The story of women
On a recommendation from my physical therapist (who rocks, btw), I picked up Anita Diamant's The Red Tent at the library last week. I've been meaning to read this for a good long while, but it never managed to jump from the shelf into my hot little hands until now.
In the novel, Diamant takes the brief sketched story of Dinah from Genesis and fashions it into a full-blown life story. Instead of being a named but voiceless daughter of Jacob, Dinah becomes a part of a rich feminine tradition in ancient Canaan that is slowly losing its power. But in addition to trying to offer an alternative view of biblical history, it's also a deeply felt work on what it means to be female, regardless of place or time. Reading it made for an interesting callback to a college course I took in Judaic Civ - we read a lot of feminist biblical criticism first quarter, and Diamant's book is a nice extension of that.
Not surprisingly, a quick look at the reviews at Amazon shows just how difficult it is to work with biblical stories (or really any religious text) in fiction - there will always be a subset of readers who expect a strict adherence to the text's words and want to see the literature used a vehicle to extend its teachings. While there's certainly a growing market for such work, I don't think that the two need to be mutually exclusive. Part of the joy that comes from fiction is the ability to play with ideas in a freeform setting, and sometimes a different perspective on the familiar is illuminating.
I've talked in this space before about the historical context for the Bible, and how removing it from that context robs us of some of the tools we need to understand it. Even if we could prove definitively that God did in fact hand down his words directly to man and these words are in the Bible, the context still matters. The nature of the original language matters - any student of foreign languages can tell you about the sheer impossibility of literal translation. The historical context of the Bible through time matters too - the King James translation was commissioned by him as a political response to the new translations into English coming out of Geneva at the time. Consider the perils of transcription as well - how many changes were unintentionally introduced by scribes and monks? The New Testament adds further complexity, as Biblical scholars widely believe that the Gospels were written long after the events in question. Basically, I don't think for a second that the Bible sitting on my shelf today is the same as it was when it first appeared in written form, and there's no way for me to tell how much of it has changed. If we ignore context, we cheapen the value of what religious texts can be.
But back to the book. One of the aspects of this book that I really loved was how it dispensed with the Doc-Marten-stomping, men-are-vile attitude that tends seep through in a lot of feminist biblical study. Being a feminist who hates men seems counterproductive in my view - we're in this world together, and knee-jerk excoriation of the XYs is no better than the patronizing little-lady attitudes of chauvinists. Sure, there are some villains in the piece, but there are also men of great tenderness, particularly those that enter in Dinah's later life.
Also noteworthy are the explorations of relationships (both loving and tempestuous) between the women in Dinah's world - Diamant states in the reader's guide that her inspiration for the story was trying to understand the tension between Leah and Rachel mentioned in the Bible, and she uses her questioning to good effect here. Likewise, Dinah's relationships with Re-nefer and Meryt in the book's last third are carefully drawn and a true reflection of the deeper emotions underneath.
Not for the literalists or prudish (OMG! Biblical people had sex, and some of them might have even liked it!) among us, but a worthy read for those who are intrigued by the idea of putting flesh on the bones of a bare biblical story.
In the novel, Diamant takes the brief sketched story of Dinah from Genesis and fashions it into a full-blown life story. Instead of being a named but voiceless daughter of Jacob, Dinah becomes a part of a rich feminine tradition in ancient Canaan that is slowly losing its power. But in addition to trying to offer an alternative view of biblical history, it's also a deeply felt work on what it means to be female, regardless of place or time. Reading it made for an interesting callback to a college course I took in Judaic Civ - we read a lot of feminist biblical criticism first quarter, and Diamant's book is a nice extension of that.
Not surprisingly, a quick look at the reviews at Amazon shows just how difficult it is to work with biblical stories (or really any religious text) in fiction - there will always be a subset of readers who expect a strict adherence to the text's words and want to see the literature used a vehicle to extend its teachings. While there's certainly a growing market for such work, I don't think that the two need to be mutually exclusive. Part of the joy that comes from fiction is the ability to play with ideas in a freeform setting, and sometimes a different perspective on the familiar is illuminating.
I've talked in this space before about the historical context for the Bible, and how removing it from that context robs us of some of the tools we need to understand it. Even if we could prove definitively that God did in fact hand down his words directly to man and these words are in the Bible, the context still matters. The nature of the original language matters - any student of foreign languages can tell you about the sheer impossibility of literal translation. The historical context of the Bible through time matters too - the King James translation was commissioned by him as a political response to the new translations into English coming out of Geneva at the time. Consider the perils of transcription as well - how many changes were unintentionally introduced by scribes and monks? The New Testament adds further complexity, as Biblical scholars widely believe that the Gospels were written long after the events in question. Basically, I don't think for a second that the Bible sitting on my shelf today is the same as it was when it first appeared in written form, and there's no way for me to tell how much of it has changed. If we ignore context, we cheapen the value of what religious texts can be.
But back to the book. One of the aspects of this book that I really loved was how it dispensed with the Doc-Marten-stomping, men-are-vile attitude that tends seep through in a lot of feminist biblical study. Being a feminist who hates men seems counterproductive in my view - we're in this world together, and knee-jerk excoriation of the XYs is no better than the patronizing little-lady attitudes of chauvinists. Sure, there are some villains in the piece, but there are also men of great tenderness, particularly those that enter in Dinah's later life.
Also noteworthy are the explorations of relationships (both loving and tempestuous) between the women in Dinah's world - Diamant states in the reader's guide that her inspiration for the story was trying to understand the tension between Leah and Rachel mentioned in the Bible, and she uses her questioning to good effect here. Likewise, Dinah's relationships with Re-nefer and Meryt in the book's last third are carefully drawn and a true reflection of the deeper emotions underneath.
Not for the literalists or prudish (OMG! Biblical people had sex, and some of them might have even liked it!) among us, but a worthy read for those who are intrigued by the idea of putting flesh on the bones of a bare biblical story.
