El
Jacob lies on his deathbed in exile in Egypt. His sons vie for supremacy. His only daughter Dinah sits vigil by his side. Over two nights, she tells the stories of Genesis as they’ve never been told before.
In The Rape of Dinah, the first in a pair of companion novels, Dinah shares her extraordinary stories of family intrigue, her brothers’ conversion to the cult of Israel, and her own rape. Turning this first Biblical account of sexual assault on its head, Dinah exposes the secret of her father’s complicity and her growing resistance to his patriarchal rule. Rebelling against her father’s disdain for the people of Canaan, she befriends two Canaanite girls who lead her into the sacred quarters of the city of Shechem. Here she falls in love with the Canaanite prince named for the city.
In The Sack of Shechem, Dinah lifts the veil on her passionate love affair and her growing fascination with Prince Shechem’s brilliant Egyptian eunuch tutor who holds sway in the inner sanctum of the temple library. The prince convinces her that their union will usher in an era of peace and redemption—echoing the marriage of Ba’al and Anat in Heaven as told in the ancient Canaanite myths. Dinah’s brothers deceptively demand that all the men of Shechem submit to the Israelites’ circumcision knife as a condition of the marriage. While the Shechemite men lie incapacitated, her brothers attack the city, massacring them and taking the women and children as slaves. It is the Bible’s first genocide.
This pair of novels, housed under the umbrella title Speak, Wood! Stone, Whisper, brings Jacob’s daughter fully to life—a fiercely observant truth-teller, passionate friend and lover, and courageous rebel. Here Dinah speaks as a dystopic visionary for the silenced, the vanquished, and the dead, both gods and mortals. Lamenting the slaughter at Shechem, Dinah reveals what she envisions as the accompanying carnage in Heaven out of which the exclusive reign of El—the god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—will arrive. Written in the distilled language of ancient poetry, Speak, Wood! reconnects the stories of the Bible with the actual myths out of which they arose. Through Dinah’s eyes, the reader witnesses the ascendancy of monotheism as the polytheistic people of the Ancient Middle East would have: an epic struggle across pantheons and between generations of gods vying over the fate of Heaven and Earth.
The modern story of a remarkable archeological find serves as an over-arching gateway for Speak, Wood! Stone, Whisper, inviting readers to travel back 4,000 years and enter Dinah’s world. For just as gateways play a big role in this two-volume saga, so do they in its form. Set in Israel, Egypt, and NYC during the 2020 pandemic, this hybrid story masquerades as a series of emails and an article by an Israeli journalist who helps uncover the profoundly disruptive implications of three women’s discovery in the Sinai—all leading back to Dinah.
Speak, Wood! Stone, Whisper explodes the cautionary tale of a wayward daughter, as Dinah’s brief appearance in Genesis 34 is traditionally told, and illuminates the pivotal role Jacob’s only daughter might have played in the great family saga of the patriarchs.