What draws him to this material
The attraction is not simply antiquity. It is the drama of moments when memory, reform, and authority all become unstable. Such moments reveal what institutions ask people to believe, what they require people to obey, and what happens when private conscience enters public life.
The Hidden Scroll grew out of Wolf's fascination with law, institutional power, sacred texts, and the strange afterlife of documents. As a litigator, he spends his professional life thinking about evidence, interpretation, motive, credibility, and how competing stories become accepted as truth. As a novelist, he brings those same questions into the world of ancient Judah.
That combination makes ancient Jerusalem an unusually rich setting for fiction. It lets the novel remain intimate and civilizational at once: attentive to individual motives while never forgetting the structures that shape them.
The work asks what institutions do when belief, interpretation, and public power can no longer be separated. That pressure is what gives the fiction its seriousness: not history as ornament, but history as a field of motive, justification, fear, and consequence.