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Twist of Faith: Biblical Fiction

by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

One of the most-read books on my shelves—you know, the ones with the spines worn white—is a novel called Princess of the Two Lands, by Lois M. Parker. I first read it when I was about twelve: it's the story of Scota, a fictional Egyptian princess who has a ringside seat for the Ten Plagues and Moses' liberation of the Children of Israel. She also has a nice little romance with a rather sexy general to whom her father marries her, and she survives the plagues to live, presumably, happily ever after.

This is the first work of Biblical fiction I can remember reading, though it certainly wasn't the only one available to me. In the conservative church atmosphere in which I grew up, fiction was a bit suspect, but fiction based on Bible stories was acceptable. My own parents were much more liberal than our church was, and I was allowed to read anything and everything that interested me (which was pretty much anything and everything), but there were always plenty of works of Biblically-based young-adult fiction on the shelves at church and at our church school (including others by the talented Lois M. Parker, now sadly out of print!).

Biblical fiction of this kind—written by and for believers, published by Christian publishing houses, with a clear mandate to "bring Bible stories to life"—was the only Biblical fiction I'd ever encountered until a few years ago, when, like millions of other readers, I discovered Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. In fact, Biblical fiction has existed nearly as long as the Bible has—certainly ever since Milton wrote Paradise Lost—because the Bible, as well as including the sacred texts of both Judaism and Christianity, is also a treasure trove of fascinating characters and intriguing stories summed up in a handful of verses. Virtually every Bible story leaves most of the details untold, and leaves avid readers wondering, "What else happened? Why did she do that? How did he feel?" The Bible is at least as remarkable for what it doesn't tell as what it does, which makes it an irresistible source of material for the fiction writer.

But despite classic works of twentieth-century Biblical fiction such as Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe and Stefan Heym's The King David Report, it was Diamant who put the genre squarely on the literary map at the turn of the twenty-first century, especially for women readers. The Red Tent unfolds one of those tantalizing hidden stories from the book of Genesis—the tale of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, whose would-be husband and all the men in his city are slain by Jacob's sons in revenge for the deflowering of their sister. One of the Bible's staggering silences enfolds this story: is Dinah a rape victim, or a young woman eloping with the man she loves?

The writer of Genesis doesn't answer the question, so Diamant does, in a brilliant novel that recreates the world of women in the time of the patriarchs. The "red tent" of the title is the centre of the women's world, the tent in which women pass their days of menstrual seclusion and strengthen their female ties in that intensely male-dominated world.

Part of the success of The Red Tent may have been due to the fact that it was so iconoclastic. The Bible presents Jacob and his household as monotheistic worshippers of Yahweh, while in the novel goddess-worship is central to the women's experience. Neither the heroes of Genesis—Jacob and his favourite son Joseph—nor the God they worship come off very favourably in The Red Tent.

Jewish writer Diamant was by no means the first author to turn readers' perceptions of the Bible on their heads (Heym's King David Report is a fine example of Biblical iconoclasm) but the success of The Red Tent paved the way for more revisionist Biblical fiction. In India Edghill's Queenmaker, King David is a self-absorbed, deceitful megalomaniac, while his maligned wife Michal is the story's heroine. Queenmaker is a fine novel, though not on the level of The Red Tent from a literary perspective, but I found Michal's mean-spiritedness wearing at times.

Edghill continues the story in the far more enjoyable Wisdom's Daughter, which tells the tale of David's son King Solomon and his encounter with Bilqis, Queen of Sheba. From a scanty few Biblical verses and some extra-Biblical tradition Edghill spins a story that revolves around a fictional character, Solomon's daughter Baalit. Here again, the author's perspective reverses the Bible's. In the Bible, Solomon is an initially promising but ultimately weak king, drawn aside from the path of obedience to God by his foreign wives. In the novel, Solomon is a gentle, wise and kind-hearted man, an early proponent of religious tolerance, who worries about not measuring up to the popular adoration accorded his famous father. The novel's most interesting character is the Queen of Sheba, who allows us a glimpse into what life might have been like in a matriarchal society three thousand years ago (Bilqis dismisses the idea of her nephew as a possible successor for her throne, concluding that he has some fine qualities which might have made a good leader—if only he'd been born a woman!).

The Hebrew Scriptures seem to provide writers with the richest vein of story material, but some authors have chosen to illuminate characters from the Christian New Testament as well. Historical fiction writer Margaret George tackles one of the most controversial in her Mary, Called Magdalene. George takes the now-common scholarly view that, contrary to church tradition, Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute and is not to be associated with the "woman taken in adultery." George's Magdalene is a smart and successful first-century woman whose life is derailed by demon possession, and who becomes an influential follower of Jesus after he heals her. George's take on the Biblical narrative is somewhat revisionist: Jesus' abilities as a healer are real enough, but miracles such as walking on water and feeding the five thousand are taken with a grain of skeptical salt. The book is intriguing, but I found that Mary lacked the resonance of some of George's other historical characters—Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, or Cleopatra.

Most of the writers I've mentioned so far have been women, and in fact the current explosion of Biblical fiction has been largely dominated both by women writers and women characters, giving voice to the often voiceless women of the Biblical narrative. Two high-profile male writers have recently gotten into the business of writing about Bible women: Marek Halter's Canaan Trilogy and Orson Scott Card's Women of Genesis series both focus on women such as Sarah, Rebecca, and Zipporah. In both cases I struggled somewhat with the male author/female character divide: neither Halter nor Card creates a woman's voice and a woman's world as authentically as Diamant does in The Red Tent. On the other hand, that may not be a gender difference: lots of female authors can't equal Anita Diamant's accomplishment either.

Of these two series, I've read only the first of each, both about Abraham's wife Sarah (and both titled Sarah). Marek Halter's Sarah is a feisty Sumerian princess who defies tradition and family expectations to run away with the desert nomad Abraham. This novel is vivid and well-written, though one flaw I found in it was poor pacing: Halter spends so much time on Sarah's early life, before the Biblical narrative begins, that later events such as Abraham's attempt to sacrifice their son Isaac are passed over much too quickly.

I read Card's Sarah immediately after Halter's. I came to this book with some prejudice, since the only thing I knew about Orson Scott Card was that he'd written an article in which he said nasty things about Star Trek—not a ploy guaranteed to get him on my good side. While his Sarah and Abraham are both appealing characters, I feel he falls down in the area of dialogue (I don't know if this is a shortcoming in his better-known science fiction novels or not, as I haven't read them). It never feels realistic, and his characters' discourses often carry a heavy burden of theology and philosophy that is not theirs but the author's. Also, in the male-writers-writing-female-characters category, Card does well enough with Sarah, but disappoints with Lot's wife Qira, who feels like nothing more than an anti-feminist caricature. However, for those who are intrigued by Biblical fiction I have to recommend Sarah if only for the sake of the Afterword.

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