My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fictionalized accounts of the Bible, especially to Christians, can be difficult to enjoy. The Red Tent is based on the life of Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob and Leah. In the Biblical account, Dinah is only mentioned a handful of times. As is the case with most females in the highly patriarchal Old Testament, females were minor characters who lived in the shadows of men. Well known women like Sarah and Rebecca, Dinah's great-grandmother and grandmother, and Rachel and Leah, Dinah's aunt and mother, served their purposes by serving their husbands and the men in their lives.
Dinah served her purpose by getting raped by a prince, invoking the rage of her brothers, Simon and Levi, who slaughtered an entire city and subsequently lost their inheritance from their father. That was Dinah's role in history, the downfall of her brothers. Afterwards, nothing was ever written about Dinah. She was silent or silenced. In old history, women spent time in a red tent during their menstruation cycle, pregnancy and post-partum. It was an area strictly off limits to men. The red tent was a woman's domain. This is where Dinah's story begins.
The Red Tent takes the historical account of Dinah's demise and places it at the center of the story. Told from Dinah's POV, she starts with Jacob's escape from his brother and meeting the daughters of Laban. This is where the fictionalization comes heavily into place, however, it was interesting to see the fleshing out of the beginning of Jacob's legacy. How did Jacob really feel about Leah? Who were the two concubines? Also learning about the pagan culture that was so vastly different from Jacob's monotheistic upbringing.
Then there is Dinah's life before her role in the Bible and the imagining of the after effects. When she so conveniently disappeared from history and from Jacob's legacy. The Red Tent did stay as true as possible to the original Bible telling, with some changes. Seven years were changed into seven months. The 'rape' narrative has been disputed for years. Was Dinah assaulted or was she just being held from her home until her father agreed to marriage? The author takes a more romanticized--if not an unrealistic--view on the situation.
As a whole, I enjoyed the story. My few complaints were that there were so many pagan rituals for everything! The endless descriptions of bracelets and backrubs and red powders and numerous gods became monotonous after awhile. Also, it seems like Egyptian woman only give birth to boys. I know it's a ridiculous complaint, but when you read the book you'll understand. Can you at least mention giving birth to a girl every once in a while, seeing as this is a story celebrating females?
This book is definitely not a Church book club read either. It's gritty and raw and real. Sex plays an integral part and it's frequent in almost every chapter. That's why I liked it so much. It didn't clean up history, it presented history as it was. These Biblical characters that always seemed so larger than life in Sunday School were humanized. The Red Tent took a small and seemingly unimportant character from the Bible and made her a voice of an ancient history.
Sounds interesting, I like when they don't try to sanitize the stories.
ReplyDeleteAs difficult as it can be, you have to read history as it was not as you want it to be.
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