The Third Temple

by Yishai Sarid, Yardenne Greenspan (Translator)

Overview

Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?

In a near-future Jerusalem, harrowing omens plague the city: a desecrated altar, an unbearable stench, a rampant famine. Shaken but devout, Jonathan, the royal family’s third son, continues to hold services and offer animal sacrifices at the prophesied Third Temple, built to consecrate the founding of the new Kingdom of Judah. His father, Israel’s self-appointed king, has abolished the Supreme Court. The Torah is the law of the land, and only people of the Jewish faith are allowed in. When war breaks out and an angel of God begins to torment Jonathan, warning him of his father’s sacrilege, the foundations of the young priest’s faith—and then his world—begin to give way.

Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Third Temple plunges readers into a tempest of fanaticism, betrayal, and destruction. Where does the power of man end and the power of God begin? With chilling resonance, this vivid novel from one of Israel’s leading authors sounds an unforgettable warning amidst rising extremism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632063908
Publisher:	Restless Books
Publication date:	11/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Yishai Sarid was born in Tel Aviv in 1965 to Dorit and Yossi Sarid, a prominent Israeli left-wing MP and cabinet member. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces for six years as an intelligence officer, Sarid studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later earned a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is an active lawyer and arbitrator, practicing mainly civil and administrative law. To date, Sarid has published eight novels that have been translated into a dozen languages and awarded numerous accolades, including the Bernstein Prize, the Brenner Prize, and the Levi Eshkol Literary Award for Hebrew literature, and in France, the Grand prix de littérature policière. Sarid lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Rachel Sion Sarid, an intensive care pediatrician, and their three children.

Yardenne Greenspan (Tel Aviv, now based in New York) is a writer and Hebrew translator. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin’s Press, Akashic, Syracuse University, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Yardenne’s writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Literary Hub, Blunderbuss, Apogee, The Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares.

Editorial Reviews

"Yishai Sarid's books might outlive his country: that is the message he bears with beauty and with pain." — Joshua Cohen, author of the The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

”A powerful, visionary work that will leave you breathless. Yishai Sarid has written an unsettling—one could say prophetic—reflection on faith, zeal, and the consequences of ideological extremism. This is a book that feels prescient and urgent: a gripping, insightful novel that serves as both a reflection of our times and a warning for the future of religion and politics in one of the world’s most contested regions.” — Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

"A masterful indictment of fundamentalist and messianic ideologies, and a probing meditation on Jewish power and powerlessness over time, the book is written with a great deal of integrity and soul — and is perhaps the most essential Israeli novel in recent memory." — Ranen Omer-Sherman, Jewish Book Council

"Yishai Sarid is arguably the most inventive Israeli novelist of his generation." — Le Monde

"The most apocalyptic, futuristic, historical, and perhaps also most realistic novel published in Israel in recent years. . . . Sarid holds the reader in thrall." — Haaretz

"The Third Temple doesn’t find this bloodlust a productive response to a sensitive conflict, nor does it think a Jewish State can weather today’s world while isolated from other nations. It suggests, instead, at every turn, that there is no going back to a past that was, in all likelihood, better in retrospect. Ultimately God, whether He dwells among his people or not, can’t save us from ourselves." — PJ Grisar, Forward

“The project is audacious, and the masterful orchestration of the story and its poetic tone are at the height of this audacity. And so are the questions it raises. . . Beautiful and chilling.” — Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire

“An extreme novel that reads like a warning.” — Biblioteca Magazine

“Sarid has emerged as a polished storyteller whose writing is lucid, almost transparent, and poetic even though he consciously avoids any poetic pretense. . . The Third Temple is well written, precise and sharp, and its dialogue with Hebrew literature as well as speculative literature is deep and fertile.” — The Bernstein Prize Committee

"If in 2015, Yishai Sarid’s book read like apocalyptic science fiction, a warning meriting consideration, reading it today, I found myself wondering if it might not be too late to avert the apocalypse it envisions." — David B. Green, A blog about art, politics and shared society in Israel

From the Publisher

★ 2025-01-18
In Israeli writer Sarid’s latest novel, an extremist form of Zionist Judaism takes hold in near-future Israel, leading to its downfall.

Jonathan is the third son of a priestly royal family. He is in Israel, but it is an Israel post-“Evaporation.” A right-wing, religious, Jewish supremacist movement has wiped out the “Amalekites” and their mosques, and the ancient Temple has been resurrected for its third iteration, restoring Jewish life to the period of high priests and sacrifices and inner sanctums. As our narrator sits in prison on the brink of his fate, after the monarchy has collapsed, the conditions that led to this moment unfold through his reflections. Through his chronicles, we gain a fuller picture of his individual struggles, which in the hands of a lesser writer might be overshadowed by the dramatic stakes of the novel’s sociopolitical landscape; thankfully, Sarid is as attuned to psychodramas as he is to sociopolitical conflicts. We learn about an injury as a result of a terrorist attack during his childhood that rendered him impotent. We learn of his romantic yearnings and disappointments. We learn of the biblical visions that haunt him. All the while, the fate of Israel hangs in the balance. As in all good dystopian novels, The Third Temple’s hyperboles hold up a mirror to reality, forcing us to reflect on which parts of our current world have begun to resemble art more than life. Though the novel was published in Hebrew nearly ten years ago, it is prescient at this moment, serving as a warning about extremism that should ring an alarm for anyone concerned about the situation of the current Israeli state. This propulsive, cerebral novel shines in Yardenne Greenspan’s lucid and skillful translation. Just as impressive as the novel’s thematic boldness is its deep and broad fluency in Jewish history, religion, literature, and traditions.

A cautionary tale of biblical proportions that reads like a parable, or a prophecy.

Kirkus Reviews