Caldwell spent nearly half a century writing this novel. She began her first version at nine and finished it at twelve. She revised it when she was twenty-two, and at twenty-six she began her third version, this time allotting more emphasis to the medical element. It was not until her visit to the Holy Land in 1956 that she seemed to acquire the spark necessary to ignite the book's success. Even so, critics deplored her heavy-handed reproduction of the Biblical period and her lavish overwriting. She did not use any of the archaic language of the King James Version of the Bible, nor many words of Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, and some critics found this objectionable.

Some claimed to detect the obtrusive evidence of multiple rewritings. Yet for all these apparent flaws, it is her genuine ability as a storyteller, her strength of narrative technique, that prevails and brings...