And after Abimelech there arose to defend Israel Tola the son of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, and he dwelt in Shamir in mount Ephraim.
And he judged Israel twenty and three years, and died, and was buried in Shamir.
And after him arose Jair, a Gileadite, and judged Israel twenty and two years.
And he had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass colts and had thirty cities, which are called Havoth-jair unto this day, which are in the land of Gilead.
And Jair died, and was buried in Camon.
And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not him.
And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hands of the Philistines, and into the hands of the children of Ammon.
—Judges 10:1–7 (KJV)

If the mention of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, elicits a glimmer of recognition; if you remember being tantalized by the enigmatic sons of Jair, who rode on thirty ass colts and had thirty cities—then you should award yourself a gold star such as our Sunday school teachers gave us fifty years ago when we had successfully completed our memory work for the week.

Chances are, though, that you haven't read the Book of Judges in a very long time—maybe never. America may be a religious nation, America may even be, in some sense, a predominantly Christian nation, but as Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero and a number of others have observed, America today is also a nation of biblical illiterates. And that's especially true when it comes to knowledge of the Old Testament, which makes up about three-quarters of the Bible. Even among many evangelicals, who fervently proclaim their devotion to the Word of God, large chunks of the Old Testament are terra incognita, seldom or never explored, much less pored over.

There are hopeful signs of change. Influential evangelical pastors as various as Kent Hughes at College Church in Wheaton and Rob Bell at Mars Hill in Grand Rapids are preaching with great effect from the Old Testament. And as Philip Jenkins points out in his book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (coming in September from Oxford Univ. Press), "the experience of the emerging churches must make us rethink the role of the Old Testament… Southern readings can help us exorcize the stubborn ghost of Marcion, a task that Christian churches need to repeat with some regularity."

But help is also on the way from another—most unlikely—source: a novel by a Jewish feminist, bitterly contemptuous of the God of Jacob. Thanks to this book, the genre of Old Testament fiction has been reinvigorated.

Fiction set in the world of ancient Israel is nothing new, of course, though it has always taken a back seat to biblical stories surrounding Jesus and Paul. In the dusty bookstores I frequented when I was old enough to hunt, there were invariably a few secondhand copies of Dr. Frank G. Slaughter's pious potboilers. While his New Testament tales are better-known, Slaughter didn't neglect the Old. Among his books in this vein were The Scarlet Cord (about Rahab the harlot, a favorite of ot novelists), The Curse of Jezabel, and The Song of Ruth. ("Against the Moabite leader's massive ugliness Boaz seemed small, but the sinews of his torso were smooth and rippling compared with Hedak's bunched muscles and huge limbs.")

At the other end of the spectrum are fables such as Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, first published in Canada in 1984, a deliberately anachronistic, self-consciously blasphemous retelling of the story of Noah and the Flood; and David Maine's The Preservationist, published in 2004, another Noah's ark tale, considerably more whimsical and less axe-grinding than Findley but equally irreverent.

While ot fiction has never gone entirely out of fashion, it's fair to say that a decade ago the genre was enfeebled. Then came The Red Tent, Anita Diamant's 1997 novel centered on Jacob's daughter Dinah, who appears fleetingly in the 34th chapter of Genesis in one of those episodes that most preachers prefer to ignore. (When was the last time you heard a sermon on this text?) From Jacob's sons, of course, came the 12 tribes of Israel, but who remembers that he even had a daughter? As the kjv relates,

And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.
And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and he spoke kindly unto the damsel.

The honorable son of a not-so-honorable Canaanite ruler, Shechem wants to marry Dinah. Jacob's sons treacherously agree to the match on the condition that the young man, his father, and all the menfolk of their city will be circumcised, and while the Canaanites are still sore and weak, Jacob's sons kill all the men, take their wives and children captive, make off with all their goods, and ravage what remains of the city. Immediately thereafter Jacob is told by God to return to a place called Bethel and build an altar there. Before they depart Jacob instructs his household to "put away the strange gods" that are among them.

This episode caught the eye of Thomas Mann, who devoted a chapter to it—heavy with his characteristic irony—in Joseph and His Brothers. Whereas Mann's narrative is aloof, urbane, Diamant's Dinah tells her own story. Her chronicle is plainspoken, intimate, woman-to-woman. The red tent of the title is the place where the women go when they are menstruating. It is also the place of childbirth, of storytelling, and of pagan ritual. (The women, with their spells and amulets and alternative creation stories—like the story of the goddess Uttu that the young Dinah hears—are not particularly attentive to the exclusive claims of El, the jealous God of the Old Testament.)

In Diamant's novel, all of the values of the biblical narrative are inverted. The Canaanites are morally as well as culturally superior to Jacob and his people, their polytheism preferable to the harsh narrowness of monotheism—though all talk of God or gods, the novel concludes, is ultimately but a puff of wind. "There is no magic to immortality," Dinah says: what endures is family, ordinary joys and ordinary sorrows, the common human heritage handed down from generation to generation, better represented in the modest traditions of women than in the boastful sagas of men.

The Red Tent wasn't an immediate success. But word of mouth, complemented by Diamant's own vigorous and savvy promotion (she was an agent before she became a novelist), kept it alive, and in time it became one of those rare books that publishers dream about, selling and selling for years. Today, almost a decade later, reading groups centered on Diamant's novel continue to flourish—even where I live, in the heart of the Midwest—and her success has inspired a mini-genre.

"In the tradition of The Red Tent," these imitators hopefully proclaim. India Edghill's Queenmaker, for instance, is the first-person narrative of Michal, King Saul's daughter and one of David's wives, whose bitter account seeks to cut the giant-slayer, psalmist, adulterer, and king down to size. Queenmaker has the flavor of a contemporary divorce-novel, transposed to a biblical setting and translated into the excruciating, faux-primitif idiom that many ot novelists adopt.

Most of the women in our small group at the evangelical church we attend (my wife included) read Diamant's novel, and they are not alone. Without a substantial audience among evangelical women, The Red Tent would not have enjoyed such a sustained success. These are women who take the Bible seriously, and there's far more at stake for them in such a retelling than there is for readers who regard the Bible as merely a collection of fables about an odious patriarchal deity.

Publishers have taken note. Last year, the paperback publisher Signet (a division of Penguin) launched a series called "Women of the Bible" with Abigail's Story by Ann Burton. Like Queenmaker and The Red Tent itself, this story—about another of King David's wives—decries the exploitation of women and features a Strong Woman as protagonist while simultaneously mining the erotic potential of its setting. (Both Queenmaker and Abigail's Story, for example, include a scene in which David surprises the protagonist while she is bathing.) But in Burton's book, romance is unambiguously triumphant. On the cover, Abigail stands proudly, staring into the distance, her lovely but keenly determined features framed by a luxuriant mane of windblown hair. Her dress leaves her shoulders bare, but a shawl is draped fetchingly across one side; one hand rests firmly on a staff. (Burton followed up with Rahab's Story and, earlier this year, Jael's Story.)

Abigail's Story is clearly intended for Bible-believing readers, evangelical and otherwise. In that respect it hardly differs from the ot novels issued by evangelical publishers in the wake of The Red Tent, such as Ginger Garrett's Chosen: The Lost Diaries of Queen Esther (NavPress) and Lynn Austin's series "Chronicles of the Kings" (Bethany House; in other ways, however, Austin departs from the conventions we've been following: her series largely eschews quasi-feminist romance). Surely, one might suppose, these books—which, in marked contrast to The Red Tent, accept Scripture with no revisionist spirit—will find an even wider audience among evangelical women.

Maybe—but I'm not so sure. Fiction creates an imaginative space in which alternative ways of seeing the world can be entertained and tested. The questions raised by Diamant's radical retelling of Dinah's story—questions about the fierce demands of the One God and the harsh fate of those who were not his chosen people; about all that is between the lines of the spare biblical narrative; about the women in a tale told by men—are ones that will occur to many who read the Old Testament with the eyes of faith. Many evangelical women have read The Red Tent precisely for such questions. They've laughed and cried and nodded in recognition even as they've measured their faith against Diamant's very different convictions. And they've returned to Scripture, not with all their questions answered but with their faith stronger. That may not be exactly what Diamant had in mind when she was writing, but books have a way of taking on a life of their own.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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