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When you see the title “Ben-Hur,” most people’s thoughts probably turn to the famous movie, with a young Charlton Heston playing Judah Ben-Hur (son of Hur). But few have actually read the book and, as is almost always the case, the book is a lot better than the movie and has far greater spiritual depth. It is long but very exciting, full of intrigue and drama, and is perfectly accessible at the high school reading level or above. After all, it was written for the popular audience in 1880, and became the best-selling American book of the 19th century, exceeding even Uncle Tom’s Cabin (another great book to read) in sales.
The author, Lew Wallace, was a Civil War general for the Union, commanding troops in the field in the Western theater of the war, and then doing many other tasks for the Union. In 1865, he was on the military tribunal for the Lincoln assassination conspirators, which included John Wilkes Booth, and he was in charge of the commission that investigated the commandant of the infamous Confederate prisoner of war facility, Andersonville. Wallace was a lawyer and a writer but was ambivalent about Christianity. In the 1870s, after talking to Robert Ingersoll, who was a famous critic and skeptic of the Bible, Wallace realized how little he knew about the Bible and Christianity. He read and researched extensively and conceived of the novel Ben-Hur, which he intended to use to display the religious and political atmosphere of the times around the earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. Before he wrote Ben-Hur, he was definitely not a Christian. After he wrote it, he was a firm believer in the Divine Son of God.
Wallace re-created the setting of the early AD world, both in cosmopolitan Jerusalem, where the Jewish leaders got along very well with the Romans, the Roman nobility in Rome, and the Jewish Zealots who hated Rome and wanted a military Messiah to come and destroy the Romans. Judah Ben-Hur moves through all of these settings, his life greatly changing as he goes, starting out first as a complacent son of a very rich Jewish trading house, then as a galley slave in a Roman warship, then as an adopted Roman noble, then using his recovered wealth to fund Zealot battle dreams, then finally as a new follower of the real Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. Interwoven is the story of Balthazar, one of the Magi who saw the Lord as a young child, Balthazar’s daughter, who embraced a more worldly lifestyle, Judah’s sister and mother, who were forced into leprosy, and Esther, the daughter of Judah’s faithful steward who preserved the riches of the House of Hur in the face of torture. Ben-Hur is a major American Christian classic and well worth reading – if a high school student doesn’t read it now then it should go on his or her bucket reading list!