If you read "The Red Tent" after having read the book of Genesis in the Bible you can't help but notice some of the differences between the two. You then wonder why Diamant decided to add some extra thoughts or why she decided to leave a certain part out. Diamant has a creative imagination and from a woman's perspective she is easy to relate to where as men might have a harder time.
Diamant begins her story when Jacob arrives in Haran, but what I feel is the core of the story is when Shalem rapes Dinah. This to me is the main reason for Diamant writing this story. The Bible spends one chapter on this and Diamant turns that one chapter into a whole book. In the Bible it seems like Dinah is raped by force. "When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the region, saw her, he seized her and lay with her by force." (Gen 34:2) Here we don't get the sense that Dinah was willing to have sex with Shalem, but when you read "The Red Tent" you get a different opinion about this. In the book we see Dinah as willing to have sex and not forced at all. "When his lips found my throat, I groaned and Shalem stopped. He looked into my face to discover my meaning, and seeing only yes, he took my hand and led me down an unfamiliar corridor. We lay down upon sweet-smelling black fleece and found one another." (p.190) Here Shalem even stops when he thinks Dinah doesn't want to go through with it, but after seeing that she does, they find a room and have sex. Far different from what we see in the Bible.
We then also have the whole matter of whether Dinah was really in love with Shalem or if it was just Shalem who was in love with Dinah. The Bible doesn't really help us here. The only thing we get from the Bile is that Shalem loved Dinah. "And this soul was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the girl. And spoke tenderly to her. So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor, saying, 'Get me this girl to be my wife.
