Richard Elliott Friedman’s newest project is a work of historical fiction about a writer he first identified in his books Who Wrote the Bible? and The Hidden Book in the Bible. That writer was a woman who lived in Jerusalem three thousand years ago, when Solomon was the king. She wrote history five hundred years before Herodotus. She wrote fiction millennia before Don Quixote. Friedman’s new work is a story — a possibility — of how this writer came to create the Bible’s longest text, the first known long prose work on earth. It is a work of historical fiction, but he intends that it will bring to light as much about history and the world of the Bible as his works of scholarship.