"WATCH OUT DAN BROWN":

Spiritual thriller flying off shelves

February 8, 2007
By Cathleen Falsani sun-times news group

A clandestine sect with evil plans to end the world. An ancient code. Secret saints. And the Kabbalah.

These are the key elements of "The Book of Names," a new spiritual thriller that has been flying off the shelves since its release last month.

The book, co-written by Chicago native Jill Gregory and her best friend/writing partner Karen Tintori, was released Jan. 9 with a first printing of 75,000 copies and already has gone into its second printing, Craig Libman, a publicist for St. Martin's Press, said.

'Watch out Dan Brown'

The foreign publishing rights for "The Book of Names" have been sold in 16 countries, and in Germany, where the book was published as "Das Buch der Namen" in December, it is No. 14 on the bestseller list and has sold more than 155,000 copies.

As the Economist newspaper in London put it in a headline that accompanied a glowing review of "The Book of Names": "Watch out Dan Brown."

[...]

The plot turns on a legend from the Talmud that says in every generation, the fate of the world rests in the hands of 36 righteous people known as lamed vovniks or "hidden ones." These people don't know they are one of the chosen, and neither does anyone else.

The lamed vovniks just go about their everyday lives, doing what is right and good and keeping the rest of the world from God's wrath.

In "The Book of Names," a (fictional) nefarious offshoot sect of the ancient Gnostic tradition known as the Gnoseos has learned the identities of 33 of 36 lamed vovniks and has set about assassinating them to hasten the end of the world.

Through plot murder-mystery-meets-mysticism plot twists, the book's hero, a political science professor named David Shepherd, uncovers the Gnoseos' plans and also realizes that his young stepdaughter is one of the remaining three lamed vovniks the Gnoseos - whose members include heads of state and other luminati - are systematically murdering.

With the help of Yael HarPaz, a fetching Israeli archeologist -Shepherd sets about saving his stepdaughter and the rest of the world by unraveling codes based on gematria, numerology applied to the Hebrew alphabet.

[...]

Sounds like fun, although it's probably also unbearably silly. Ther term lamed vovniks looks Yiddish rather than Talmudic, and I don't know where they come from, if from anywhere outside the imagination of the authors. There weren't any Gnostic groups called the "Gnoseos." The word is just the genitive case of the Greek word gnosis. But in terms of the Dan Brown comparison, the important think is that Gregory and Tintori seem not to be making any outlandish historical claims about their novel.

UPDATE: Stephen Goranson e-mails:

I don't know a lot about this, but the Talmud San. 97b has a statement that there must always be 36 righteous in the world who see the divine presence. Gershom Scholem has a fine essay translated from German in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, "The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men." And an earlier novel to use this tradition is The Last of the Just, by Andre Schwartz-Bart.

The phrase "lamed-vav" is just the number 36 written in Hebrew letters. So that much seems to come from the Talmud.

UPDATE: Kate Lingley e-mails:

Another comment on your blog entry about "The Book of Names" -- This is not the first work of popular literature to be written on the theme of the 36 Just Men. Stephen Bilias' book "The Quest for the 36" is a work of speculative fiction from 1988. I bought it by chance back then and really enjoyed it. Far from "Da Vinci Code"-esque thrillers, it is a work of seriocomic speculative fiction, about a New York talent agent (to give you a sense of the humor of the thing, his name is Dexter Sinister) who is recruited to find the Lamed-vov. In the end it is surprisingly touching, actually. I found it delightful.

UPDATE (15 February): The authors respond.