66 pages • 2 hours read
Francine RiversA Voice in the Wind
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Jerusalem” - Part 2: “Germania”
Chapter 1 Summary
The ancient city of Jerusalem teeters on the brink of destruction. Torn from within by rival political factions and besieged from the outside by the formidable Roman war machine, its future hangs by a thread. Amid the chaos, Hadassah, a young Jewish woman, watches her family die of starvation. Her father Hananiah, a Christian who preached about Jesus of Nazareth, is killed, a martyr to his belief. He brought his family to Jerusalem from Galilee to spread the word of Jesus even though many other Christians have fled the city. He and his fellow believers gather for Passover, and Hananiah tells the story of how, as a boy, he died of fever, and Jesus had brought him back from death. As a preacher, Hananiah suffers routine ridicule and beatings. His friends warn him to leave Judea, but he remains, claiming, “Whatever happens, this is where the Lord wants me” (9). His friends’ warnings having come true, Hadassah resents her father’s stubbornness, his faith, and his martyrdom which have left his family to fend for themselves.
Hadassah’s brother returns emptyhanded from a scavenging trip. He reports that dead bodies by the thousands are being dumped behind the temple. The stench of death fills the city. He fears that, left unchecked, the Roman soldiers will go on a killing spree throughout the city. The Roman commander, Titus, is the only thing reining in their hatred. As the siege of Jerusalem continues—both sides retreating and then surging forward—the Jewish forces lure the Romans into their holy temple and set it ablaze, killing the legionnaires inside. Thirsty for vengeance, the Roman army storms through the city, burning everything and killing everyone in their path. In their small house, Hadassah and her siblings can only wait to be found and killed themselves.
Eventually, the battle reaches Hadassah’s doorstep. A soldier, Tertius, forces his way in, kills her brother and raises his sword against Hadassah; but her frightened eyes “sapped the killing strength of his arm” (15). After ten years in Judea, Tertius’s hatred of the country and its people has fueled his bloodlust, but something about Hadassah suggests she is more “civilized.” He sheathes his sword, sparing her life, and drags her and her sister Leah through the corpse-strewn streets. They pass the Holy Temple, now ransacked and blackened from fire, and Tertius deposits them in the “Women’s Court,” a holding place for prisoners. During the night, Leah dies. The next morning, a legionnaire tosses her body into a wagon heaped with other corpses. Deemed unlikely to survive the march to Rome, Hadassah is denied food. Outside the city walls, Hadassah sees thousands of crucified Jews scattered across a devastated landscape as the Roman legions prepare to raze the city.
The captives are sequestered near the Roman commander’s camp, forced to watch the pomp and ritual of the Roman army’s victory celebration. Oxen are slaughtered in sacrifice and roasted for a great feast. The captives are fed rations of corn and barley, and even Hadassah is granted a portion by a young Roman soldier who cannot take his eyes off of her. She sits alone and eats, praying for strength. Hadassah wonders why she, the “weakest” and least faithful of all her family, is the only one to survive.
Chapter 2 Summary
As the Roman legions march west toward Rome, they are ambushed by the Bructeri, a tribe of Germanic warriors. Armed with spears and shields and clad only in simple cloaks, the warriors rely on the element of surprise, striking quickly and retreating once the Roman forces have recovered. Atretes, leader of the Chatti clan, kills as many Romans as he can before ordering his clansmen to retreat into the nearby forest. With his father among the dead, leadership of the tribe is now Atretes’s if he chooses. He fears the Batavian rebellion against Rome is failing, disproving the predictions of the seer Veleda. Atretes constructs a funeral pyre for his father, burning the body in accordance with tribal ritual. His mother insists the leadership is all but assured for him, but Atretes is ambivalent, preferring the adrenaline rush of battle to the responsibilities of leadership. When the high priests offer him the sacred horns of leadership, however, he accepts. He understands he is destined for this role. After an elaborate ritual, Atretes is anointed chief, and his first task is to pass judgment on a deserter. After declaring the man guilty, the clansmen throw him into a bog where he sinks to his death.
On their next ambush, Atretes is hemmed in and isolated by the Roman legions, their commander wanting to kill him first to sever the head of the snake. Atretes battles Roman soldiers one-on-one, each legionnaire wanting the blood of the “barbarian” chief on his sword, but the Germanic warrior dispatches them easily. Wanting Atretes captured alive, the Roman commander orders his legions to fight defensively until a group of them disarm the clan chief and knock him unconscious. He awakens, chained to a table. The Roman commander enters with a merchant who buys Atretes for the gladiator games, assuming he survives the journey to Capua, a city in the southern part of Italy.
Parts 1-2 Analysis
Rivers’s narrative thus far traverses a wide swath of ancient Europe shortly after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Opening with the Roman siege of Jerusalem and moving to the shadowy forests of tribal Germania, Rivers’s thorough research and eye for detail is evident. Battles are depicted with vivid accuracy, the names of weapons and their tactical use woven easily into the narrative. From the specifics of Germanic death rituals to the clothing worn by various Jewish sects, her ancient world lives and breathes with the heat of the Judean sun and the stench of the city’s rotting corpses. Amid the fetid odors and barbarism of battle, two protagonists emerge: Hadassah, the young Jewish woman spared death at the hand of a Roman soldier, and Atretes, the fierce Germanic chieftain captured by the Romans and sold into slavery. How—and if—their paths cross is uncertain, but the struggles of Hadassah and Atretes will likely inform much of the novel’s conflict.
At this point, the novel’s religious themes are consigned to Hadassah’s immediate family—her father was a Christian preaching to a community of devout Jews—and to the bias of one religion against the others. The Romans consider the Jews barbarians. Likewise, the Jews and Christians view the polytheism of the Romans as pagan. Even within the walls of the holy city of Jerusalem, internecine conflict rages among various Jewish sects and between the Jews and Christians, who ironically have a common enemy in the Roman Empire. A cultural clash also arises between the “civilized” Romans—urban dwellers—and the “barbarians” who live in the forests of Germania, half naked warriors who are considered feral animals compared to the Romans with their rigidly structured culture. Any language other than Greek or Latin is viewed as savage. However, a touch of fetishization of that savagery is also apparent in the objectification of Atretes. Both repulsed by his animalism and allured by his brute strength, Malcenas, the Roman merchant who buys Atretes, “admired the straining muscles of the powerful young body. Oiled, he would look like a bronzed god” (39). These characters exhibit the duality of fear and excitement that signifies the exoticization of unfamiliar races and cultures. Underlying all of these biases and assumptions is the idea that a culture which doesn’t conform to what is familiar is inherently inferior. Unfortunately, this fear of difference drives the massive slaughter associated with the expansion of the Roman Empire.
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