Week 1: Introduction — Jerusalem in Flames

1.Rivers begins the novel with the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., an event of almost unimaginable horror. What details does she include that made the loss feel most real to you? What was your emotional response to Hadassah's situation at the story's opening?

2.Hadassah watches her family die one by one — her father, her mother, her siblings — and she survives almost by accident. Her father had been a devoted follower of Jesus who shaped her entire understanding of God. What does she carry from him into her captivity, and what does she seem to have lost?

3.Even at the outset, Hadassah's faith is fragile and terrified rather than triumphant. How does this portrayal challenge or confirm your own assumptions about what strong faith looks like?

4.The destruction of Jerusalem was, for first-century Jews, the unthinkable — the end of the Temple, the center of their entire religious world. How does this historical backdrop help you understand Hadassah's internal silence about her faith throughout much of the novel?

5.Hadassah is sold into slavery — a complete loss of agency and identity in the eyes of Roman society. What does it mean, theologically, to still be 'God's own' when the world has stripped away every external marker of identity and worth?

6.Rivers was clearly shaped by the book of Lamentations in crafting Jerusalem's fall. Read Lamentations 1:1-3 aloud in your group. Where do you see echoes of that lament in Hadassah's interior life? How does lament function as an act of faith rather than a failure of it?

7.The novel is set in a world where power belongs to Rome and weakness belongs to slaves. How does Rivers begin, from the very first pages, to invert that hierarchy — showing us where true power and true poverty actually reside?