The Red Tent

Rating:
Summary: Much more than just a Biblical retelling
Review: This novel is not a gripping, intense, fast-paced book. It's the story of one woman's life, and as such it encompasses periods of great change and periods of stasis, upheaval and peace, passion, contentment, and anguish. If you're looking for a book about monumental events with a larger-than-life heroine, this book is not for you. If you're looking to be utterly captivated by how one woman can change history and be changed by it, you'll love "The Red Tent".
The title of the book underscores its greatest theme: that of the sisterhood of women that transcends generations, religions, and cultures. Dinah grows up secure of her place within this sisterhood, only to find herself cast adrift from it in one moment of savagery and violence. Her journey from her childhood home in Canaan to the home she makes for herself in Egypt parallels her search to once again find a place where she belongs as much as she did with her mothers in the tent.
Leah, Zilpah, Rachel, and Bilhah, the wives of Jacob and the mothers of the twelve tribes of Israel, are also central characters. Anyone who gets riled up by any suggestion that the Bible is not 100%, verbatim, word-for-word truth from the mouth of God should also avoid this book. Not that Diamant drastically alters the story - far from it. But she introduces crucial details that are lacking in the original, as well as resolving several inconsistencies and contradictions. (For example, Jacob working 7 months instead of 7 years each for Leah and Rachel. If he had worked 14 years before marrying Rachel, she would have been almost 30 and completely unmarriagable. Diamant's scenario only makes sense.) If an author doesn't add or alter any details from her source, than what's the point in writing a book at all? In addition, the women of Jacob's family are not Jewish - Judaism didn't exist yet. I've read several reviews that take offense to this aspect of the book and claim that it's pagan propaganda. Far from it. Think about it: Early Christians considered themselves a faction of Judaism for several generations after the death of Jesus. Likewise, the exclusive worship of El was simply a sect of the polytheistic Canaanite religion for years, until the followers of El wiped out the followers of every other god and goddess in the region hundreds (if not thousands) of years later.
Dinah's story is one of an ordinary woman caught up in events beyond her comprehension, who escapes from a life where she is pulled back and forth between the whims and desires of men, only to find that greed, like love, exists everywhere. Dinah's courage, like Leah's pride, Zilpah's spirituality, Rachel's beauty, and Bilhah's compassion, overcomes the boundaries of time and culture and underlines the universal nature of womanhood in a lovely, rich, and epic tale.