A Biblical Tale of Red, Hot Love
A Review of Anita Diamant's The Red

The Red Tent; A Novel. By Anita Diamant Picador U.S.A., 1997, 321 pp., $14.99 (Paperback.)

It’s never been hard to understand why many contemporary women have problems with the Bible. Clearly, the Bible tells of a culture where men had the right-of-way. Particularly in the Old Testament, there is little for the modern woman to identify with, what with all the forced marriages, rape, and general absence. Even the heroines of the Old Testament come with big question marks: Esther won her power through a beauty contest; Rahab was a prostitute, and so on.

This tension is no doubt part of the reason for the success of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, a book that has enjoyed rave reviews and a long run on the best-seller lists. As The Boston Globe wrote, "[This is] what the Bible would be like if it had been written by women." Diamant takes great liberty with the biblical text, using the Genesis 34 account of Dinah, the only daughter of Old Testament patriarch Jacob, to flesh out the female characters who until now have been secondary characters.

It’s hard to imagine a better set up for a story. The account of Dinah in Genesis has always roused readers’ curiosity with its puzzling mix of love, sex, violence and revenge. Dinah is sexually assaulted by a man who loves her (or so we are told, his sexual transgression notwithstanding). Jacob is upset, but agrees to let the man, named Shechem, marry Dinah for a great price: he and his entire kingdom must be circumcised. Shechem agrees and he and his men undergo the painful procedure. While they are recovering, Jacob’s sons ransack the kingdom, killing every male (including Shechem), carrying off the women and children, and plundering the wealth.

And Dinah? She’s never heard from. Dinah doesn’t have a voice in the Bible, so we don’t know whether she also wanted to marry the man who assaulted her. We never learn whether Dinah delighted in watching her brothers’ scheme unfold or if she was devastated at the death of her new husband. .

The Red Tent is Diamant’s attempt to let Dinah speak for herself. Dinah is the narrator here, illuminating the world of the Bible with a woman’s perspective. Though Dinah spends a great deal of time commenting on and revising other well-known biblical narratives, particularly the marriage of Jacob with sisters Leah and Rachel and their maidservants, the most central story is the rape that defines Dinah’s life.

Perhaps surprisingly, Dinah lets us know that the rape was really a star-crossed romance. Dinah meets Shechem when she goes to his kingdom to help Rachel with a birth. At his mother’s urging Shechem invites Dinah back to the kingdom. Diamant’s prose here is something like a Bible-times Harlequin romance as Dinah and Shechem celebrate their new marriage together. After a week, Shechem and his father jovially go to Jacob to discuss the bride price. Dinah is angry when she hears what her father demands, but Shechem and all the men go through with it. Soon after, Dinah and the rest of the women in the kingdom wake up drenched in their lovers’ blood. Dinah returns once more to her family to curse them for their violence, a curse that leads to the deaths of Jacob’s wives and causes his sons to turn away from him.

Diamant has written several books that address contemporary Jewish life, but this is her first novel. The writing is overly dramatic at times–like when Dinah describes her name: "…the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah" (1)–and occasionally gets in the way of the story. But despite the usual rough spots of a first novel, The Red Tent has had a presence on the New York Times’s best-seller list for good reason. Diamant creatively explores the differences between men’s and women’s lives during early biblical times and uses this female version of the story to comment on the biblical version, which, next to this version, seems all the more masculine.

In contrast with the way males are represented in the Bible, Dinah’s/Diamant’s men have questionable mental abilities, integrity and, in some cases, masculinity. The Bible describes Isaac and Joseph as righteous men and leaders; but here, Isaac is feebleminded and annoying to his wife Rebecca, while Joseph is cowardly, illiterate and has sexual relations with both Potifer and his wife. Joseph is successful as the leader of Egypt only because Dinah’s son reads and writes for him and acts as his advisor.

Contrast this with the way Diamant portrays Rebecca, Isaac’s wife and Jacob’s mother. In The Red Tent, Rebecca is a pinnacle of female power and wisdom. She is feared and respected by her daughters-in-law for the way she defied Isaac and caused his blessing to go to Jacob instead of the first-born Esau, and she is praised for pages as "a diviner, healer, and prophet" even before she shows up in the story (148). When Dinah finally meets Rebecca, she compares her tent and robes to those of royalty and describes pilgrims who travel great distances to seek advice and prophesy from the "Oracle."

In the midst of these revisions, Diamant also suggests that women’s lives in biblical times were not all bad. All of Jacob’s wives are happy in their marriage to him and their lives are full because of their friendships with each other.

But she also suggests that the women didn’t really need the men, anyway. The mothers and daughters worked, ate and slept separate from their sons or brothers. The men in this version are mostly reduced to secondary characters, and their words and motivations are mediated through Dinah. Diamant seems to be using this technique to comment on the way the Bible has treated women–that is, the Bible left women out, so she’s going to leave men out.

The Red Tent gets its name from the tent where Dinah and her mothers spend their days during their monthly periods and childbirth. It is the only time when the women are completely free from men and able to build relationships with one another and relax from their daily chores of cooking, weaving and serving the men. The tent comes to symbolize female power, unity, and a connection to the earth. The women enter the tent together at the start of the new moon every month. When younger women enter the tent for the first time the older women hold a ceremony celebrating the connection to the earth, which they see as the giver of all life.

Whereas the Bible, and its stories, is a testament to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Dinah’s world is immersed in pagan spirituality. Diamant portrays Joseph and his fathers as the only monothesists. Jacob’s sons are schooled in the ways of his father’s God and some of them embrace it, but many of them don’t understand his belief. Jacob doesn’t spend as much time talking about his beliefs with his wives and daughters as he does with his sons, so it’s easy for his wives to incorporate their husband’s God into a mix of their own gods, which includes a fertility goddess, a sea goddess, a mother of 70 gods, and goddesses of various household skills. With this distinction between what the men and women believe, Diamant suggests that the God of the Bible was believed in and worshiped only by men and could have stayed within the world of the men if Dinah’s mothers had another daughter to keep their beliefs alive in the family.

Jacob’s wives had been able to pass their beliefs onto another daughter.

The popularity of The Red Tent has something to do with our curiosity about the lives of biblical women, and something to do with a desire to relate to the biblical stories. For my tastes, Diamant leans too heavily on revision, and too lightly on her ability to flesh out female characters. I’m glad that she’s giving women like me a chance to engage the women of the Bible and think through what they may have been like, but I’m still waiting for something less political, less opinionated, and truer to an authentic biblical historical vision.

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