Point of View

The novel is written in the third person point of view. The narrator of the novel is obviously the author, James A. Michener. Michener helps the characters tell their story from the primitive days of Ur to the 1960s. Even though there is plenty of dialogue between the characters, Michener is the story teller that fills in the details of history.

The use of the third person has more advantages than the use of the first person. In the first person, the main storyteller would have to be present at all of the events, since the knowledge of the reader is confined to the knowledge of the storyteller. This situation is avoided by the use of the third person. Given the fact that the novel encompasses a time period that encompasses all of Judaism, there is no way the first person point of view could have...