The Rape of Dinah

If you've never heard (of) Eddie Izzard talk about religion, or anything else, you should. He is one of the most talented comedians ever, so funny, so smart, also completely clean and non-offensive, for those of you who like that sort of thing. Here he is on the Church of England: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k


"Is our sister to be treated as a common whore?" --Gen. 34:31

Old Testament
Book 1: Genesis
Jacob and Esau (cont'd)
Chapter 33: Jacob and Esau go their separate ways
Chapter 34: The Rape of Dinah
Chapter 35: Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin
Chapter 36: The descendants of Esau

Wow, the bible really starts off with a bang, huh?! There has not been a moment's rest in 32 chapters. Finally we reach a kind of lull before Joseph's story starts. Dinah's story is interesting, but it sort of hangs out there by itself, it doesn't seem to fit in with the general shape of the narrative. One of the purposes of the bible that has been lost on us is as some kind of record of the times. It's not about GOD the way the new testament is--it's about the people, who was who, who came from where, and so on. One of its main functions seems to be as folk descriptions for the various tribes and people who lived in the area at the time. So if you said you were Canaanite, everyone would know what that meant, where you came from and so on. Apparently all the other tribes had their own versions of these same stories. Many of them were actually legends or myths or whatever--it's interesting that the stories themselves were shared among all the different people, and incorporated into the bible. (And once again, it gets a little monotonous to keep repeating this, but that fact belies the fictional nature of the bible.)

Even this story of the rape of Dinah is actually "ancient." Understand what this means. These stories didn't actually "happen" to the characters in the bible--who knows if Jacob even really had twelve sons plus Dinah? The authors wanted to include all these stories, so they put the stories onto the characters they had available. (Often they didn't even do a very good job, when two stories conflicted, or they put two different stories on the same person, they just threw it all together, like the two creation stories.)

Going along with stories of where did these peoples come from, the stories are designed to explain animosities between various tribes. I find that interesting--"why is it we hate the Levites again? Oh that's right, because of the rape of Dinah." These are the same ancient hatreds that we see now played out in the middle east, or in Africa. Something that I have never heard is where these books of the old testament came from. At some point they were written down. What I imagine is that for centuries the "priests" had the job of keeping these stories of the history of the people, and they were probably passed down from generation to generation through them. But we learned to write, and at some point they were written down. (One more reason it's nonsensical to say "God wrote the bible"--which version of the game of telephone, exactly did he write?) But even after it was written down, these were still ancient times, and some got lost and so on. At some I think much later date they were compiled into a text with a purpose, to tell a particular story about God. This is, I believe, what is meant in the notes by "ancient tradition" versus the "priestly writers" and so on. These later writers filled in the gaps and sewed the stories together to make the point they wanted to about the delayed realization of God's promise to Abraham.

That's interesting to contemplate as well. At some point the writing of the bible changes from recording tradition to creating intention--descriptive versus persuasive. That is always the moment where you have to wonder who is actually talking, and why.


The rape of Dinah is an interesting story, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. As I said, if I were a better feminist scholar I could write a paper about this, but with my low ambitions, I will be satisfied with an entry in a blog.

By the way, something I've been meaning to say, I just want everyone to know that I invented blogs and blogging. In 1995, the internet was just barely getting off the ground. Netscape was the biggest company, Yahoo was starting, ebay might have started already, and that was about it. e-commerce was hardly heard of--no one used credit cards on line. I was just finishing (well, that's not the right word. I was stopping) school at the University of Florida, and I was going to drive across the country to San Francisco with my girlfriend. We fought all the time, and I thought it would be an interesting idea to keep a journal of our trip, the miniature moving soap opera of my car as we drove, and post it online. My friend at the time Megan said she thought it was a terrible idea--why would anyone want to read about your trip across the country? She was a real visionary, huh? My problem is I can sometimes be influenced too easily, and I took her brilliant opinion to heart, and never wrote it. So that trip, the story of my girlfriend's and my road trip from Florida to San Francisco, is the first ever, although unwritten, web log. I will add an entry about that in wikipedia to make it true.

Dinah's story is another one of those that is wrong and contradictory in so many ways it's hard to keep them straight. Dinah goes to visit the women in the country, and Shechem, son of Hamor the local prince, sees her. It's important to see exactly the language the bible uses to describe what happens next: "he took her, lay with her, and dishonoured her" (Gen. 34:2). Does that sound familiar? It is exactly how both Isaac and Jacob began their relationships with their wives. So is that rape? Of course we're not told whether it was consensual, but neither were we with Rachel or Rebecca or Leah. Shechem, it says, remained true to Dinah: he loved her and comforted her (Gen. 34:3). That also sounds just like Isaac and Jacob: rape first, marry later.

He tells his father he wants to marry the girl. Then again Jacob hears that Shechem had "violated" his daughter. Finally the passage says what is apparently the real crime of Shechem: her brothers were grieved and angry "because in lying with Jacob's daughter he had done what the Israelites held to be an outrage, an intolerable thing." They can't possibly mean that rape itself is an outrage and an intolerable thing. The only possible reason for their outrage, I think, is that a Canaanite man had sex with an Israelite woman. (There's so much mixing of the tribes in these pages that I can't keep them straight. I'm sure there is animosity between the Israelites and the Canaanites, and yet I am also sure that God promised the land of Canaan to Abraham. I think that's the point--that God promised to Abraham this land--Canaan--that is not naturally theirs. It's also important, I think, to picture what life was like in this place. [For an amazing book on life in the middle east, read "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)--or watch the movie even. The book can get boring, but the way these people live is amazing. Remember Akabah? These people really do live in the desert. They can set off across the desert and arrive at the one watering hole for hundreds of miles ten days later. I think these characters, Jacob's children, Hamon's children, they may have been living in the same area, but that doesn't mean they were neighbors. It's very much like the old west stories between the cattle ranchers and the sheep herders. The tribes are just out living in tents in the vast open wilderness. As Jacob and Esau did in chapter 33, the clans just have to separate, to spread out over the land to give each herd room to graze.]) So it's not odd that the Israelites would be living among the Canaanites--it was a vast open country, one group living in one valley, the next in the next.

So although they could live near each other in peace, it was apparently an outrage for a Canaanite man to sleep with an Israelite woman. This is the reason for the outrage, nothing to do with the wishes or violation of Dinah herself. Despite the name of this passage, she is not a character in the story. It's the story, as always, of men fighting over the woman as a possession.

Hamon offers Jacob anything--he literally says name your price--to allow Shechem to marry Dinah. Jacob agrees. His price? All the men of Hamon's clan must get circumcised, then Shechem may marry Dinah. In another bizarre moment in the bible, all the men agree! Every man gets the end of his penis cut off so Shechem can continue having sex with Dinah.

This passage strikes me as blasphemous. It is using this sign of God's covenant with Abraham in a very base and sinful way. So again, is it? If it's here, it must be our understanding of morality that is completely wrong. Morality must be malleable--it is the only way to make sense of these stories.

And then, after Shechem's family agrees to it and does it, again this seems very disrespectful to God and his holy desire to have all our penises mutilated. Then two days later, while all the men were still in great pain, Simeon and Levi attacked the city (?) and killed every male. They grabbed Dinah and took her back with them. Then the rest of Jacob's sons came and looted and pillaged over the dead bodies of the men.

In usual Bible justice, Jacob gets mad only at Simeon and Levi. He says they brought trouble upon him, and "have made my name stink among the people of the country" (Gen. 34:30). Simeon and Levi replied, "Is our sister to be treated as a common whore?" (Gen. 34:31)

Sadly, Rachel dies during childbirth in chapter 35, giving birth to Benjamin.


--bibletoenail