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.
continued...
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