The Red Tent
by Anita Diamant
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Book Reviews of The Red Tent
Book Review: Great interpretation of the story of Jacob
Summary: 4 Stars
The Red Tent is an interesting novel based on the story of Jacob, as told through the eyes of Dinah, his only daughter. Dinah is mentioned in the bible in a single sentence regarding the rape of Dinah. Beyond this, we know nothing about her. Diamant's novel revolves around this passage and about the ensuing destruction of Shechem. The Red Tent is not a simple retelling of the story of Jacob - Diamant creates realistic characters and gives context to the characterizations of Laban, Jacob, Esau, Rachel, Leah, Joseph, and the rest of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish religion. Further, as I mentioned before, the story is told via female eyes - an entirely different perspective than the normal biblical analysis. While not all will agree with Diamant's characterizations, they seem to fit generally with the text of the bible (except her portrayal of Rebecca as a cult priestess and her portrayal of Laban which seems more negative). There are a few inaccuracies - in the bible, Jacob worked for 7 years before he married Rachel and another 7 years before he married Leah wheras in this book, he worked only for a few months. Diamant's interpretation of the rape of Dinah is novel - but not entirely implausable considering the fact that Shechem indeed asked to married her and agreed to submit to circumcision in order to do so. Indeed, in one passage Rachel hides her father Laban's teraphim (idols) from him by placing them under her while she had her period. This passage is taken directly from the bible! I had no idea about the presence of idols in Genesis and this book creates what I would guess to be an accurate portrayal of the state of religion at the time of Jacob. While the bible does not explicitly discuss the practice of idolatry, it seems very likely to me that Diamant in theorizing that idolatry was commonplace amongst the wives of Jacob is spot on.
Diamant creates an interesting discussion of daily life in biblical times. After the destruction of Shechem, we know nothing of what happened to Dinah. I do not want to spoil the book, but the sections that follow are purely of Diamant's imagination and are just as good as the sections derived from the bible. The book discusses menstruation and childbirth quite a bit - Dinah becomes a midwife. While this is purely Diamant's invention, these sections are very interesting and important because menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth were very important in the daily lives of women of that era. If you take a literal view of the bible, you probably won't like this novel. However, if you enjoy the idea of examining bible stories from a woman's eyes I recommend this novel highly.
Book Review: Cyclic Existence in Jacob's Family
Summary: 4 Stars
The Red Tent is the story of Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, midwife to the other side of a story that is but a chapter in the heroic tale of the Hebrew people. The writers of the Bible tell us Dinah was a rape victim and that her brothers Simeon and Levi avenged her honor by slaughtering the Shechemites, whose prince committed the act.
Dinah's version transforms the rape into a short-lived love affair. There's a world of difference between sex as an act of violence and sex as an act of love. In this case the difference is between her experience of a man whom she loved and two brothers whose hunger for power and land drove them to profane sacred ritual in the name of personal power. The Jacobites had ordered that all the Shechemites be circumcised as part of a peace treaty and then attacked them while they were recovering from the experience. Treachery, plain and simple.
How is it that two opposing world views could coexist within one family? Diamant explores this possibility in this work of fiction. The women of the tribe of Jacob worship the Queen of Heaven, Inanna and appeal to her many aspects--lesser gods and other intercessors--for insight, healing, and more. The women's lives are ordered around the red tent, where they are set apart once a month for about three days to menstruate, where they deliver their children, where they tell stories and sing. They leave their differences at the door of the tent and share in a deep spiritual experience. The Spirit as they understand it is not separate from the physical world. As a result, everything is holy. Dreams are portents of the future. Clairvoiance, dream interpretation, prophecy, and other acts of spiritual insight are the result of being in tune with the rhythms of the earth, which rhythms are symbiotic with the bodily rhythms of the women.
The men have no knowledge of life inside the tent. In their world, men quarrel with each other--think of the great biblical battles between brothers and between fathers and son. It's all about the strongest man--even about the strongest god--rather than about community.
Ulitmately, the male-dominated world of Esau and Jacob, Jacob and Laban, Jacob and his sons, the Jacobites and the Shechemites gives way to the world of Dinah and Joseph--one a judge, a teller of truth, and the other a diviner a teller of dreams. Between them they create a faith in an almighty god that is mother and father, creator of this world and of the spirit world, and the main character in a story that invites us in to read, reread, and rediscover our relationship with God again and again.
Book Review: A Unique Twist on an Ancient Tale
Summary: 4 Stars
In choosing a time period so rarely addressed by historical fiction writers and by focusing her book on the gender the early Old Testament chapters scarcely touch on, Diamant has given her novel a unique perspective. Polygamy creates a most unusual family structure for her the heroine, Dinah , who is blessed with 4 mothers! Exactly how frightening and deadly an event childbirth could be in those days is well depicted in the book's midwifery scenes. The continued mingling of polytheism with monotheism into the second and third generational descendents of Abraham and Sarai demonstrates that the change to montheism was not immediate in the Jewish faith and that there was a mingling of cross cultural traditions in this early time period.Poetic license with its deviations from and contradictions with the Biblical record clearly make this book a fictional account.
The effect on the reader is confusion. Which parts were indeed fact and which were fiction? The answers can obviously be found in the original Biblical text or for a more readable accounting- in the chapter called the "Rape of Dinah" in
Jonathan Kircsh"s anthology of rarely discussed Old Testament stories entitled The Harlot by the Roadside. The really astonishing surprise comes when the most far fetched portions of this novel (which this reader was absolutely convinced were fictional) proved to be true events ! The circumcision of all male inhabitants of a town as the terms of Dinah's bride price and the duplicity of Jacob's sons" in inflicting subsequent annihilation on the weakened and recovering inhabitants who had just paid this awesome price- come right out of the pages of Genesis.
Cahill's book Gift of the Jews attributes radical changes in Western thinking to the unique concept of montheism which originated in the Jewish faith. This book portrays the early Jews as divided between monotheism and polytheism along gender lines. Only the male members worship El ( oheim) . All females are universally polytheists and even Rebecca, Isaac's wife, is cast as a diviner. Despite cultural intermingling and intermarriages, it is difficult to fathom so a universal a division, especially along gender lines into the fourth generation of Jews. Since the novel focus on women who are all polytheists, the people in this novel hardly seem to be the iconoclastic early Jews Cahill describes.
Enjoy this book its glimpses of an ancient world in transition and read it for a good historical rendition of womens' lives - but take this tale with a grain of salt. It is what it purports to be: a work of fiction.
Book Review: Cute but not well-informed on history of ancient Canaan
Summary: 2 Stars
It was enjoyable to read but can be misleading to someone having little background on the ancient near east and biblical history. The author attempted the impossible: to put a story that was written about mythical characters into historical context! It is amusing to me as a student of womens' issues in ancient Israel that this book is being publicized as a feminist retelling of the Jacob tale. It is very true that much of the matarial in the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) was written and edited from a male perspective and I suspect that the lack of attention to the Dinah character before and after the events at Shechem may be the result of the doings of one or more male redactors. However, the story of Dinah is part of the J source of the Torah, the very work that scholars have suspected to be the work of a woman -Richard Elliot Friedman thinks *maybe* while Harold Bloom thinks the writer was definately a she, without question. I also think it was a woman and I strongly suspect that she wrote more on Dinah, material that was later cut by a redactor. In fact the incident at Shechem may have been the only reason for the exile to Egypt in J's original story (ironic punishment for the massacre committed by Shimon and Levi). But whatever material had been there before, the story of Dinah and Shechem and the bloody acts of Dinah's brothers along with the rest of the J text is full of anachronistic details which can really tell us something about the world in which this woman lived and wrote, probably the eighth century BCE, possibly a little earlier. Yet Diamant seems to have gone out of her way to replace J's cute anachronisms with details inserted to show the reader that Dinah is living in the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1,000 years before the time of the writer who should not be condemned for knowing nothing about that time period. On the positive side, the book was well-written and an easy and relaxing read and included a family tree which helped for keeping track of the characters. But if you are looking for a liberal or feminist version of the biblical narrative, this is not it. The Red Tent is not well informed on literary and source criticism of the Tanach and I would recommend reading it only with extreme caution. And before reading it, I would recommend getting some background on woman of the bible and the Dinah story and related narratives (like the narrative about the "rape" of Tamar by Amnon and the aftermath) through reading "The Harlot by the Side of the Road" by Jonathan Kirsch, "The Book of J" by Harold Bloom, and "The Hidden Book in the Bible" by Richard Elliot Friedman.Book Review: A must-read for women
Summary: 4 Stars
I recently finished Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent", and I found the book extremely fascinating. It's the story of Dinah and her mothers, the wives of Jacob in the Old Testament. The book's premise is basically that the lives of these women were all but ignored in the Bible, and so Diamant relates the biblical stories from their point of view. The first half of the book deals primarily with descriptions of what daily life was like for women during those times. This was by far the most interesting part of the book for me. I was totally engrossed in learning about the roles that were available for women at that time, and the ways in which each of the main characters managed to find an appropriate role for herself. I also really loved the depictions of female strength and wisdom, and the way women treated their bodies as sacred and really seemed to love and worship the functions of their bodies, not merely for reproduction but also for pleasure. The idea of all the women retiring to the red tent to separate themselves from the men and celebrate their menstruation together resonated very strongly with me, and seemed like such a powerful alternative to the way that our society insists that the body and eveything associated with it is disgusting and should be kept hidden.
Unfortunately, the second half of the book was not as enjoyable as the first. In the second half of the book, Diamant moved away from the depiction of day to day events, and began relating Dinah's own story. Dinah's life is full of drama--love, hate, betrayal, violence... It made for interesting reading, but for the most part it was drama that I could have done without. I would have preferred to go on reading reading forever about the five women who were central to the story; their individual stories, their relationships with each other, their time in the red tent together, their various pregnancies and births... I really responded very deeply to the traditions of their lives, and didn't like all the upheaval that occurred in the later part of the narrative.
But even if I didn't like the second half, it's still a very good book. It's not an extremely feminist book, although it may sound that way. Nonetheless, it's probably a book that every woman should read, just because it presents such a wonderful notion of women supporting each other, learning from each other, and valuing each other's wisdom. I wish that we still had something like the red tent nowadays, and could more publicly acknowledge the significance of women's relationships with each other and with our bodies.