Anyone who has read the Bible knows that sometimes women are often not well represented in the not so many instances where they are sought to be represented by the men who wrote the book.

Take the story of Dinah, for example. She is the daughter of Jacob who is “defiled” by a prince of the city of Shechem and then avenged by her brothers who proceed to execute all the men in the city. That, basically, is all the Bible tells us about the daughter of Jacob. But is that all there is to Dinah’s story? Is she only meant to be a victim whose only purpose in the Biblical texts is to be raped and serve as a catalyst for the murder of the men of Shechem? American author, Anita Diamant, doesn’t seem to think so and her excellent revisionist novel, The Red Tent, goes back to Dinah’s story and retells it from the perspective of Dinah herself.
In The Red Tent, Dinah is a fully-developed character, as the author makes the readers’ connection with Dinah stronger by tracking her life even before she was born, through childhood and then adolescence and adulthood. It is a marvel to read Diamant as she transforms and shapes Dinah into something much more than what she was in the Bible’s version of events. Yes, Diamant does take many liberties with the tale and some of her choices (such as portraying what has become known as the “rape of Dinah” not as rape at all but as a consensual relationship between two people who love each other) might be considered controversial or upsetting to Biblical purists, but her task of giving Dinah her own voice is fully accomplished.
Dinah is not the only character to be reviewed and developed in the novel. All of the women who are married to Jacob and known primarily in the Bible to be simply his wives and mothers to his children are given individual personalities and roles in Diamant’s book. Leah is portrayed as strong and dutiful with strange eyes; Rachel is kindly, beautiful and a bit spoiled in the beginning; Zilpah is religious and very peculiar, while Bilhah initially appears small and timid only to conduct one of the most shocking acts halfway through the novel.
It is important to know that while the author is aware of the job she, as a Jewish woman, has to do with regards to the revision and reconstruction of the stories of Biblical women, she never loses sight of the fact that she is a novelist, a storyteller, who has to entertain. Like the Bible itself, The Red Tent is filled with sex, murder, curses, various surprises and shocking moments and everything else that ensures it is an entertaining, heartbreaking, beautiful work that keeps the reader enthralled throughout.
There also seems to be an implicit message in the novel about the necessity of telling women’s stories due to the fact that a lot of information, knowledge and lessons can be lost if women’s stories disappear or are retold by men and not women themselves. Dinah in the novel says to the reader of her own tale: “We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing.”