The Red Tent: My Reaction

In her book, The Red Tent, Anita Diamant attempts to expound upon the foundations laid by the Torah by way of midrashim. In doing so, parts of her stories tend to stray from the original biblical text. The following essay will explore this and several other aspects of the book as they relate to the Torah and modern midrash.

One of the first differences I recognized was the description of Leah’s eyes. In Genesis 29:17, Leah’s eyes are described as weak. Diamant dispels this ‘rumor’, saying that Leah’s eyes, one blue and one green, “made others weak” because most people had difficulty looking her in the face. By making this small adjustment, Diamant is able to create a connection between Jacob and Leah that the Bible neglects. The Bible says only that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, which tends to give the impression that Leah was unloved. Diamant says that Jacob was able to look Leah in the eye without any trouble and never made any comment regarding them. This is significant because it shows that Jacob overlooked a flaw in Leah that most others seemed unable to ignore, and the physical attraction between them that she later addressed in the seven days following their marriage (which was a single night in the Bible) seems to make more sense. In addition, their discussion in the tent concluding that Jacob was to emerge after the week “feigning anger “ is a midrash provides an explanation as to why Jacob slept with Leah and still complained to Laban that he had been tricked. Diamant makes Jacob appear to be more of a gentleman than the Bible does, and thus, a more likeable main character in her novel.

In The Red Tent, Diamant created people not mentioned in the Torah. One such person was Ruti, Laban’s last wife. Laban beat Ruti badly and frequently for no apparent reason. In Diamant’s book, Ruti’s fairly small role serves as a clear reason for the reader to dislike Laban. Until Ruti is introduced, besides being a drunk and making love to sheep, we find Laban to be little more than pathetic. Including Ruti in the story adds another dimesion to Laban’s character; one of cruelty and aggression. At this point, Diamant makes Laban begin to fit the novelistic “bad guy” mold quite well, and the reader finds him more repulsive than ever before. His daughters pay little attention to Ruti and ignore the evidence of their father’s abusiveness because Ruti is “the mother of their sons’ rivals, their material enemy.