The Pillar of Fire; or, Israel in Bondage

In the form of a series of letters from two generations of young princes to their royal parents back in Tyre, the capital city of the kingdom of Phœnicia, The Pillar of Fire; or, Israel in Bondage gives the reader an ostensibly first-person eyewitness account of the life of Moses in the years preceding his personal exit from Egypt, and then, decades later, his confrontations with “Pharaoh” and his leadership of Israel out of slavery during the Exodus.

Published originally in 1859 as a follow-up to the wildly successful The Prince of the House of David, The Pillar of Fire is the second written but the first chronologically of a trilogy of epistolary novels by Joseph Holt Ingraham called the Hebraic Power Trilogy.  The Pillar of Fire (1859) is intended to illustrate the beginning of Hebraic power, The Throne of David (1860) its culmination, and The Prince of the House of David (1855) its decadence.  This particular digital version was transcribed from a 1865 re-print edition with one illustration, and enhanced by the addition of a further ten illustrations intended to accentuate the reality and emotion of the story of Moses.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.