere near the fulfillment of them. The King God has chosen as the rescuer of his people at this point has little power.
In fact, he pays tribute to the Medes who are the second most powerful nation in the world. So how is he going to become the king of the Medes and fulfill Jeremiah’s prophecy and be on his way to fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecies as well?
The whole thing seems hopeless, and that’s the background of The Peasant King. It tells a story of these impossible doors that God opens before the Persian king and how God fulfills Jeremiah’s promise.
It’s really about a year of miracles. That’s all in the background of the story.
By the waters of Babylon…Jenny Wheeler: Yes. There’s a famous psalm that refers to this period, Psalm 137, which talks about the captives sitting by a river in Babylon and their captors ask them to sing.
They obviously are well known as musicians and the psalm says, “how can we sing when we’re captive and we just want to lament.”
That has been picked up by a lot of popular musicians in our own time, and I can think of two.
I’m quite old and ancient now, but two in my lifetime, Boney M and Don McClean both had hit records referring to these verses in Psalm 1 37. Why do you think that it has such a resonance even for us today?
Tessa Afshar: I’m quite ancient myself, but I like even more ancient things like reading the Bible.
And I have to say, I think that Psalm would have been written closer to the initial captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.
So many decades before this period. And yet at the same time, I think that sense of it, that the weeping of the loss of it, is probably deeply embedded in the consciousness of these captives.
They have lost their whole nation. And to us, it’s resonant because all of us understand the experience of loss, the experience of loss of something big.
And I think particularly today, I live in the U. S. I’m a citizen of the U. S. even though I wasn’t born here, but I feel the change, the rapid changes of this culture, of this society.
And sometimes I can’t get my head wrapped around it. And sometimes I feel like the captives in Babylon and I want to sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep for what I feel is going.
And I feel like the world is in a place where I’m so unfamiliar. I’m a stranger. And as Christians, we are meant to be strangers in this world.
A stranger in a strange landThis was never meant to be our home. we’re renters. Our permanent home is elsewhere.
But I think that there are things that happen in life, whether on a personal level, or sometimes as in this period where it’s national events cause you to feel like truly a stranger and you want to sit and weep for what’s been lost.
Jenny Wheeler: The psalm does use that phrase, doesn’t it? A stranger in a strange land, I think that’s the sense of it, if not the actual words.
Tessa Afshar: Yes, exactly. And I think, as Christians, we understand that at the very core level, we are strangers in this world. We’re meant to be citizens of a heaven.
We’re meant to be residents of Eden and our citizenship is not here. It’s in heaven. There’s a part of us that always resonates with that sense of being strangers.
This is not the way it’s meant to be.
Jenny Wheeler: In your books you create a narrative which is wonderfully detailed and believable. But how much do we actually know historically from the sources of this period? And how much of it do you have to create from your imagination?
Tessa Afshar: What a great question, Jenny. For this particular book, as far as the Bible is concerned, the Bible in the prophecies tells us about this Persian king.
What it doesn’t tell us is how does this transformation happen? How does he go from being the ruler of a fairly small country with few resources to the head of an empire strong enough to overcome the Medes and the Babylonians, the two most powerful nations in the world.
Opening doors of bronzeWe are not given a glimpse into that transformation from the Bible, but the secular sources, the historians who are close to this time do provide us with quite a bit of information.
They are the ones who tell the story of the transformation. The thing that the Bible tells us is God promises this Persian king. He says, “I will equip you. I will go before you and I will open the doors of bronze before you.”
The doors of bronze symbolize that which is impossible for human hands to open, to break down. And God is saying, even though you don’t know me, I am going to do this for you. And then when you study the historical accounts. these secular accounts consistently say, ‘but this is impossible.’
How did he win that battle? This shouldn’t have gone this way. And that’s when you read it through the lens of the Bible, you realize the Lord really did equip him. The Lord really did open doors of bronze.
There is some detail that we know. My main characters are actually fictional and I’m telling their story alongside this whole historical account in the background.
There are many things we do know. The ancient Persians are also, to a large degree, tremendously mysterious to us because they don’t leave a whole lot of information about themselves.
I use what resources are available and then there are some things that I absolutely just have to make up or imagine or dream up.
Jenny Wheeler: Now those original sources, are they available in English or do you have to have help with translation? How does that work?
Tessa Afshar: Oh, goodness, no. People like Herodotus for example, the English is absolutely available and then there are secondary sources, scholars who’ve dug into these original sources and they have processed them and they are able to compare them.
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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Persian history seen through their enemy’s eyes
Because I’m not a historian, I write novels. And I need the help of those who are actual historians and are scholars in this area to say, yes this is what it was probably like.
And it’s really helpful because historians more recently in the last 20 years or so have discovered a lot more about Persians, because if you read the older modern sources, they’re not as reliable because they’re relying so much on only what the Greeks said without really putting it through a process of how reliable is this?
And the Greeks were the enemies of the Persians. If you read American history through the eyes of let’s say a Russian at this point or something like that.
You know that how they perceive things and how they described leaders is not necessarily always accurate.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I know what you mean. The Peasant King follows on from a previous book called The Hidden Prince and you can read them both as standalones, but they naturally fit together, telling similar events chronologically.
And in The Hidden Prince, the prophet Daniel appears as a pretty important secondary character.
He’s not quite one of the principal characters, but for a lot of people who know that name in the Bible, even if it’s just Daniel in the lion’s den, it was great to have all of the detail filled in around what life might’ve been for Daniel in this period.
Tell us about that first book and what inspired that.
Tessa Afshar: I consider these two books a duology. Created to be standalone, as you mentioned, but personally, my preference as a reader always is to read things in order.
So if you want to read one of these books, I would say pick up The Hidden Prince, which is 20 years before The Peasant King.
It’s the events of the childhood of this Persian king and again, two main fictional characters who play an important fictional role in the story that we do have from history.
Tessa’s primary goal – to write a fun storyAnd I love always bringing in biblical characters as secondary characters. So we get to know them a little bit.
We get to know the biblical background in a fictional setting. I don’t want my readers to pick up these books and feel like, oh my goodness, I just wanted a fun novel, and I feel like I’m reading a Bible study.
I want them to read an exciting story. I want to keep them up at night. I want them to laugh out loud.
I want them to get a few tears in their eyes and to have a genuine experience of reading a fun novel but at the same time to bring these threads both from the Bible, from these characters and from God.
Daniel is one of those few people in the Bible that we don’t get to see the negative side of. He’s presented at this as this incredibly brave, courageous and wise person.
And I really wanted to reveal him a little bit. There, is no mention by the way, in Daniel of whether he was married or not married.
Some scholars say he might have been a eunuch, but other scholars very strongly disagree. The Bible doesn’t say he is or he isn’t. The Bible is silent.
I came to the conclusion that he probably wasn’t. And so that meant. was he a single man into his late life or he never married, which is very unlikely for someone of his position and wealth.
I decided that he was married. If he wasn’t a eunuch, then I decided he was likely to be married.
And I gave him a wife just so he could have some enjoyment in my book. I guess now I also love the character of his wife and sons play a role in the story in The Hidden Prince.
So yeah, I think the role that Daniel plays is this character who is the older man with all the wisdom, with all the faith, who comes alongside the younger ones who are in their twenties and are struggling to understand, how do I live in this world as a captive?
And then when they fail, how do I survive my failures?
‘Historical fiction written in Biblical times’Jenny Wheeler: You write both historical fiction as well as biblical fiction. So you’ve got other stories which may not have a biblical origin, but are still set in the ancient world.
For you as an author, is there much difference between how you handle the biblical fiction and the historical fiction?
Tessa Afshar: Yeah, I think, I personally prefer the term historical fiction written in biblical times to biblical fiction because the way I look at the Bible.
There’s no fiction in the Bible, do you know what I mean? This is my source of truth with a capital T and I take that very seriously and novels by virtue of what they are inherently are made up to a large degree.
When you write historical fiction, the history informs the novel, but you’re still making stuff up. That’s the whole nature of it. Sometimes I have a main character who is in the Bible.
So my story about Rahab; my story about Lydia’ or the woman with the issue of blood. These characters are in the Bible, the main characters, I think that for me, is closer to what I would consider a biblical fiction, even though I would still prefer to call it fiction set in biblical times.
But the stories like The Hidden Prince or The Peasant King, which have central characters who are fictional for me, those are historical fiction.
Jenny Wheeler: In both books you refer to a verse in Deuteronomy which speaks of God’s ‘little by little’ approach. There’s a famous verse which a lot of people use to help them get through times when their patience is being tested about how God’s pattern often is to move little by little rather than do everything in one big rush.
I’ve seen some interesting comment that you’ve had online about this particular approach and how for our own times with instant gratification and particularly now with the digital age ‘little by little’ is even harder for us to accept than it might’ve been a few hundred years ago. Tell, talk a little bit about that.
Little by little the road to wisdomTessa Afshar: Jenny, I have to make a confession. I forgot that I had used that verse in The Hidden Prince as well.
I thought I was just using it in The Peasant King, which has, I think, a more central thread. And then I have a devotional coming out in the next year. So it’s part of the devotional as well.
And I think the reason this is been so much on my mind is because God has been really speaking to me through that verse in Deuteronomy, where God says to his people they’re about to come into the promised land. And he says, you will take the land little by little and not all at once. And he has a reason for that, because if they take it all at once, actually they won’t be able to be on top of it, so to speak.
I feel like our brains need to be retrained into the little by little because so many of the most important lessons of God are learned in the little by little places where when you are in pain or when you are longing for something, when there is a desire that’s unmet, you want an all at once answer.
You want the pain to go away. You want this emptiness to be filled, but it is in the little by littles, in the waiting places, in the learning to trust in God, places in the. believing in God for something places that our faith grows. As long as we receive things all at once, our faith remains childish and shallow.
But when our faith is tempered in the little by little places of God, where he teaches us to wait on him, I think that faith is much more powerful and deeper and more able to navigate this world, which sometimes can be so hard.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. You lived in the Middle East in a nominally Muslim family until your early adolescence. And then you were suddenly wrenched into life in an English boarding school, which you say very nicely, you survived. That must have been a very traumatic experience for you.
Tessa Afshar’s remarkable life storyTessa Afshar: In some ways it was. The reason I left my country of birth was that my parents divorced and my mom and my sister and I ended up going to England where I went to boarding school. So it wasn’t merely that I started attending boarding school. It was that I lost my language, my home, my father remained behind and he was the parent to whom I was particularly attached.
I lost my extended family, my friends, my food, there was a lot of loss. And that is tremendously wrenching. I think for me, that has taught me what it’s like to come into things as an outsider. And the Bible is full of people like that.
People like Rahab, people like Ruth. I think in many ways the Bible is a book of outsiders whom God turns into Insiders, those who belong to him. So I think that was an experience that I learned very early in life. And as hard as it was, Jenny, I feel like the Lord used it for great good in my life.
Jenny Wheeler: Now you converted to Christianity in your twenties, that also is quite a remarkable next step given your background. How did that come about?
Tessa Afshar: I was very blessed in that I was born to a very supportive family. My father, for example, never disciplined us kids. There were three of us, never once physically disciplined us. And part of that was because he was a physician and he didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time with us at home.
He was a very busy man and he said he didn’t feel he had earned the right to discipline us like that. I had a privileged upbringing. We were nominal Muslims, so my mother didn’t wear the hijab and we didn’t pray five times a day.
My father had been trained in medicine in France and so there was a lot of kind of westernized approach to life, although we also had a very Middle Eastern, very the Islamic worldview had left its mark for sure.
Part of that I always say, for example, even from an eternal perspective for Muslims, when you are thinking about eternity, do I go to heaven? Do I go to hell? Like your eternal destiny ultimately it comes down to.
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