Only Daughter

This is it, I promise...the last post about the five women in Diamant's The Red Tent. I can't leave Jacob's womenfolk without discussing his daughter Dinah, the heroine in the novel.

When you read the account in Genesis, you'll see that Jacob and Leah's daughter was "defiled" by a young man named Shechem and that his father Hamor made a generous offer to Jacob in return for his daughter. Shechem apparently loved Dinah and wanted to marry her. Her brothers, however, were angered at her treatment and demanded that all the men of Shechem's city submit to being circumcised. They do so. Surely now Jacob will agree to Hamor's offer.

However, as the men in Hamor and Shechem's city were healing, two of Jacob's sons, Simeon and Levi, killed most (maybe all) of the men in the city, including Shechem and his father. Then they took their sister Dinah and left...along with livestock and the women and children of the area. That's the last we hear of Dinah.

What happened to her? What were her true feelings about the situation and about Shechem? Was she heartbroken over the murder of the man who loved her? The fact that she was still in his house instead of waiting with her family for the proposal to be accepted or not is telling. She was with Shechem, not them. It could have been by choice. Then again, she could have been held against her wishes and consequently felt a degree of vindication when her brothers went on their plundering, murdering campaign. We don't know.

Though her account is fictional, Ms. Diamant helps the reader see that perhaps Dinah truly loved Shechem and that she stayed with him of her own will...and that she grieved deeply at his death. In the novel, she left the house of Jacob never to return and later gave birth to Shechem's son in Egypt. In Egypt, Dinah lived a lowly and lowkey life in another's household, and as time went by, she again found love. By a twist of fate, she was the midwife who helped deliver her cousin Joseph's child.

I don't know the real story. I just know that reading this novel made all of these women become more real to me. They were human like the rest of us mortals, and they felt resentment, envy, heartache, loss, love, and grief. They aren't just names in a book; they lived. And their lives contain lessons for all of us. I'm just not sure what Dinah's lesson for us is. Do you have any ideas?