Knowingly Betraying a Friend — A Novel

He was a Hittite — an outsider, a sword for hire from the peoples of the north — and he had chosen the God of Israel with all the grave deliberation of a man who picks a thing rather than merely inherits it. He had even taken that God into his own name: Uriah, "the LORD is my light." He kept faith with everyone — his God, his king, his companions, his young wife asleep in Jerusalem. None of them, in the days to come, would keep faith with him. Save the first.

Based on 2 Samuel 11–12, Knowingly Betraying a Friend retells the most sorrowful chapter of David's reign through the eyes of the man it destroyed. Here is the loyal soldier on the siege line at Rabbah, keeping a watch no duty required; here is the restless king on the rooftop who could not sleep; and here, drawn across all the miles between them, are two watches bending toward one another like stones rolling to the bottom of the same valley — toward a thing that would break the heart of God.

With a storyteller's tenderness and a teacher's reverence for the text, Rev. Dr. Willie Rodríguez Hirsch gives flesh to the name Scripture records and the Church too often forgets. It is a novel about loyalty and its betrayal, about the terrible freedom of a king, and about the one Friend who never breaks faith — the God whose light a dying man carried in his very name.

A story to break the heart, and heal it.