The Source

The Source is a historical novel by the American writer James A. Michener, published in 1965 by Random House.

The book is organised around an archaeological excavation at a mound in Israel, where the diggers work down through the layers left by successive civilisations. Each layer opens into a story about the people who lived on that ground: a pagan Canaanite community and its gods, the arrival of monotheism, the Romans, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the Jewish communities of the diaspora who return to the land. Among the recurring figures is a family whose line the novel follows across the centuries, and the dig itself carries a contemporary plot about the politics of the new state in 1964.

Michener wrote long novels that take a place or a subject and follow it across a great span of time, and this one covers the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from pre-monotheistic days through to the establishment of the modern state, closing in 1964.