These intervals are also opened up by prefatory scenes in the present called "The Tell" which deal with Cullinan, who is at Makor on a five year dig, and Vered Bar-El, and Israeli expert in dating pottery, "a dark haired lovely Jewess from Bible times." (He falls in love with her she will not go against her faith to marry a non-Jew.) However 95% of the book turns from the excavation to a reconstruction affording a synoptic view of Judaism, its religion, history and culture. Michener, whose globe-trotting (Hawaii, Afghanistan, etc.) makes him a sort of Lowell Thomas of the novel, extends his reach and his grasp this time to include not only the country of Israel, but 11,800 years of its history and religion in sequences relating to some artifact at the site (a flint, a phial, a Menorah, a coin, etc.). This endless diorama of gods, graves and a scholar begins at the archaeological site of an American, Cullinan, at Makor (in old Hebrew- The Source).
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