Anita Diamant's The Red Tent is wonderful writing. It is an excellent study in Point of View. The character of Diana is complex and easy to like, even in her imperfections. The culture of the red tent is compelling but follows the current trends of finding legitimacy in the sacred feminine where ever it can be inferred. The feminine voice of Genesis is too often not heard.

That said, I did not like the book. Diamant embraced presuppositions that cannot be countenanced. I think we are in a particular spiritual danger when we assume that the Bible is simply the "male perspective." Diana's take on Biblical figures like Jacob and Joseph is interesting, but goes so far as to retell the story with different elements.

On the one hand, I appreciated Diamant's use of the pagan elements affirmed by the Bible, but I do not think the Hebrew matriarchs were inclined to maintain a pagan identity in rebellion to the LORD and to their husbands. In Diamant's world, the Egyptian religious world was much more androgynously integrated than YHWHism. Why should that be?

A fiction writer may interpret the biblical material, but not revise it. So, if the Bible says the massacre at Shechem took place because of a rape and that Diana was laid low by the events, we must interpret based upon those facts, not dismiss them.

The explicit sexual content, especially in the first half of the book, is characteristic of the age of Diana in that period of her life, but is unnecessary. At times she sounds like she is from Pasadena more than from Palestine. Of course, the subtext here is that Pagans are much more sexually well adjusted than People of the Book.

On the whole, the work is well written and engaging. However, the subtext is that perspective is truth, that the Bible is merely the record of the "winner," that if women had written Genesis it would tell a very different story, that it is nothing more than another ancient myth to be manipulated for our own purposes. Diamant does not indulge in the same kind of revisionism that Dan Brown does, that is, she does not insist that her book is anything but fiction; and his writing is nowhere near her league. But if a person read The Red Tent and did not have an already established trust for the truth of Scripture, it would skew their perspective.