The Bronze Bow
by Elizabeth George Speare
Summary
Daniel bar Jamin lost his parents to Rome years earlier, his father crucified as a rebel and his mother dead soon after from grief, and by the time the novel opens he works unwillingly as a blacksmith's apprentice while dreaming only of driving the Romans out of Galilee. He runs off to join Rosh, the leader of an outlaw band hiding in the hills, expecting a revolutionary army and finding instead a collection of thieves who steal as much from poor Galileans as from Romans. Disillusioned, Daniel returns to his village and starts training his own band of village boys in secret, binding them with an oath sworn on a bronze bow, a phrase borrowed from a psalm about a warrior's hands trained for battle. At home his sister Leah, terrified of strangers since their parents died, has barely left the house in years. Daniel keeps hearing about a traveling teacher named Jesus, and dismisses him at first as another voice preaching patience instead of revolt, until a bungled attempt to free his captured friend Joel gets one of his own followers killed and leaves his mute, powerfully built friend Samson taken prisoner by the Romans after Samson deliberately draws their attention away from the others. Grief and failure finally open Daniel to what Jesus has been saying about love outlasting hatred, and by the novel's end Jesus has healed Leah of her fear, freeing her to step outside again, while Daniel extends his own hand in forgiveness to Marcus, a Roman soldier who had shown him unexpected kindness, inviting him into the house to meet his sister.
It moves at the pace of an adventure story through its first half, all secret oaths and mountain hideouts, before slowing into something quieter and more demanding once Jesus enters the story directly. Speare never lets the religious material turn into a sermon, keeping it filtered through Daniel's stubborn, angry point of view so that his change of heart has to be earned rather than announced. Readers who come for a story about resisting Rome sometimes find the final chapters' turn toward forgiveness abrupt, though the book has stayed a staple of middle grade classrooms for exactly that unresolved tension between revenge and grace.
Historical Context & Significance
Houghton Mifflin published The Bronze Bow in 1961, and the American Library Association gave it the 1962 Newbery Medal over three honor books, Edwin Tunis's Frontier Living, Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Golden Goblet, and Mary Stolz's Belling the Tiger. It was Elizabeth George Speare's second Newbery Medal, following The Witch of Blackbird Pond in 1959, a repeat only a handful of authors in the award's history have managed.
Kirkus Reviews credited Speare with reentering first century Galilee and filling it with entirely human characters, while the critic and librarian Carolyn Horovitz argued the prose fell short of greatness and carried a certain commercial sameness. The novel's frank staging of Jewish characters alongside an idealized Jesus has drawn objections from both Jewish and Christian readers over the decades, and in 2006 the San Rafael City Schools pulled it from a social studies reading list after parents argued it glorified Jesus and vilified Jews, a decision local English teachers publicly protested as censorship. A television adaptation, Keeping the Promise, aired in 1997.