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A review by lpm100
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
5.0
Book Review
The Red Tent
5/5 stars
"Diamant convincingly writes her own Midrash"
*******
Some historical fiction (think James Michener) seems more plausible because it is about times that were not so far back that we have no frame of reference.
This book is historical fiction with some research done, but it is for times that are so far back in the past that it is almost meaningless to speculate about its plausibility.
Maybe the author's narrative arc is realistic.
Or maybe not.
It is very clear, however, that these events took place before Jewish people invented themselves and way back when Israel was still Canaanite land.
With the ascendance of Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple, it's very easy to forget that it was not always that way-- and that:
1. Judaism was originally a sacrificial / tribal religion;
2. Israelites had to be born first. And then many hundreds of years later and after living as subject people the first Israelite became the first Jew;
The narrative that Haredim create for themselves is that the Beit Midrash sprang into existence a couple of weeks after Abraham and the Torah was handed down to Moshe a few weeks after that in a village somewhere in Eastern Europe. (Maybe Lithuania. Maybe Satmar, Hungary. Depends on which sect you ask.)
But reality was different, as this book seems to show us:
1. The process of Jews' becoming strict and passionate monotheists was something that went on over several hundred years-- and as of the time of the events in this book... it was nowhere near complete. (And that explains how there are so many matriarchs and patriarchs in here making offerings to idols as well as so many pagan ceremonies that roughly parallel Jewish holidays of today.)
2. A lot of the restrictions that we have (such as not mixing milk and meat) we're not there before Israelites congealed into a people. And as Israelites became Jews, the shape of those restrictions changed further under rabbinic interpretation (p.18) .
Even at least one deoraita (not eating insects) had not been enacted (p.123) around the time of Jacob and Joseph.
3. The reader will also find the most rudimentary beginning of the laws of family purity, and nothing about the categories of forbidden co-wives. (Jacob The Patriarch did marry four sisters.)
4. The impression that I get from this book is that the relevant events took place over a very small area (from what I get, I don't imagine that it was more than 40 miles wide), and there were a bunch of tribes of people there with different quirky customs.
It also appears that the characters in this book were semi-nomadic shepherds and not dwellers in an enclosed city. (That's not hard to believe, because within the Chumash that distinction is made several times.)
And, as is liable to happen in that type of situation, some number of them amalgamated themselves into what we now know as Jewish people.
5. Back in those days, when people talked about receiving their father's blessing/birthright, it was not an abstract thing; as here, it seems like a son will inherit his father's holdings in the right to supervise them. (p.197).
Diamant rewrites the story/creates her own midrash to make it such that:
1. Jacob spent 7 months working for each bride and not 7 years.
2. The other two sisters (Bilhah and Zilpah) were to be taken as security for a dowry for the first two wives.
3. In the Chumash, Dinah is a victim. In this book, she's a little bit closer to Blanche Devereaux.
4. "Rape" is used to describe both sexually overtaking a woman by force as well as taking a willing woman who could not technically consent. (Even if a 15-year-old is willing, it is considered rape these days.)
If we believe Diamant, what happened to Dinah was more like a technical rape and it was exacerbated because of trade conflicts that her brothers had with the house of Hamor.
5. Jacob's being renamed Israel was reimagined as being because his name was worn out as being a manipulator and a spawner of killers. His flight away from Shechem was because of the mass murder perpetrated by his sons.
6. The only daughter of Jacob/Israel ends up midwifing for Joseph (Zafenat Paneh-ah) the lost son (p.286). It appears that the purpose of this far-fetched plot event was in order to give an idea of the treatment that Joseph would have suffered when he was sold as a slave. (The Egyptian / Arab men have had a very long reputation for enjoying the rectums of either sex.)
Second order thoughts:
1. Why such hatred toward Laban? Diamant portrays him in a way even worse than Iago. (Bestiality. Spousal battery. Incestual tendencies. The object of hatred of ALL FOUR of his daughters.)
And it seems like this went so far that she had to invest the energy to create a character that is never mentioned in the Jewish Bible. (Ruti) for the express purpose of vilifying him still more.
Why not imagine him as a doddering old man? Or a poor old sap?
What was the point?
Was it a bit of Jewish oikophobia? (There is a lot of this, and so it's not hard to believe.)
As if to say, "Within all of these stories about kings' viziers and viceroy-- let's not forget that it wasn't always that way and that the ancestors came from some pretty unsavory people."
Or, maybe to say that "Sometimes good really can come from bad."
2. What language were these people speaking? And over what distances did the languages work? (We only have distances in terms of days' journey. It's not hard to believe because it's a common story that somebody can travel 50 miles in any direction in Africa and have no clue what local language people are speaking.)
3. These conditions remind me in another way of what they are like in certain parts of Africa in the present day.
It is known that Africa is an extremely violent and unstable place, and the causative agent of that is that: so many men have multiple wives that it creates young men with nothing to do but attempt to foment revolution. Lots of characters in here have multiple wives, and it's not so hard to imagine that the fate of Wenenro (p. 253) was the direct consequence of that.
4. Egypt is a very easy Jewish bete noire. But, Diamant shows them as more advanced than their Canaanite neighbors - - by dint of the fact that Dinah was such a country bumpkin. (She had never seen a river before she left her village. Or a cat.)
5. The author wanted to tell the story seen through the he eyes of women, but the problem is that the girls were among the last of the children born. It appears that Diamant used a literary device to put words in Dina's mouth, which is that of omniscience of an as-yet-unborn character. (This literary technique is not new. You could see it in action in Eugenides' " Middlesex," but I wouldn't waste the time even of my worst enemy reading that book.)
6. The marriages between the people in these books are WAY too close. Just ....no.
Verdict: Recommended. If for no other reason than to give us an idea of local conditions at that time.
New vocabulary:
amphora
bamah
pessary
dandle
teraphim
lapis lazuli
teraphim
cairn
wadi
brindled
mina(h) of wool
milk-sister/brother
sistrum
carnelian
scarab
flagon
madder
easing stool
Memphis (Egyptian city)
barque
loamy
The Red Tent
5/5 stars
"Diamant convincingly writes her own Midrash"
*******
Some historical fiction (think James Michener) seems more plausible because it is about times that were not so far back that we have no frame of reference.
This book is historical fiction with some research done, but it is for times that are so far back in the past that it is almost meaningless to speculate about its plausibility.
Maybe the author's narrative arc is realistic.
Or maybe not.
It is very clear, however, that these events took place before Jewish people invented themselves and way back when Israel was still Canaanite land.
With the ascendance of Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple, it's very easy to forget that it was not always that way-- and that:
1. Judaism was originally a sacrificial / tribal religion;
2. Israelites had to be born first. And then many hundreds of years later and after living as subject people the first Israelite became the first Jew;
The narrative that Haredim create for themselves is that the Beit Midrash sprang into existence a couple of weeks after Abraham and the Torah was handed down to Moshe a few weeks after that in a village somewhere in Eastern Europe. (Maybe Lithuania. Maybe Satmar, Hungary. Depends on which sect you ask.)
But reality was different, as this book seems to show us:
1. The process of Jews' becoming strict and passionate monotheists was something that went on over several hundred years-- and as of the time of the events in this book... it was nowhere near complete. (And that explains how there are so many matriarchs and patriarchs in here making offerings to idols as well as so many pagan ceremonies that roughly parallel Jewish holidays of today.)
2. A lot of the restrictions that we have (such as not mixing milk and meat) we're not there before Israelites congealed into a people. And as Israelites became Jews, the shape of those restrictions changed further under rabbinic interpretation (p.18) .
Even at least one deoraita (not eating insects) had not been enacted (p.123) around the time of Jacob and Joseph.
3. The reader will also find the most rudimentary beginning of the laws of family purity, and nothing about the categories of forbidden co-wives. (Jacob The Patriarch did marry four sisters.)
4. The impression that I get from this book is that the relevant events took place over a very small area (from what I get, I don't imagine that it was more than 40 miles wide), and there were a bunch of tribes of people there with different quirky customs.
It also appears that the characters in this book were semi-nomadic shepherds and not dwellers in an enclosed city. (That's not hard to believe, because within the Chumash that distinction is made several times.)
And, as is liable to happen in that type of situation, some number of them amalgamated themselves into what we now know as Jewish people.
5. Back in those days, when people talked about receiving their father's blessing/birthright, it was not an abstract thing; as here, it seems like a son will inherit his father's holdings in the right to supervise them. (p.197).
Diamant rewrites the story/creates her own midrash to make it such that:
1. Jacob spent 7 months working for each bride and not 7 years.
2. The other two sisters (Bilhah and Zilpah) were to be taken as security for a dowry for the first two wives.
3. In the Chumash, Dinah is a victim. In this book, she's a little bit closer to Blanche Devereaux.
4. "Rape" is used to describe both sexually overtaking a woman by force as well as taking a willing woman who could not technically consent. (Even if a 15-year-old is willing, it is considered rape these days.)
If we believe Diamant, what happened to Dinah was more like a technical rape and it was exacerbated because of trade conflicts that her brothers had with the house of Hamor.
5. Jacob's being renamed Israel was reimagined as being because his name was worn out as being a manipulator and a spawner of killers. His flight away from Shechem was because of the mass murder perpetrated by his sons.
6. The only daughter of Jacob/Israel ends up midwifing for Joseph (Zafenat Paneh-ah) the lost son (p.286). It appears that the purpose of this far-fetched plot event was in order to give an idea of the treatment that Joseph would have suffered when he was sold as a slave. (The Egyptian / Arab men have had a very long reputation for enjoying the rectums of either sex.)
Second order thoughts:
1. Why such hatred toward Laban? Diamant portrays him in a way even worse than Iago. (Bestiality. Spousal battery. Incestual tendencies. The object of hatred of ALL FOUR of his daughters.)
And it seems like this went so far that she had to invest the energy to create a character that is never mentioned in the Jewish Bible. (Ruti) for the express purpose of vilifying him still more.
Why not imagine him as a doddering old man? Or a poor old sap?
What was the point?
Was it a bit of Jewish oikophobia? (There is a lot of this, and so it's not hard to believe.)
As if to say, "Within all of these stories about kings' viziers and viceroy-- let's not forget that it wasn't always that way and that the ancestors came from some pretty unsavory people."
Or, maybe to say that "Sometimes good really can come from bad."
2. What language were these people speaking? And over what distances did the languages work? (We only have distances in terms of days' journey. It's not hard to believe because it's a common story that somebody can travel 50 miles in any direction in Africa and have no clue what local language people are speaking.)
3. These conditions remind me in another way of what they are like in certain parts of Africa in the present day.
It is known that Africa is an extremely violent and unstable place, and the causative agent of that is that: so many men have multiple wives that it creates young men with nothing to do but attempt to foment revolution. Lots of characters in here have multiple wives, and it's not so hard to imagine that the fate of Wenenro (p. 253) was the direct consequence of that.
4. Egypt is a very easy Jewish bete noire. But, Diamant shows them as more advanced than their Canaanite neighbors - - by dint of the fact that Dinah was such a country bumpkin. (She had never seen a river before she left her village. Or a cat.)
5. The author wanted to tell the story seen through the he eyes of women, but the problem is that the girls were among the last of the children born. It appears that Diamant used a literary device to put words in Dina's mouth, which is that of omniscience of an as-yet-unborn character. (This literary technique is not new. You could see it in action in Eugenides' " Middlesex," but I wouldn't waste the time even of my worst enemy reading that book.)
6. The marriages between the people in these books are WAY too close. Just ....no.
Verdict: Recommended. If for no other reason than to give us an idea of local conditions at that time.
New vocabulary:
amphora
bamah
pessary
dandle
teraphim
lapis lazuli
teraphim
cairn
wadi
brindled
mina(h) of wool
milk-sister/brother
sistrum
carnelian
scarab
flagon
madder
easing stool
Memphis (Egyptian city)
barque
loamy