“But if ye will not hearken unto us, to be circumcised; then we will take our daughter, and we will be gone.” And their words pleased Hamor, and Shechem Hamor’s son.
—GENESIS 34:17–18
“So we will give you our sister for your wife,” Levi continued in per-feet seriousness, “but only if you are circumcised when you take her to the marriage bed.”
Shechem looked dubious and slightly ill, which seemed to amuse Jacob and only encouraged Levi.
“I’ll do it,” Shechem said grimly.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” Levi continued. “Not only you but every man among your people must be circumcised, too. Only then will we give our women to be your wives, and only then will we take your women to be our wives. Only then will we dwell with you throughout the land, and become one people.”
If Shechem heard the sniggers among the other sons of Jacob, he did not show any sign of it, but Hamor could not suppress a grin.
Simeon grinned, too, as if he had suddenly understood what game his brother was playing. Now it was Simeon’s turn to join in the game.
“But if you refuse to do what we ask,” he lectured Shechem, “then we will take our lovely sister—such a pretty one!—and we will be gone.”
“Done!” said Shechem in a voice that seemed to quaver, as if fear and longing were struggling within his throat as he spoke.
And the young man deferred not to do the thing, because he had delight in Jacob’s daughter. And he was honoured above all the house of his father. And Hamor and Shechem his son came unto the gate of their city, and spoke with the men of their city, saying: “These men are peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for, behold, the land is large enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters. Only on this condition will the men consent unto us to dwell with us, to become one people, if every male among us be circumcised, as they are circumcised. Shall not their cattle and their substance and all their beasts be ours? Only let us consent unto them, and they will dwell with us.”
—GENESIS 34-19-23
Simeon laughed out loud as Dinah’s handmaiden recounted the scene she had witnessed the day before when Hamor and the court physician appeared in the marketplace and addressed the crowd.
“ ‘You all know of the stranger called Jacob and his people, they are our friends,’” the young woman recited, reciting Hamor’s words and mimicking his gravelly voice. “ ‘Let them live with us and move freely around the country—the land is big enough for all of us.’”
“Yes,” Simeon urged, “and then what?”
“Well, the prince saw that the crowd was not ready to riot—so far, so good!—and so he said: ‘Let us marry their daughters, and let them marry our daughters.’ Some of the men in the crowd began to hoot a bit—I suppose they fancy our women, too. And then the prince gave them the bad news: ‘But these people will agree to live with us and become one people with us on one condition only: Every man among us must be circumcised like them.’”
“And what happened when they heard?” demanded Levi.
“Oh, they did not like the sound of it at all! They began to grumble, and Hamor’s voice was not quite so deep now.”
The girl raised her voice to a shrill squeak and mocked the way Hamor pleaded with his people: “ ‘If we marry with these strangers, their livestock will be ours! Their goods will be ours! All we have to do is consent to be circumcised, here and now.’”
And unto Hamor and unto Shechem his son hearkened all that went out of the gate of his city; and every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of his city.
—GENESIS 34:24
Now all of the brothers were laughing out loud as the young woman brazenly imitated the shocked expressions that she had seen on the faces of Hamor’s people, and demonstrated how some of the men in the crowd had covered their private parts with their hands as if to protect themselves from the circumciser’s knife. And she pointed out how the prince had taken the precaution of stationing his guards around the crowded marketplace so the menfolk might better understand that they had no real choice in the matter.
“And so,” the handmaiden continued, “all of the strong and able-bodied men ended up in perfect agreement with the good prince, and every single one of them was circumcised right then and there.”
“Every one?” Simeon asked, betraying a touch of anxiety because, as he knew but did not say, everything depended on it. “Every able-bodied man went under the knife?”
The handmaiden nodded solemnly and then broke into bawdy laughter along with Simeon and Levi and the rest of the brothers.
On the second day after the mass circumcision at the city gate, Simeon and Levi walked with the handmaiden to a distant hilltop where they would not be interrupted or overheard. They listened carefully as she described the lay of the land, the path to take if one wanted to pay a visit to Hamor’s big house and the other houses where the menfolk were resting from their encounters with the surgeon’s knife.
On the third day, Simeon and Levi rose before dawn, strapped on their short swords, and slipped out of the compound in silence. Only the handmaiden saw them go, and then she went back to sleep for an hour or so before her long day of work would begin.
Simeon and Levi knew that every last man in Hamor’s town—including Hamor himself, and his son, Shechem—was in his bed, still wrapped tightly with bandages in the place where the surgeon’s knife had cut him. A grown man who had just been circumcised is in no condition to be up and out of bed and walking about the town—every step would be another moment of pain. On that, the two brothers were counting.
At the first house they encountered, Simeon and Levi unsheathed their swords and shouldered open the door with a loud crack that awakened only a pair of servant girls who were bedded down on the floor near the stove. The girls looked up, bleary and confused, as Simeon and Levi stalked past them in search of the room where the master of the house slept. As soon as the kitchen girls noticed the swords Simeon and Levi were carrying, they began to wail. And so, when Levi finally found a man with a black beard on a pile of bedding in a back room, the poor soul was already awake and alert as Levi dispatched Him with one short blow to the neck.
The same brutal operation was repeated in dwelling after dwelling, tent and shack and house, as Simeon and Levi stalked through the streets of Hamor’s town and methodically did their work. They were shepherds, and they knew how to dispatch a living creature swiftly and efficiently. Now they put their expertise to a new use, although they held their victims in somewhat less regard than they would a beast being slaughtered for their table.
Now and then, one of the men of Hamor rose from his bed and seized a staff or a sword in a desperate attempt at self-defense, but two armed men on their feet were always more than a match for some bedridden soul whose private parts were bloody and bandaged. By sunrise, they had slain all but two of the newly circumcised men in the town, and the last house they visited belonged to Hamor and Shechem, who were awake and astir but unsuspecting, still lingering in their beds and waiting to be called to breakfast by one of the servants.
And it came to pass on the third day, when they were in pain, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city unawares, and slew all the males.
—GENESIS 34-25
And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went forth.
—GENESIS 34:26.
Hamor half-rose in his bed when he saw Simeon and Levi at the threshold, but they reached him before he could cry out, and a single blow with the cutting edge of a sword across the neck silenced him forever. Shechem appeared behind them, bellowing like a bull, but no one but the servants was left to hear the sound. With another strike of the blade, Shechem, too, was dead.
Blood-spattered and breathing heavily, Simeon and Levi searched the house
from room to room until they found Dinah in the richly decorated bedchamber that had been set aside for her until her wedding day. Their sister stared at them with an expression of horror that they had never seen before, not even on the faces of their victims and the bystanders who had witnessed the slaughter.
“Come, sister,” said Simeon, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the door of the house, “we are here to take you home.”
Jacob fretted and sputtered as he watched the grim parade that headed toward the compound. What would become of them now, he wondered? What vengeance would be visited upon him because of the massacre of Hamor and his people? Hamor and his menfolk might be dead, their wives and children taken captive, but there were still many more Canaanites than Israelites across the land. Surely they would not overlook what had happened.
Simeon and Levi had returned only hours before, leading their weeping sister between them, and their brothers had greeted them with shouts and laughter. But they celebrated only briefly before the bloodied heroes sent their brothers back to the town with orders to wreak a further vengeance on Hamor’s people.
The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister. They took their flocks and their herds and their asses and that which was in the city and that which was in the field; and all their wealth, and all their little ones and their wives, took they captive and spoiled, even all that was in the house.
—GENESIS 34.28-29
And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi: “Ye have troubled me, to make me odious unto the inhabitants of the land, even unto the Canaanites and the Perizzites; and, I being few in number, they will gather themselves together against me and smite me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.”
—GENESIS 34.30
“Take the spoils of the city,” Simeon had commanded his willing brothers, “because they have defiled our sister.”
Levi had been even more precise. “Take their sheep and their oxen, take everything you find in the city and everything you find in the fields,” he instructed them. “Take their wealth, and their little ones, and their wives, too.”
Now the brothers were returning from the day of conquest, driving before them a herd of many species—lowing cattle, wailing women, weeping children—and carts loaded high with clothing and bedding, silver vessels and objects of wrought gold, jars of wine and jars of oil, all the spoils of the now-empty city of Hamor.
If Simeon and Levi expected praise from their father, they were disappointed in their moment of glory. The fretful Jacob looked at them—their bloody clothing, their captive women, their spoils—and glowered with anger and fear.
“Do you know what trouble you have caused for me?” Jacob scolded them, pacing back and forth in front of his house. “For all of us? You have made my name stink among the people of the land, the Canaanites and Perizzites. Today you have slain a hundred of them, but we are still few and they are many. Did you not realize that they will gather them’ selves together against me and slay me because of what you have done? I shall be destroyed, me and my house!”
Simeon was silenced by his father’s anger, but Levi spoke up for both of them in a voice that sounded like it came from a sulky adolescent rather than a bloodied warrior.
“What would you want us to do?” he cried. “Should our sister be treated as a whore?”
And they said: “Should one deal with our sister as with a harlot?”
—GENESIS 34:31
CHAPTER FIVE
“SEE WHAT A SCOURGE IS LAID UPON YOUR HATE”
The Strange Affair of Dinah and Shechem
RAPIST, SEDUCER, OR SUITOR
THE CURIOUS PUNISHMENT FOR THE CRIME OF RAPE
“MY COVENANT SHALL BE IN YOUR FLESH”
“I HAVE LOVED STRANGERS”
TWO BELLIES, ONE SPEAR
THE BIBLICAL COURT OF CONSCIENCE
“FOR THE HONOR OF OUR SISTERS”
One voice alone is not heard in the Bible’s account of the rape of Dinah, the voice of Dinah herself. While the menfolk speechify and haggle and plot among themselves and against each other, no one bothers to ask her whether she wants to marry Shechem or see him slain. Dinah’s silence, so odd and so provocative, reminds us that the biblical author conceals far more than he reveals in telling us the tale of Dinah and Shechem.
Only a single sentence is offered to explain Dinah’s role in the tragic affair: “[S]he went out to see the daughters of the land” (Gen. 34:1). Yet even this sparse bit of intelligence is tantalizing. To the stern rabbinical sages who interpreted and embroidered upon the story of Dinah, the sight of a single woman at liberty in the countryside was distressing and dangerous. Indeed, they could not rid themselves of the notion that a woman is a seducer by nature or, at best, a victim of her own vanity and curiosity. Thus, one ancient rabbinical sage suggested that Dinah ventured out of her father’s tent “adorned like a harlot,”1 and another rabbi speculated that Shechem hired a troupe of gaily clad women to sing, dance, and play in the streets in order to lure Dinah out of Jacob’s compound so he could ravish her.
“Had she remained at home, nothing would have happened to her,” goes the rabbi’s homily. “But she was a woman, and all women like to show themselves in the street.”2
Contemporary readers, of course, recoil at such misogyny. But the ancient rabbis, no matter how sexist they may appear to us now, were responding to something extraordinary in the text itself. For a woman of the biblical era, young and unwed and living among strangers, to venture out of her father’s encampment and seek the companionship of local women is a bold and courageous act: Dinah is defying the strict and narrow protocols that governed the lives of the wives and daughters of the patriarchs. In fact, a feminist Bible critic named Ita Sheres has described Dinah’s excursion as an “outing,” a word that once meant only a day in the country but now suggests that Dinah engages in something even more daring: “[A] bold act that implied individuality and purpose,” as Sheres puts it.3 Dinah is a woman who kicks over the traces of traditional morality and asserts her own authentic identity.
So daring and dangerous is Dinah’s adventure in the eyes of the biblical author that she is made to nearly disappear from her own story. But we can still detect faint echoes of Dinah’s voice in the text of Genesis 34. Some readers insist that she is whispering the words of a long-suppressed love story rather than a bloody tale of rape and revenge. Others argue that the real heroes of Dinah’s story are the sword’ wielding brothers who slaughter a whole people in her name. Long neglected and even suppressed by sermonizers and Sunday school teachers, Genesis 34 takes on new and urgent meanings in our own troubled world, where the distant descendants of Jacob and the modern counterparts of Hamor still encounter each other in the Holy Land.
RAPIST, SEDUCER, OR SUITOR?
None of the Hebrew words and phrases used by the biblical author to describe what Shechem did to Dinah are translated straightforwardly as “rape.” The Bible tells us that he “saw her, and he took her, and lay with her,” according to the conventional English translation, and then the biblical author adds one more intriguing phrase: “and humbled her” (Gen. 34:2). So we might ask: Does Shechem actually rape Dinah? Or is something more subtle going on between the lovestruck young prince and the adventurous daughter of Jacob?
The Hebrew word innah, translated in some English-language Bibles as “humbled” (KJV/NEB) is rendered in other translations as “abused”4 or “defiled” or “dishonored,” indicating a “degrading and debasing” experience by which “a girl loses the expectancy of a fully valid marriage,” mostly because she is no longer a virgin.5 The distinguished Bible translator Ephraim Speiser, who wants to let us know that the Hebrew word implies the threat or even the use of physical violence, renders the word as “slept with her by force,” which may be an awkward metaphor but certainly suggests the functional equivalent of rape.6 And feminist Bible scholar Ita Sheres insists on translating the Hebrew text even more forcefully
: “[Shechem] tortured her.”7
While none of the English translations of the Bible use the word “rape,” some commentators insist that no other meaning can be gleaned from the Hebrew text. According to one Bible critic, the “three-fold repetition” of verbs and “ascending order of violence”—“[He] took her, and lay with her, and humbled her”—“quashes the idea of seduction,” and the same critic insists that the Hebrew phrase customarily translated as “[he] lay with her” really ought to be rendered in blunt street slang: “[he] laid her.”8
Still, the very next sentence of the biblical text assures us that Shechem falls promptly, powerfully, and poignantly in love with his victim. Again, the biblical author uses a string of verbs to make the point: “And his soul did cleave unto Dinah…, and he loved the damsel, and spoke comfortingly unto the damsel” (Gen. 34:3). After reporting the sexual encounter itself in a single sentence, the narrator turns his attention to the real concern of his story: the ardent courtship of Dinah by Shechem, the elaborate negotiation of a marriage contract, the cunning efforts of her brothers to prevent the marriage from being consummated, and the massacre that crowns their efforts.
So the Bible itself allows the possibility that something other than forcible rape may have taken place. For example, the storyteller later uses the word “defiled” to describe what Shechem does to Dinah: “Now Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter” (Gen. 34:5). The word “defiled” is used elsewhere in the Bible to describe forbidden sexual relations rather than forcible ones: the adultery of a straying wife (Num. 5:12–14), for example, or the consorting of a priest with a harlot (Lev. 21:4–7).9 A reference to the “defiling” of Jacob’s daughter by the smitten young prince might be understood to mean only that the two of them were not married when they made love to each other.
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 9
