The Red Tent

“The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour […] On the rare occasions when I was remembered, it was as a victim.”

This quote introduces the framework of Dinah telling her own story, and that oral narratives are women’s way of preserving a history unobserved by men. The image of the broken link foreshadows Dinah’s place in her family history, and explains why her story is different from that in the male-authored Book of Genesis.

“[Zilpah] told me that the presence of El hovered over [Jacob] […] El was the god of thunder, high places, and awful sacrifice. El could demand that a father cut off his son—cast him out into the desert, or slaughter him outright. This was a hard, strange god, alien and cold.”

In contrast to the nurturing mother-goddesses (like Inanna) whom Dinah’s four mothers worship, Jacob’s god (El) strikes them as cruel and cold. This quote foreshadows Simon and Levi’s violence and the alienation that Dinah will experience from her family upon her husband’s murder.

“Leah, too, said Laban had put his hand under her robes, but when she told Adah, my grandmother had beaten Laban with a pestle until he bled. She broke the horns off his favorite household god, and when she threatened to curse him with boils and impotence, he swore never to touch his daughters again.”

Men’s sexual violence against women is a pattern throughout The Red Tent, indicating the dangers that exist for women in a culture where they are regarded as the property of men. Dinah’s grandmother Adah uses a pestle, a cooking utensil, to threaten her husband Laban, and breaks a phallic symbol—the horns of a teraphim (household god)—to indicate she will punish any sexual advances he makes toward their daughters.