Violet Voices

Thoughts on “The Red Tent”

I read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent last night. As promised, here are my thoughts about it.

Yes, it was “revisionist” biblical fiction. In fact, it scarely resembled the biblical story in anything but the basic skeleton. I felt the writing was fairly strong in most parts, but the third part lacked energy and felt as if it were there merely to tie up all the loose ends. Lots of narrative summary to move things along, but it also pulled me out of the story and characters by reminding me that the narrator was only telling me a story, not living it with me. However, the community of the women displayed was compelling to me. Made me wish for a piece of that in our own culture. Yes, we have community in our way, too, but not the celebration of femaleness that was portrayed in this book. I liked that, minus the goddess worship.

And that, I believe, is the biggest complaint about this book. The fact that she portrayed the God I worship as being nothing more than a distant, male talisman that had little to do with the lives of women. But I can’t take offense at the author for that. She shaped her story according to the study and experiences that have shaped her. And the followers of the Judeo-Christian God bear much responsibility for leaving the impression that our God cares little about women.

I can understand why the idea of rewriting the stories of the Bible to include female deities and feminine experiences is so tempting. The brokenness of humanity, our own severed community between genders, has created a situation where it is impossible to imagine a God without reference to gender. And, for reasons I lack the scholarly understanding to explain, our only scriptures present this God using predominantly masculine language. There are feminine metaphors, but they are a small percentage of the whole. There are also female narratives, but they, too, are small in number. Human rebellion against this God created the situation of male power and female longing and despair. In the light of this, it’s only natural for women to want to create their own faiths and narratives.

But it doesn’t make it right or true. What Diamant’s story, and other feminist revisions do, is create further divisions between us women and our brothers. Parts of her story are quite plausible, I suppose–we don’t know for certain that Jacob’s wives shared his religious beliefs, and there are hints that perhaps they didn’t. (The portrayal of Rebecca, however, was just plain weird.) But the overriding message of the book was that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn’t care about and bears no relevancy to the world of women. That in order to really experience full womanhood, one needs to basically worship one’s own sexuality and enter fully into a female world where men are on the periphery.

To me, it points to a fundamental misunderstanding about the character of God. And to be fair, it’s a misunderstanding that His followers throughout history have been primary culprits in creating. God is NOT masculine. God is NOT gendered. God is NOT male. Neither is He feminine or female. He transcends gender. He created humans in His image–and the masculine and feminine aspects of our humanity are only one small part of that reflection. They are rooted in our physical nature. God, on the other hand, transcends the physical. He created it, so it must be an aspect of Him, something that reflects Him. But when we conceive of God in terms of gender, we are remaking Him in our image, leading to worshipping ourselves.

The constraints of language force us to think in terms of gender. But I believe that as people really come to know the God of the Bible and allow Him to shape their conception of who He is, instead of shaping Him to their own biases and experiences, they will discover a God who is relevant to every part of who we are. Every experience, every narrative.

The God I know and worship is not a patriarchial God, or a matriachial one. He’s a God who understands all the intimate workings of my heart, mind, and body, and knows the brokenness of my humanity. Worshipping this God as He rightly is should bring me into community not only with my sisters but also with my brothers. This God doesn’t create divisions. It is our own humanness apart from Him that creates divisions between us. The desire of men and women to have power over each other or to prove the other’s irrelevancy creates “worlds” between us. It is not God.

What I find troubling about The Red Tent, then, is not Diamant’s supposed revisions on the biblical story of Jacob’s family. I can tell she did a vast amount of research, and that she tried very hard to incorporate the culture of the time into the story. I know she took some liberties with what many of us consider to be biblical truth. That by itself doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the message that emerges from this revisioning of the God of the Bible. The message that God is a “man’s god” and has no part to play in a woman’s life. It saddens me because I know that many women in our world today believe this to be true. It’s a belief that is reinforced by religious teaching and practices within the faith community. And, contrary to the very nature of this God, it’s a belief that divides and separates men from women, making us into idols to be, by turns, worshipped, manipulated, or conquered.

As beautiful and wonderful as I find humans to be, we are also a very broken creation, aren’t we? And I don’t see that any solution is to be found except coming to know God as He truly is and letting Him make us whole people, so that our maleness and femaleness are just one aspect of reflecting the community and relationship of the God in whose likeness we are created.

The Thoughts on “The Red Tent” by Violet Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Written By: Meredith Efken
Posted under: Women's Voices .  Email This Post