sententia

In this series

1. Retrofitting “The Red Tent”
2. Retrofitting “The Red Tent” Part II

“Weekly Reads” is moving to Mondays! It seems as though more of you actively check the site on weekdays, so I want to see if the change in dates will work better. So, in lieu of the WR post, here’s the conclusion of “Retrofitting the Red Tent.”

This article was originally published in February 2007, which was in turn republished from an academic paper written when I was in school. It has been republished from the original Sententia.net, and formatted for reading online.

Last time, I talked about family life, gender roles, and the like as far as they concern the ancient Israelite women found in Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent. But what else do we know about how the lives of ancient women actually were lived?

Education

Meyers does tell us that there were likely Iron Age women who could read and write — but this isn’t something that Diamant picks up on.  Instead, the women of The Red Tent are involved in more “traditional” forms of education.

Another area to which Meyers dedicates a significant amount of attention is the role that women played in the socialization and education of children. She remarks,

There can be no doubt that women play a unique and critical role in the socializing process, broadly conceived. They not only bear the children who represent the future of the the household and society, but are also the primary caretakers of the young and as such introduce them, especially in a
household-centered society, to a sizeable proportion of the tasks, modes of behavior, cultural forms, and norms and values of their society.

This is largely the same role that the women of The Red Tent took, especially in their relationship to Dinah. However, Diamant also portrays the women also providing education to the boys, including teaching them how to spin cloth.

She writes, as Dinah, “After [being teased by Simon and Levi], Zebulun and Dan refused to do any more spinning for our mothers, and after much begging they were permitted to follow their older brothers into the fields” (Diamant 77).

Dinah goes on to relate that all the children were taught to perform tasks such as gardening, carding wool and spinning (78). This correlates with Meyers’ indication that “children of both sexes were probably exposed to tasks that were part of the female’s managerial contribution to the household” (Meyers 151).

Authority

With regard to the jural-legal place of women among the ancient Israelites, Meyers focuses her attention primarily on the authority they held.

She describes this authority particularly as it functioned within the household environment, stating that “one should look at family law in terms of the internal governance and authority structure of a household” (155). In determining how this authority would have functioned within the context of ancient Israel, Meyers examines the textual evidence from Torah.

Her survey of these passages, combined with insights from anthropology, lead her to conclude that the authority of both parents in Israelite families was supported in the oldest legal tradition in the Bible . . . The centrality of the household in the premonarchic economy, and the vital role of women in that situation, gave women considerable informal power and at least some legal authority (157).

Whether Meyer means that this legal tradition dates back to the time depicted in The Red Tent is unclear; the implication is, however, that female authority would have been normative in that time as well since it is a common feature of agrarian societies (157).

This type of authority is also suggested by Diamant, though its presence is more understated than Meyers’ discussion would suggest. In Diamant’s narrative, women are respected for their insights and their abilities; the most obvious example of this occurs with regard to the character of Rebecca.

Diamant describes Rebecca as a source of wisdom, and not just to her family members, but also to “pilgrims who came seeking advice and prophecy from her they called ‘Oracle”’ (Diamant 150).

Though Rebecca’s character presents the most obvious example of the womans’ authority, the implication is present throughout the narrative that the women had a significant influence in all aspects of the household decisions.

Religious Leaders

Finally, and perhaps most significantly given the Biblical source for Diamant’s narrative, Meyers discusses the role of ancient Israelite women in religious activity.

As Meyers cautions, though, “In this area, we must tread carefully. Archaeology and biblical scholarship have been consistently and enthusiastically concerned with the monumental and the official aspect of religion” (Meyers 157). As it pertains to the agrarian communities of the earliest Israelites, which was largely private, little attention has been paid outside of the Biblical text, if only because there are no monumental remains of tent communities.

That being said, sociological evidence suggests that proto-Israelite religion was primarily family-oriented, being largely decentralized and occurring within the individual households (158-159). When considered in conjunction with the role of women in the socialization and education of children, Meyers concludes that women would have also played a significant role in the religious practice of the family.

It is also likely that women then — as now — had their own religious rituals.  One of the most striking scenes of The Red Tent occurs when Dinah begins her first menstrual period, and gives her blood back to the earth.

The households gods, the teraphim, are used to break Dinah’s hymen, at which time Rachel cries out, “Mother! Innana! Queen of the Night! Accept the blood offering of your daughter, in her mother’s name, in your name. In her blood may she live, in her blood may she give life” (172).

Every birth, every death, every major life event is marked by the women of The Red Tent. Diamant’s message is thus in concert with that of Meyers: “Circumstantial as [the] information about household cult and female involvement may be, it surely suggests a place for women in household religion” (163).

The Verdict

Clearly, the instances in which Diamant’s world differs from the descriptions of Meyers do not indicate a historical fallacy on Diamant’s part; because Diamant sets her story approximately 1500 years before the time Meyers is addressing, to come to such a conclusion would clearly be an anachronistic fallacy.

However, there is a tendency to assume that, in the instances where Diamant’s account is in accord the conclusions of Meyers, Diamant’s recreation is an accurate portrayal. It is important to realize that just likedissimilarities do not mean that Diamant’s recreation is wrong, similarities do not mean that it is right.

On the other hand, one must also not lose sight of the fact that it is the job of the fiction writer to write fiction, not history. If anything, the comparison of Diamant’s The Red Tent with the insights of Meyers demonstrates that anthropology, sociology and similar disciplines can certainly help fill in the gaps presented by the more traditional sources of archaeological and textual information.

The rest must be left to the imagination, be it that of the scholar or that of the novelist.

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