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| Book cover for "The Red Tent." |
[this review contains spoilers for "The Red Tent"]
I read The Red Tent [affiliate link] by Anita Diamant. This is a bible fanfic narrated by Dinah, daughter of Jacob. It tells the story of Jacob's 4 wives- Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah- and their children, giving a "woman's perspective" on this story from the bible.
I love this book. Here's my review of it:
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Fleshing out a whole world
The main thing that this book does is to portray a whole realistic world which contains ideas and practices that we know were common in bible times, but may be hard for us to imagine because they are so different from our modern world.
Some examples:
- Polygamy. What would society be like, if it was normal for a man to have multiple wives? How would people view that?
- Women dying in childbirth. Babies dying at birth. We know that these things used to be very common, but it's so different from how we live now, thanks to modern medicine. What was it like for women back then, when these tragedies were common? In this book, many of the characters work as midwives, and you see their thoughts on the risk of death during childbirth, and how they handle it.
The book does a good job of showing how issues like these would have effects on many aspects of people's lives and the way they viewed the world. I think for me, if I try to imagine something like polygamy (ie, what if men could have multiple wives, but women could only have 1 husband), I imagine a society that is basically the same as ours but with that 1 difference- but no, that's not how it would be. There would be so many differences, in how people viewed gender, marriage, sex, etc, in a society that viewed polygamy as normal.
This is a fictional story, so we can't necessarily take it to mean "this really is how they viewed marriage back then"- but it does the worldbuilding in a plausible way, much better than whatever I was imagining upon hearing the definition of polygamy, for example.
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Polytheism
In this book, the women in Jacob's family worship many gods, and this is talked about like it's totally normal. Sometimes, in the book, Dinah tells us about Jacob's God, whose name is El, and some ways he is different from other gods. Not in a good way, though- mainly he is more harsh than other gods.
In the bible, it says that Rachel stole her father Laban's "household gods" when Jacob's family left Laban. This always confused me, when I read that bible story- why would Rachel steal these idols? Don't all the "good guys" in the bible believe in the "correct" god, and therefore wouldn't have any interest in idols?
But in "The Red Tent," the women really do believe in the gods represented by Laban's idols. They are nervous about their journey back to Jacob's homeland, and they feel that if they bring the idols with them, the gods will protect them.
This also makes Genesis 35:2 make more sense- "So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, 'Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes.'" When I read that verse, when I was a kid, I always wondered what it was talking about. Why would Jacob tell them to get rid of their "foreign gods"? Of course they don't have foreign gods- is he just saying that as a formality? But I think, instead, we should take that verse to mean that members of Jacob's family did worship other gods besides Jacob's god. (And maybe that they should have been allowed the freedom to do so- isn't it kind of wrong that Jacob forces them to stop?)
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Women's roles and men's roles
In this book, the women live very separate lives from the men. And, it turns out, that makes sense, in a world where women often die in childbirth, and babies often die. In that kind of world, in order to have enough children to maintain the population, most women do need to have their whole adult lives dominated by pregnancy and breastfeeding. Not only breastfeeding your own baby; if another woman in your household dies giving birth, maybe you have to breastfeed her baby too.
There are a few women in the book who are independent and have careers of their own, but that is only because they are unmarried, or because their children have already grown up.
The interesting thing is, the book shows the wives all working together to raise each other's kids. From a patriarchal perspective, a big deal is always made about who someone's father is- but it was the women who actually did the work of caring for the babies and little children. Not just the mother, but the other wives. It's likely that a child has a closer relationship with their father's other wives than with their actual father. Rachel and Leah were both Jacob's wives, and they fought over his affection, but in the practical day-to-day stuff, they had to work together. This is an interesting dynamic.
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Wife vs slave
[content note for rape and abuse]
In this book, the categories "wife" and "slave" are sort of blurred. Both of them mean "a person you're legally allowed to have sex with" and the other details beyond that- details about how well a man treats his wife or slave- sort of exist along a whole spectrum without an obvious dividing line.
In "The Red Tent", Laban (father of Rachel and Leah) has a wife/slave named Ruti, and everyone knows he is regularly beating and raping her. But no one does anything about it; they act like "that's just the way it is." (At one point, Ruti is pregnant and asks the other women for help getting an abortion- that's the only thing they ever do to help her.)
But there are other couples in this book where the man treats the woman decently. Where the man cares about the woman's pleasure during sex, and they both enjoy sex. And it's kind of like... a woman might end up with a man who cares about her and treats her well, or she might end up with an abuser, and it's just luck of the draw, there's no way a woman can really have any control over this. You hope you end up with a decent man, but if you don't, well, *shrug* that's just the way it is.
Hope you think about that any time anyone tries to make an argument about "the biblical definition of marriage"!
Also, the characters in this book don't seem to have any concept of monogamy being the "ideal." Some men have 1 wife, some men have several wives, some men are having sex with their slaves, and all of these are just kind of seen as normal. There's no sense that monogamy is "better" or that monogamy is "the way it should be."
(Again, this is fiction, so we shouldn't take this to mean that actually *was* how people thought back then. Maybe it was, but we'd have to do more research to find out. Don't just rely on what we see in this fictional book. What I'm saying is, this feels plausible and fits with what the bible says.)
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There are sex scenes in this book
[content note: explicit sex scenes]
So, Jacob has 4 wives- Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. (Oh, Bilhah and Zilpah are slaves, by the way.) Each of them has sex with Jacob, and the book talks about what the experience was like for each of them.
And, beyond that, a lot of things about women's lives in this society were related to sexual things that men did to them, so it makes sense that the book would describe that.
The sex scenes are like... they're explicit enough that you understand what's going on if you generally understand what sex is, but euphemistic enough that you'll be completely confused if you're sheltered and "pure." I actually hate that; I really care a lot about the sheltered-and-pure demographic, and it really bothers me how parts of this book are not accessible for them.
Let me give you an example. Here's Leah and Jacob's wedding night:
"It was not fully dark inside the tent. He [Jacob] saw my [Leah's] face and showed no surprise. He was breathing heavily. He took off the rest of my clothes, removing first the mantle from my shoulders, untying my girdle, and then helping me as I stepped out of my robes. I was naked before him. My mother told me my husband would only lift up my robes and enter me still wearing his. But I was uncovered, and then, in a moment, so was he, his sex pointing at me. It looked like a faceless asherah! This was such a hilarious idea, I might have laughed out loud had I been able to breathe.
"But I was afraid. I sank to the blanket, and he moved quickly to my side. He stroked my hands and he touched my cheek, and then he was on top of me. I was afraid. But I remembered my mother's counsel, and opened my hands and my feet, and listened to the sound of my breath instead of his.
"Jacob was good to me. He was slow to enter me the first time, but he finished so quickly I barely had time to calm down before he fell still and heavy upon me, like a dead man, for what seemed like hours. Then his hands came to life. They wandered over my face, through my hair, and then, oh, on my breasts and belly, to my legs and my sex, which he explored with the lightest touch. It was the touch of a mother tracing the inner ear of her newborn child, a feeling so sweet I smiled. He looked at my pleasure, and nodded. We both laughed." And then Jacob spoke tenderly to his first wife.
My first reaction on reading this was, if I had read this book years ago, when I was in my early 20's and "pure", for example, I would have had no idea what it was talking about. Yes, I knew the dictionary definition of "intercourse" but I didn't know anything else about the actual practical mechanics of sex. I would have had no idea what these people were doing.
Yes, if I had read this back when I was "pure", I would have hypothesized that perhaps what was going on with the "enter me" bit was the dictionary definition of intercourse. But I would have rejected that hypothesis, because I would have felt that the other details being described in the passage didn't really match. If 2 people were doing the dictionary definition of intercourse, they wouldn't talk about it in this way, they wouldn't feel this way about it. I would have concluded that it must be describing something more mysterious and intangible.
To help out readers of my blog who are very sheltered/naive and can't make any sense out of what this part of the book is saying, I'll link to the Scarleteen glossary entry for "penis-in-vagina intercourse" [content note, explicit NSFW language at that link]. When the book says "enter me" that's what it means. You may find this unbelievable, but really, that *is* what it means.
And then towards the end of the passage, when Jacob is touching Leah and it uses the word "pleasure" I honestly can't tell if that means she had an orgasm or not. Sometimes "pleasure" is a euphemism for orgasm. If you're confused about the mechanics here, here's the Scarleteen glossary entry for "manual sex" and a Scarleteen post about how women can orgasm *not* through intercourse.
I understand what this part of "The Red Tent" is talking about because I have experience having sex and also reading explicit sexy fanfiction. I am extremely disturbed by the assumption that the reader should have experience with things like that, otherwise they'll just be completely lost when they try to read the sex scenes in this book.
I found myself wishing the book would just come right out and SAY what these characters are doing, rather than assuming the reader already knows the basic structure of what hetero sex is like, and then all the book needs to do is add a layer on top to describe some small details about how it played out for this specific couple. I want this to be MORE explicit.
But then, I realized something else: When I was all naive and "pure" and didn't know how sex worked, if I had come across an explicit description of people having sex, I would have had a very strong reflex reaction to turn away from it, block it out, I cannot read this because it's BAD. That comes from purity culture ideology; I believed that if I knew more details about sex, I might become interested in it, and then it's a slippery slope to doing all kinds of horribly sinful sexual things. So, good and pure girls are ideally supposed to not know any details at all about how sex works. Besides, you know, the dictionary definition of intercourse. Flee from temptation.
And even after I didn't believe in purity culture any more, the visceral reflex reaction was still there. Sort of being overwhelmed at the wrongness of... like... a penis existing, without anyone trying to euphemistically hide its existence. If I had tried to read a sex scene that spells it all out in detail, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The urge to block it out and get away from it. You know what, if I had tried to read the sex scenes in "The Red Tent", which describe sex without using explicit words like "penis," I still wouldn't have been able to do it. It still would have been too explicit, and I would have felt it was wrong to read about it. Not necessarily "wrong" as in "purity culture says this is a sin", but even after rejecting purity culture, I still had a deep feeling of wrongness about being exposed to the concept of how sex actually works, in practical terms.
So... I don't know what would be best for the "too sheltered to know how sex works" crowd. At first I thought the sex scenes should be more explicit, but now I feel like that's bad too.
So don't take this as me saying what the book should have done differently. ("She wants there to be porn in this book?") I'm not giving advice. LOLLLL imagine me giving advice about how to write sex scenes. Mostly what I'm saying is, I don't understand the logic behind vaguely-written sex scenes. I'm so confused about this.
It seems like this book is not interested in describing the exact mechanics of what the characters did, but instead, talking about how they felt and what their relationship was like. Ohhh, I just realized that's literally the reason the author did NOT make the sex scenes more explicit. (Also, ohhh, if the reader is a child who doesn't know what sex is, the actual intention in writing sex scenes so vaguely is that the reader is NOT supposed to understand it.) Because the book isn't supposed to be about that; it's supposed to be about how the characters feel and how they interact with each other.
I think what we're supposed to get from this passage- I'm gonna take a stab at this even though I am asexual af, which means I have a lot of difficulty matching up specific sexual actions with what feelings are seen as "normal" to have about them- I think what we're supposed to get from this passage is this: Jacob is a decent sexual partner. He wants his wife to feel good and have an orgasm. Jacob still takes the lead- they're not equals; she doesn't really know what's going on, and she just has to go along with whatever he does, but I think most modern readers see that as normal and not a bad thing (???) as long as he leads her along with kindness and care. And there was never any option of *not* having penis-in-vagina sex on their wedding night. The basic structure of what they're doing is they're going to have penis-in-vagina sex, and that's not open for discussion (I think most people don't register this as a problem though) and within that framework, he is kind to Leah and cares about how she feels, so he is a good sexual partner.
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Bilhah and Reuben
In the bible, Jacob marries both Leah and Rachel. Leah has a slave named Zilpah, and Rachel has a slave named Bilhah. Leah and Rachel fight over Jacob's affection, and it's a big deal how Leah gives birth to several sons, while Rachel is unable to have children at all. So Rachel tells Jacob to have sex with Bilhah, so Bilhah can get pregnant and the child will "count" as Rachel's.
In the bible, Bilhah gets pregnant twice, and has 2 sons: Dan and Naphtali. In "The Red Tent" this happens differently (we'll talk more about the differences in a minute). Bilhah only has 1 child, Dan. (In "The Red Tent," Naphtali is Leah's son.) And then after that, Jacob doesn't have sex with Bilhah again.
Later, in "The Red Tent," Dinah describes how Jacob's son Reuben is spending a lot of time with Bilhah, and they seem to like each other. This subplot is meant to shed some light on Genesis 35:22, "While Israel [Jacob] was living in that region, Reuben went in and slept with his father’s concubine Bilhah, and Israel heard of it."
I love this, actually. I ship Bilhah and Reuben.
When I was a kid, and I read the bible, and I read that Reuben had sex with Bilhah, his father's wife, I was like "oh gross, that's bad and wrong, she had already had sex with Jacob, so she's supposed to be with Jacob." From a purity-culture perspective, it's disgusting if someone has sex with one partner, and then at some other point in their life, they have sex with some other partner. (And the bible definitely frames it like Reuben did something wrong.)
But the way it's portrayed in "The Red Tent"... Bilhah was a slave, and Rachel used her. Jacob goes along with it, and he's decent toward her during sex, so good for him I guess, but Bilhah never had a choice. And even though she had sex with Jacob, and she gives birth to his child, and she's called his "wife" (again, the blurriness between "wife" and "slave"), there's not really any relationship between Bilhah and Jacob. Why shouldn't she go find someone else who actually cares about her? Reuben cares about her- you know what, I'm happy for them.
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Things that happened differently in "The Red Tent" than in the bible
Okay I LOVE the fact that some things happened differently in "The Red Tent" than in the bible. I interpret this as saying that the bible was written by men who sometimes got things wrong because they didn't pay attention to the women.
I would say, if you're a bible nerd, the most important difference is the issue of Bilhah having 2 sons or 1 son. In the bible, the sons of Jacob are as follows:
Leah's sons:
Reuben
Simeon
Levi
Judah
Issachar
Zebulun
(also 1 daughter, Dinah)
Rachel's sons:
Joseph
Benjamin
Zilpah's sons:
Gad
Asher
Bilhah's sons:
Dan
Naphtali
(Jacob has 12 sons and 1 daughter.)
In "The Red Tent," there is 1 small difference: Naphtali's mother is Leah, not Bilhah. I know the author did this intentionally- there's no way you can write a fanfic about the wives of Jacob and *accidentally* get a detail like this wrong. And this comes up several times in the book, the fact that Naphtali is Leah's son. This isn't a mistake; the author, Diamant, meant to do it.
For a bible nerd like me, this is a really big deal. This is the biggest difference between the bible and "The Red Tent." The 12 sons of Jacob are important because they become the 12 tribes of Israel; it's a big deal if the bible gets the origin of one of the tribes completely wrong. Also, the number of children that each of the wives has plays a huge role in the conflict between Rachel and Leah, as the bible tells it. This is a big deal.
If you're not a bible nerd and you didn't really know about those details, the biggest difference between the bible and "The Red Tent" is what happened to Dinah. In the bible, there is only 1 story about Dinah, in Genesis 34. Here's what happens in the bible's version of it: Dinah is raped by a man named Shechem, who then wants to marry her and asks for her father Jacob's permission. Jacob's sons aren't happy about this, so they tell him that they will only agree to the marriage if Shechem and all the other men in his city are circumcised. (Here's a [NSFW] link to Mayo Clinic if you're too pure to know what that means.) Jacob's God requires men to be circumcised, so all of the men in Jacob's household already are. Shechem agrees to this. He and all the men in his city get circumcised. Then, while all the men are still in pain, Dinah's brothers Simeon and Levi attack the city and kill all the men, including Shechem. Then the rest of Dinah's brothers come and loot the city and take the women and children as captives.
In "The Red Tent," Dinah was not raped. It's very much consensual, and they are in love. After her brothers come and kill her husband (and the other men in the city), she is beside herself with anger. She feels like no one in her family cares about her, and she runs away.
The way I interpret this is, the author is saying that the bible records this incident as rape because Dinah's consent wasn't what mattered. Her father and brothers didn't consent to it, therefore it was seen as rape. How messed-up is that.
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Hey, what's up with Christians and the story of Dinah?
In all my years as a good churchgoing evangelical, I don't think I ever heard a sermon or Sunday school lesson about the story of Dinah. (I do remember one time the boys in the youth group were talking about this story and giggling endlessly over the whole circumcision aspect.) So while I haven't heard a standard evangelical response to this story in particular, I do know the response to other bible stories where the great role models do horrific things: they weren't perfect. (For example, Abraham has sex with Hagar, a slave- well, Abraham wasn't perfect. David rapes Bathsheba and murders her husband, well, David wasn't perfect. They weren't perfect because of these small incidents, but don't think about those too much- mainly they were great bible heroes, roles models we should learn from.)
Simeon and Levi murdered all the men in the whole town. Well, they weren't perfect.
I can't believe I have to say this, but: There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between "not perfect" and "murdered all the men in the town." If you're not perfect, that's fine. If you murder all the men in a town, oh my GOD, what the heck, you should go to jail.
And Christians who view the bible as lessons for us about how we should live... they read these horrible stories and say "well this is an example of what we should NOT do" and just move on like it doesn't matter, like it's just a slight aberration from the main theme of "here are some great role models we should imitate."
In "The Red Tent," the incident recorded in Genesis 34 is the turning point of Dinah's whole life. She is so angry at Simeon and Levi. She never forgives them. Of course she doesn't! Seeing how devastating this was to her, how it affected her for the rest of her life... the typical Christian response "well they weren't perfect" is so wrong, so disproportionate to what we are actually talking about. They murdered all the men in the town.
(Yes, I realize that the bible tells the story as a rape, so if we take the bible's version of events as true, then Simeon and Levi were rescuing Dinah from her rapist, so that's a very different thing than murdering her husband just because they happen to not like him. Still, though, the other men in the town had nothing to do with it- definitely was wrong to kill them!)
And, actually, if you pay attention when you read the bible, you see that there were some consequences, that the story doesn't just move on like it doesn't matter. At the end of Genesis 34, Jacob tells Simeon and Levi that he isn't happy with what they did, because what if other nearby people hear about it and attack Jacob's family. And in Genesis 49, when Jacob gives "blessings" to his sons, he says that Simeon and Levi were violent, and that this is a bad thing. This is likely referring to what happened with Dinah. Still, though, none of this is really the right level of response when someone murders all the men in a town.
Why DON'T we talk about this story in church? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the patriarchs of Israel, we talk about them a lot, why don't we ever talk about "hey remember the time when Jacob's son's murdered/enslaved a whole town?" Seems like that should be a bigger deal.
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I'm really curious about this being a bestseller
This book was published in 1997 and was apparently a bestseller. When I was in the US and I was reading it, there were a few times that people told me they had heard of it before. I was really surprised- bible fanfiction is the kind of obscure niche content that I'm into, but I wouldn't expect people *in general* to be interested in it. Was there some big cultural moment in 1997 when everyone was talking about the 4 wives of Jacob?
Did this book cause controversy among evangelical Christians when it came out? I remember when "The DaVinci Code" came out and evangelicals were all up in arms about how it was an attack on Christianity, how it was so harmful because it didn't agree with the bible. I can easily see evangelicals starting a similar culture war over "The Red Tent."
First of all, the biggest reason evangelicals would hate it, is that some things in this book happened differently than in the bible. The book is saying that the bible got some things wrong, oh let's clutch our pearls over this terrible attack on the inerrancy of scripture.
Second, "The Red Tent" shows Jacob's family members worshiping many gods, and viewing this as normal. The book mentions Jacob's God but isn't that interested in him. There's no message about Jacob's God being better than other gods; there's no point at which the reader is supposed to think "this character is having problems because they don't believe in the right God." The book is just not about that at all, and from an evangelical perspective, that's not acceptable.
Third, the polygamy, the abuse, the way women are treated in this book. Evangelicals have this weird fantasy that "the biblical definition of marriage" is "1 man, 1 woman" and this gets trotted out to justify discrimination against queer people, single mothers, and anyone else whose family doesn't fit this ideal structure that the bible supposedly presents to us. Evangelicals will tell you that yeah sure there's a lot of polygamy in the bible, but the bible makes it clear that's not how it SHOULD be.
Well, "The Red Tent" gives a realistic portrayal of a society which had as much polygamy and slavery as is described in the bible, and it's so far from modern evangelicals' fantasies about "the biblical definition of marriage." It's very clear that women are not treated well in this book- it makes it very hard to argue "we need to go back to how marriage and gender roles were understood in the bible."
Fourth, the sex scenes.
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Conclusion
I had a great time reading this book. You should definitely read it if you like bible fanfic which tells a bit of a different story than what the bible says. The biggest strength of this book is that it creates a whole world, which is so different from ours but the book makes it feel like something we can understand and relate to. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like if most people believed in many gods, if polygamy was normal, if slavery was normal, if women frequently died in childbirth, etc, but this book does a good job of imagining it.
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