On December 7, Lifetime premieres its biblically-inspired miniseries, The Red Tent, a creative reimaginig of the story of Dinah, daughter to Jacob and Leah. If her name or the details of her life aren’t immediately familiar it’s because Dinah, like many other women in the book of Genesis, wasn’t written about in great detail. That, among other reasons, is why the author of the book of the same name, Anita Diamant, decided to delve deeper into some of the most iconic female characters of the Bible:
"When I looked at Genesis, Dinah is only mentioned briefly, but she doesn’t say a word about what really happened to her in the city of Shechem," Diamant said. "Was she assaulted, as two of her brothers insisted? That’s hard to see given that the man wanted to marry her and agrees to a bride price. But since Dinah doesn’t say anything in the Bible, we really can’t know what happened. So in my novel, Dinah is the narrator. She has a voice."
Giving a voice to women is something both Diamant’s novel and Lifetime’s on-screen adapatation work hard to do. We see sisters Rachel and Leah embrace their roles as mothers and midwives, imparting wisdom to their daughters. The symbolic red tent becomes a safe haven for the women, a place uniquely their own where they share the secrets of womanhood, counsel each other in times of need and, for a time at least, are the deciders of their own fate.
In a time when women’s choices were made for them, Diamant gives characters like Dinah and Rachel a chance to decide for themselves. It’s that freedom and indepence that drew actress Morena Baccarin to the role of Jacob’s favored wife:
[Rachel] is very impassioned by love and romance. She’s just a very sort of heart-driven person and I liked that.” Playing a strong, self-assertive woman like Rachel was a plus for the actress. “That is an important thing and I think it’s an important thing to have out there.”
Though these stories may have originally been based off of text from the Bible, Diamant makes it clear that her novel is just that, a creative piece of work all her own. “This is a work of fiction – not biblical commentary. My goal was not to 'novelize' Scripture, but to tell a compelling story of my own invention, based upon it.”
Compelling may be the perfect word to describe the new minseries. Sweeping landscapes, powerful storytelling and captivating performances by its award-winning cast all serve to bring the story to life. In this version, the characters we grew up learning about in Sunday school or in sermons aren’t infalliable perfect beings but rather flawed followers. We see the struggles of Jacob who works to hold onto his faith while making the right decisions as a father. We see Dinah suffer at the hands of people she trusts, thrown into varying forms of slavery and finally, granted the freedom to truly be herself. We see Rachel and Leah’s relationship as messy, complicated and fraught with tension but also as one full of love and loyalty.
Ultimately, Diamant hopes that The Red Tent will give a voice to the lost, to the unwritten women who no doubt had a role in making the history we now base our faith on. And it’s stories like Diamant’s and shows like The Red Tent that spark conversations on faith and history, and that's a great thing.
The Red Tent airs Dec. 7 & 8 on Lifetime.
