Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale is a story heavily influenced by the Bible and contains many biblical themes that are used to demonstrate Atwood's belief in balance. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead, which was formerly the United States. The story is told through the perspective of a handmaid named Offred and begins when she is given her third job as a maid. Offred describes her society as a fundamentalist theocracy in which the Christian God is seen as the divine ruler of the Republic of Gilead. Atwood is often considered a feminist writer, but through this novel her writing is neither fully feminist nor patriarchal, but something in between. Atwood is also someone who describes herself as a “rigorous agnostic.” A maid is a concubine assigned to live with a Commander (of the Faith) and his Wife. The Handmaid's role is to produce Caretakers (children born without birth defects) for the host family. The maids are forced to dress all in red in addition to their white nun-like wings that function as blinders. Red represents passion and sin that can be whitened by the cleansing power of God. Commanders are the patriarchal heads of the house who have the duty to father children by the wife or handmaiden if necessary. “Not every commander has a handmaiden; some of their wives have children. From each, says the slogan, according to his abilities; to each according to his needs... It was taken from the Bible, or at least so they said. Saint Paul… in the Acts”. Commanders dress in black to show their superiority, as they are the highest on the social ladder. The Wives are at the top of the social ladder when it comes to women, which gives them power over other women: "...the transgressions of women in the house, whether Martha or Handmaid, should be under the jurisdiction of the Wives alone." Wives dress in blue to represent the Virgin Mary who is usually depicted in blue in biblical artwork. The Handmaids are re-educated by women with the title of Aunts. The Marthas are women who do housework. They were trained after the revolution when an extremist group called the "Sons of Jacob" took control and abolished the United States Constitution after attacking the capital killing the President and much of Congress. The goal of these extremists is to raise the rate birth rate that has drastically decreased due to war and pollution. In other words, these extremists believe that the world has been invaded by sin, which is causing birth rates to decline and birth defects to increase this as the cause of sin, although perhaps not the real source of the problem: «The reasons for this decline are not entirely clear to us. Part of the inability to reproduce can undoubtedly be attributed to the widespread availability of contraceptive methods of various kinds , including abortion, in the immediate pre-Gilead period.” These social classes, Handmaids, Wives and more, are put in place to bring salvation back to the land. The Handmaids are represented as salvation for the people of Gilead, in this way the Handmaid's Tale can be seen as a story of Noah, with the Handmaids also being called the animals on Noah's ark when Offred describes her travels of routine shopping where he must be accompanied by another Handmaid. "We can't go there except two." To reiterate, the animals on Noah's ark are the salvation for the future of the world while the Handmaids