There is a big difference between writing about the whole of the book of Genesis chapter by chapter or only discussing selected passages or "bible stories": the latter allows you to cheat! There are parts of Genesis that we all love and enjoy talking about, and there are bits that are... weird. When selections are made, these are the parts that are always skipped, and the trouble with that is that doing this repeatedly tends to generate a false idea of what the whole of Genesis is like. With false expectations created, we find the weird bits even more shocking, not just in their own right but because they don't fit in with our preconceived idea of what we think Genesis should contain; now those bits become plain embarrassing and people will try even harder to sweep them under the carpet.
The story of Dinah is a sort of reverse Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet the love story derails when it runs up against a great feud with a tragic outcome; Dinah is a love story that goes wrong and creates a great feud, one with an even more tragic outcome. It is "difficult" for modern sensibilities in more ways than one: first, there is the subject matter (rape and "forced" circumcision); secondly, the revengers' behaviour (pretending to act on good faith as a trick followed by vicious mayhem); and thirdly, the discomfort of hearing such things about one's own family (the perpetrators are after all the children of Israel). All of these issues are fraught with many complications.
We'll start with the rape theme. When we look into it, a number of (awkward) questions soon pose themselves. Was what Shechem did actually rape, and how is rape going to be defined for the purpose? Jacob's sons call it rape to justify their macabre act of vengeance, but was it physical violation or just "statutory rape" from their viewpoint (i.e. illicit sex according to their own laws and customs, which allowed her family to consider themselves the gravely injured party)? We don't know and we only have one source, the narrative before us, although it is true that this source reports the words of several of the involved parties which, if the reports are trustworthy, might be considered witnesses of a sort.
Let's note first of all that Dinah herself is not one of the witnesses on the stand; her views on the matter are not reported! So in a real sense the story is not all that much about Dinah, she is little more than the real story's pretext, and the real story is about conflict, trickery and vengeance. But hang on, let's try and sort Dinah out first.
Dinah goes out one day to visit with the women of the town, when Shechem (the son of one of the most powerful men in the town, Hamor) falls in love with her and "forces her." For modern readers this is all fine until we get to the word forces which makes it sinister, and therein lies the crux of the matter. For ancient readers, however, it seems that the focus might have been elsewhere, because an unmarried woman in those days had no business, it seems, going out like that without a chaperone, "so whose fault is it?" they might ask. The problems this asks us to address, from our point of view, are downright painful, but if we are to be historical, they are a fact, like it or not. Therefore, the moral nature of the initial premise of the story (traditionally known as "the rape of Dinah") is, in historical and cultural perspective, unclear, for we cannot be quite certain whether this was intended as an unambiguous indictment of Shechem's actions or whether, on the contrary, in earlier audiences' eyes, Dinah shared some of the "blame". It is all very well reading the story as if it took place in late twentieth-century Paris or New York, but it didn't, and the rules were probably different. The rules we can criticise on our own moral terms all we like, but that doesn't tell us how this episode was actually being understood by an ancient audience (and in fact, by generations of ancient rabbis, even).
Now the reason why this might be important for our understanding of this passage as literature is that it may not be a story about just revenge, which is questionable on other grounds in any case: is wiping out an entire city in revenge for one wrong committed by a single individual just? Rather, it may have been seen as a story about unjust revenge, taking the law into one's own hands, an unreasonable, disproportionate and unwise (see Jacob's point of view at the end) response to a perceived transgression of one's own behavioral norms.
Since it is our privilege to do so from our chronologically and morally distant vantage point, let us adopt a broader view of things and observe that, whatever the gruesome details and the different possible "takes" when interpreting them, the initial premise is about a clash between the conflicting cultural assumptions, social practices and ethnic attitudes of two groups in contact, the Hivites of Shechem on the one hand and the Hebrews of Jacob's clan on the other. Over and above the specifics of the incident, it was an intercultural misunderstanding. However, while we are making a bid to see them from a position of neutrality, there is little reason to think that the writers who transmitted the story that is our source of information were equally committed to maintaining such a balanced objectivity, since they had their agenda after all. What was it?
Well, first of all, there is the widely held theory that this part of Genesis is to be read as a history of tribal events in the form of an allegory:
Narratives which seem at first sight to be concerned with individuals may really be setting forth, in this somewhat figurative fashion, the relations and fortunes of tribes. For instance, the account in chapter xxxiv of the seduction of Dinah, and the revenge taken by Simeon and Levi, is often interpreted as referring to an attack on Shechem by the two tribes of Simeon and Levi. (CB intro., p. 47)So also Speiser:
Most important of all, the history of Jacob has hitherto been in the main a story of individuals. This time, to be sure, personalities are still very much in the forefront of the stage; but their experiences serve to recapitulate an all but lost page dealing with remote ethnic interrelations. The account, in other words, presents personalized history, that is, history novelistically interpreted. (EAS p. 266)Some analysts suggest that the original motivation for telling Dinah's story in the first place was to record the circumstances which led to an ancient event that is not recorded but assumed to have occurred: the demise of the tribes of Levi and Simeon (the names of the sons of Jacob who led the slaughter of the Shechemites). It looks like these tribes must have suffered a calamity because they do not figure in later accounts of the allotment of Canaanite territory to the Israelites, but were dispersed among the territories of other tribes, and also because they are cursed rather than blessed by Jacob in his deathbed speech. We don't know what happened to them, but perhaps this piece narrated what they did to deserve or provoke it. At the end of the passage itself, Jacob rebukes them; it seems that he was not impressed by their story (the rape of Dinah) justifying their atrocious actions, so probably the audience isn't supposed to be either.
If this interpretation is correct, then, the point of the story actually centred damningly on Simeon and Levi's crime rather than on the anecdote that triggered it, and Hamor, Shechem and the rest of their people, not Dinah, are the real victims. The reason for considering the story important to the Israelites, in that case, would be to distance themselves from the excesses committed by their brethren, which is certainly an interesting twist if nothing else. Thus, by this theory, the story does not necessarily aim to justify Shechem's abduction of Dinah (there is no hint of such a thing) but rather to put it in a larger perspective in which "other things are going on." No wonder Dinah was not sought for an opinion; it would have been more or less irrelevant.
If a larger moral teaching is be found in this reading of the passage, it surely has to do with the futility of violence for purposes of revenge, which is neither useful nor ethically justified and, what is more, usually results in a backlash which may have even worse consequences than the punishment one was trying to inflict. But I don't know if the authors of Genesis were overtly seeking to drive home such a message; usually Genesis doesn't read much like a handbook expounding a moral code of conduct, so I don't see why we should expect this passage to be an exception.
There is another broader reading that can be and has been made of this story: as a cautionary tale against intimate relations with people from a different religious, cultural or ethnic background than one's own. In the case of the Israelites that would translate in practice into a warning against intermarrying with gentiles. Such a reading has been made, but it is unlikely to be one that dates back to the time when this story was first being recited.
If we were able to deconstruct all these layers of possible ulterior motives for the telling and reinterpretations of the meaning of the story, what might we be left with? An intercultural incident gone badly wrong was the conjecture I annotated earlier. On such an account it is unnecessary to attribute initial blame to any of the parties involved: we can assume that whatever each character did, according to the mores of their own community they had done nothing wrong. The trouble is that the mores did not coincide, and according to each other's ground rules they had stepped out of line. The question is not raised, in an absolute sense, of whose mores or rules were "right" or "wrong" within some more universal framework; no such supra-ethnic plane of morality is invoked in this narration. If it had been, we might have expected it, in the symbolic language of Genesis, to have entailed references to "God's will" (as the closest approximation to a universal moral standard), but God was not brought into it; this is an issue between man and man (quite literally) and it is left to be resolved by men. Nobody asked God's opinion, any more than they asked the offended woman's. The "retribution" which falls on Shechem's entire community in punishment for their "sinful" behaviour was also not meted out by God in this instance but rather by men, and it is not necessarily implied that their way of dealing with things was righteous. On the contrary, there is room for reading the entire episode as an indictment of bad human judgment which fails to ensure that the punishment fits the crime, as it clearly doesn't in this case, according to common sense.
This view of Dinah's Story as essentially being about the tragic outcome of a head-on collision between two culturally different human groups occupying roughly the same physical space seems to be correct as far as it goes. The passage says that the local inhabitants were Hivites (xiwwim). Scholars today remain uncertain about the identity of the xiwwim but some at least think they were probably Hurrians. The Hurrians were an important Bronze Age people who formed part of the population of the Near East and spoke a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Their main area of settlement in pre-Old Testament times (see map) was in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia; some scholars believe that they had an important cultural influence on the ancestors of the Hebrew patriarchs prior to their migration to Canaan, since Har(r)an was a Hurrian town. If the Hivites were Hurrians, then they would have constituted an exotic ethnic and cultural presence in Canaan, most of whose indigenous, pre-Philistine (i.e. Canaanite) population was of Semitic stock. One detail that is consistent with this theory would have been the fact, which occupies centre-stage in the story we are reading, that unlike Canaanite people in general, who all practised universal male circumcision, the Hivites evidently did not.
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| Were the Hivite inhabitants of Shechem Hurrians? Source of map: Wikipedia |
That the issue of contrasting cusoms is involved in the troubles between Hebrews and Hivites is stated explicitly by Jacob's sons when they come from the field and hear what Shechem has done with Dinah (v. 7, JPS): 'The men were distressed and very angry' ki n'vala ‛asa v'yisra'el 'because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter -' w'khen lo ye‛ase 'a thing not to be done.' Yet Shechem for his part shows no sign of any awareness that he has acted sinfully (n'vala means 'grave sin, sacrilege', CHALOT) and actually talks as if he were acting innocently on good faith all along. The two groups don't seem to be speaking the same cultural language!
But although this view of the story is correct as far as it goes, it is too two-dimensional as a summing up of the whole episode because it overlooks the "internal contradictions" that are evident within each camp: neither the Hivites nor Jacob's clan act in unison, en bloc. In particular, there are generational differences on both sides, as Speiser pointed out:
The story before us is a tale of sharp contrasts: pastoral simplicity and grim violence, love and revenge, candor and duplicity. There is also a marked difference between the generations. Hamor and Jacob are peace-loving and conciliatory; their sons are impetuous and heedless of the consequences that their acts must entail. The lovesick Shechem prevails on his father to extend to the Israelites the freedom of the land - with the requisite consent of his followers. But Dinah's brothers refuse to be that far-sighted. After tricking the Shechemites into circumcising their males, and thus stripping the place of its potential defenders, they put the inhabitants to the sword. Jacob is mournful and apprehensive. But his sons remain defiant and oblivious of their future. (EAS p. 268)
Particularly noteworthy is the restraint and low profile maintained by Jacob in this story. He seems to have ceded the initiative to the younger generation now, and perhaps he has gained in wisdom too, for unlike his sons he expresses no eagerness for aggressive action that will lead to a conflagration, perhaps because he is aware that this would ultimately lead to unfavourable consequences for himself and his family. He comes across as a changed man in comparison to his youthful time with Laban, which is sometimes put down to the profound impact that was made on him by the supernatural episode of his struggle with the "angel" who injured him at Penuel; but we should also bear in mind that there his sons and daughters were still children and now they are fully grown, so Jacob must also be considerably older. His first reaction to the news about Dinah was to wait until his sons returned, and after they had gone berserk the message he conveys is one of disapproval and concern. The story has arrived at the grim reality of life in a complicated world.
Everett Fox in Genesis and Exodus notices the particularly human dimension of each of the characters who play roles in this short dramatic piece which we now realise is packed with tension and unanswered questions:
The chapter is notable for the latitude it allows its characters to express their thoughts and emotions: Shekhem's desire and love, the sons' anger and cunning, the Hivvites' gullibility and greed, and Yaakov's fear. Like other stories in the Yaakov cycle, it presents us with a somewhat ambiguous situation, where right and wrong are not always simple and the putative heroes are not always heroic. (EF p. 145)Putting the generational differences among the patriarchs into a wider perspective, Fox also makes the following interesting observation:
Whereas Avraham and Yitzhak had been able to conclude treaties with the inhabitants of Canaan, Yaakov winds up in the opposite position... Interestingly, Yaakov's sons act somewhat like their father had, "with deceit"... The vengefulness and brutality of Yaakov's sons in this story anticipates their later behavior in the Yosef story (Chapter 37); surprisingly, it is for the present crime and not for the sale of Yosef that their father condemns them on his deathbed (49:5-7). (EF p. 145)
34:2 wayyiqqax otah wayyishkav otah way‛annéha
The first of these predications, wayyiqqax otah, says that Shechem "took" Dinah, which for all its potential ambiguity does not imply, in the way the English verb take might, any sort of specifically sexual act (cf. my previous comments here and there about the equivalence this verb sometimes has with marry, though here it doesn't mean that either!); in this context it is probably little more than a semantically quasi-neutral manner of introducing the object of the following predicates (rather as ba in Mandarin, when used in a similar manner, doesn't really reference the notion of striking): if I am right about this, then wayyiqqax otah per se doesn't mean that he literally did anything to her, any more than the colloquial English expression 'he went and died' really means that he went somewhere, at least not in geographical terms. The next predication, wayyishkav otah, on the contrary, does: it says that he slept with her, and while that clearly was intended to mean that they had sex, it still doesn't say a thing about whether it was consensual. The last of the three predications, way‛annéha, is the one that does that. This looks like the same verb root, ‛-n-h, which in the qal form (suffixing stem ‛ana) means 'to answer', but the two verbs may be mere homophones, etymologically unrelated (EK); this other ‛-n-h means 'to be bowed down, afflicted' (EK), 'to bend down, be wretched, pitiful' (CHALOT), and it is the root of the adjective ‛ani (fem. ‛aniyya) 'poor, wretched, humble' and the noun ‛oni (possessed: ‛onyi etc.) 'misery, affliction' (cf. 16:11 ki shama‛ YHYH el ‛onyekh 'for the Lord has paid heed to your suffering'). But in this case the verb is a piel (i.e. transitive and "intensive": suffixing stem ‛inna), the range of meanings of which includes 'oppress, humiliate, subdue, overpower, force oneself upon.'
34:3 wattidbaq nafsho b'dina bat ya‛aqov wayye'ehav et hanna‛ara waydabber ‛al lev hanna‛ara
Lit. 'His [i.e. Shechem's] soul clove to Jacob's daughter Dinah, and he loved the girl and spoke to the girl's heart.' This verse gives us some interesting material by way of biblical Hebrew romantic talk. The last clause (waydabber ‛al lev hanna‛ara) might be better rendered 'he wooed her (heart)', actually. It is only too bad for everyone concerned that this took place after he had lain with her and forced her (v. 2), and before asking permission through the correct channels (which would presumably have been denied initially, since he was uncircumcised).
34:4 qax li et hayyalda hazzot l'ishha
Shechem seems unaware of his imprudence, let alone the magnitude of his offence, for in asking his father to intervene on his behalf to obtain consent for Dinah to become his lawful wife he seems to be acting in good faith in accordance with what was no doubt the socially accepted procedure in his time and his community (and many others), where marriages were supposed to be decided upon and arrangements carried out by the parents. Notice too the "normal" use of qax 'take' (the imperative of the same verb as wayyiqqax in v. 2).
34:5 w'ya‛aqov shama‛ ki Timme et dina vitto
(JPS) 'Jacob heard that he [i.e. Shechem] had defiled his daughter Dinah.' The verb T-m-h means, in the qal, 'to become unclean', and as used here in the piel it means 'to defile, profane.' Thus it is clear that from the viewpoint of the narrator and the protagonists, Shechem had done wrong, but there is no indication of whether the basic wrong from their perspective consist of wayyishkav otah or of way‛annéha.
24:6 wayyetze xamor avi sh'khem el ya‛aqov l'dabber ito
The pace of the narrative is unhurried but relentless in its progress step by step towards impending disaster. Shechem's father Hamor, heeding his son's supplications, makes the necessary social visit to Jacob, Dinah's father, to discuss matters and, no doubt, try to smooth ruffled feathers. In v. 8, Jacob responds by delaying the interview until his sons have returned from the field so that they may also be involved in the negotiations.
34:7 ki n'vala ‛asa v'yisra'el lishkav et bat ya‛aqov w'khen lo ye‛ase
(JPS) '...because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter - a thing not to be done.' See my notes above regarding the word n'vala 'outrage' and the central significance of the unassuming phrase w'khen lo ye‛ase 'a thing not to be done', which is what, from one perspective, this whole story is really about: conflicting rules of conduct. But to tease out the strands of meaning here, I think it is important also to notice what it is that is spelt out at this point in the text as being, to "Israel", an outrage and a thing not to be done, namely lishkav et bat ya‛aqov 'to sleep with Jacob's daughter.' Simeon and Levi did not put the whole Hivite community of Shechem to the sword in vengeance for the rape of Dinah, not according to this: the "outrage" the Hivite had committed is explicitly said to have been the fact of his having sexual relations with one of them, that was the "thing not to be done." No doubt the rape made it worse, certainly not any better, but there is not much evidence that this was uppermost in their minds, or the minds of the ancient rabbis who analysed the story, and we should not try to read Genesis as if it were about events taking place today in our neighbourhood. Thus when, in v. 31, Jacob's sons respond to their father's angry berating for what they had done, their defence will be hakh'zona ya‛ase et axotenu 'Should our sister be treated like a whore?' The definition of zona is a prostitute or an "easy woman", a woman with whom a man may have sexual access (see the story of Tamar in ch. 38 for an illustration of the concept in Genesis). To be honest, this concluding comment doesn't exactly mean that Shechem's perceived offence, or the story's underlying "problem", was specifically that Shechem had raped Dinah; the language used throughout the story all suggests that it was more about the issue of illicit sexual relations between members of the two mutually alien communities without following the pertinenit protocol.
34:8-10 waydabber xamor etc.
The whole of Jacob's household having gathered, Hamor begins by speaking to the family. First he requests Dinah's hand for his son. This is clearly not a mere routine procedure in the present case because they belong to distinct communities unaccustomed to intermarriage, so Hamor proposes they agree to allow this in the future, an arrangement which he presents as being to their mutual advantage, which would go beyond the matter of mere marriage and involve the establishment of closer ties all round between the Hebrews and the Hivites of Shechem.
34:11-12
After his father has finished speaking, the suitor puts in a few words of his own. His little speech paints a picture of Shechem as a man considerably less dignified and at the same time more overbearing than the older (and probably wiser) Hamor; what he says boils down to "I will give you whatever you like if you let me marry Dinah, and remember I'm very rich."
34:13-17
Now it is the turn of the other party to speak, but it is Jacob's sons rather than Jacob himself who do so. The wayya‛anu with which this section begins means 'they answered' and is not to be confused with the other wayyá‛an 'he forced', using a homophonous verb, with which Shechem's behaviour had been described in v. 2 (I don't know if this irony was deliberate). It is at this point in the narrative that the story takes a turn for the worse, as Jacob's sons decide to get their own back on what they view as the offending party, and practising a kind of elaborate trickery which commentators have compared to the younger Jacob's own use of cunning but which strike me as being of quite a different calibre in their premeditation and sinister purpose, begin to set Hamor and Shechem up for what was really a singularly heartless plan quite unworthy of decent human beings, much less the patriarchs of one's own people (and as such they were seen by the authors and audience of this book, let us remember). It hardly seems likely that we are supposed to condone this scheme; not even Jacob did, let us recall. In the clause asher Timme et dina axotam 'because he had defiled their sister Dinah' and in the similar one in v. 27, asher Timm'u axotam, however, it seems that the conjunction asher (unusually) must mean 'because', unless it means 'on the pretext that' or (as Speiser has in v. 27) 'in reprisal for.'
34:14 lo nukhal la‛asot haddavar hazze latet et axoténu l'ish asher lo orla ki xerpa hi lánu
This premise is absolutely true and unremarkable (which only serves to make the ultimate outcome all the more shocking). Circumcision would indeed make or break the deal from the vantage point of the Israelites' logic, and by asking Shechem to undergo circumcision Dinah's brothers seem to be doing nothing other than give him a free pass. They speak the truth: ki xerpa hi lánu, for it is a disgrace among us for our daughter to marry an uncircumcised man. Unfortunately, the trap is already being set, for we are told already in v. 13 that the brothers have decided to reply b'mirma 'with guile'. Using the selfsame kind of tactic common among the "best" modern criminals, they are mixing truths with falsehoods to bamboozle their mark and lay him open to a frontal attack.
34:15 l'himmol lakhem kol zakhar
The wording is taken from God's instruction to Abraham to circumcise every male (cf. 17:10 himmol lakhem kol zakhar 'every male among you shall be circumcised'). As is characteristic, the schemer poses as one full of virtue, quoting God's commandments, no less, to achieve a goal for which those words were never intended.
34:16 w'natánnu...
In this textbook example of malicious manipulation, having told the victim what they want him to do, they now go on to coax him with generous but insincere promises: 'we will give our daughters to you and take your daughters to ourselves; and we will dwell among you and become as one kindred'...
34:17 w'im lo...
...followed by a threat regarding the consequences of non-compliance.
34:20 wayyavo xamor ush'khem b'no el shá‛ar ‛iram waydabb'ru el anshe ‛iram
At this point the transition from a personal (or family) vendetta to a political issue (i.e. one of city policy) is completed, because Hamor takes the matter to the town assembly (that is the real meaning of shá‛ar ‛iram 'the town gate'). What follows is Hamor's speech to the village elders, in which he proposes a pact with "these people" (ha'anashim ha'élle).
34:21-24
As in politics then and now, he emphasizes all the reasons why it would be a good thing to do what he wants, and gets them to agree to the deal (v. 24: wayyishm'‛u el xamor w'el sh'khem b'no kol yotz'e shá‛ar ‛iro), which involves all the men in the town getting circumcised (wayyimmólu kol zakhar).
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