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And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him…And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife. And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein… .And the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and Hamor his father deceitfully, and said, because he had defiled Dinah their sister: And they said unto them, We cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one that is uncircumcised; for that were a reproach unto us: But in this will we consent unto you: If ye will be as we be, that every male of you be circumcised; Then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. But if ye will not hearken unto us, to be circumcised; then will we take our daughter, and we will be gone. And their words pleased Hamor, and Shechem Hamor’s son… 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. And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went out. (Gen. 34)

The Egyptian story of The Contendings of Horus and Set sets forth a series of events concerning the contest between Horus and Set for the throne. In the discussion of Myth #55 we saw that the biblical account of how Jacob tricked Esau out of his birthright and blessing shared several similarities with one of the episodes in that story, the one where Isis disguised herself and carried a bowl of food to Set.

As the Egyptian story continued, there came a point when Re, the chief deity, fed up with the continued complaints, directed Horus and Set to stop feuding and to eat together. Set agreed and invited Horus to a feast but he had other purposes in mind. After Horus visited, ate, and fell asleep, Set sexually abused him. For some legal reason, if Set could show this, he would become king instead of Horus.

When Horus learned what Set had done to him, he went to his mother for help. Utilizing her magical skills, she made it appear to the council of gods that Horus abused Set rather than the other way around.

In Genesis, with Jacob and Esau in the roles of Horus and Set, a similar scenario started to develop. When Jacob returned to Canaan, he sought out Esau to make peace. Esau (after the incident where Jacob wrestled with the stranger) invited Jacob and his family to come back with him for a feast. Jacob, suspicious of his brother’s motives, told Esau to go on and he would follow after. Instead, he skipped out of town and brought his family to Shechem. Strangely, the Bible says nothing further about Esau’s reaction to being left in the lurch.

If the Genesis account were truly following the Egyptian storyline, Jacob should have followed Esau to his home and Esau would later subject his brother to some sort of sexual abuse. That scene doesn’t occur in Genesis, but at the very point where we would expect such a story, the narrative shifts to another scene of sexual abuse, in which the son of Hamor, king of Shechem, raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah. Given the narrative context, it shouldn’t be too surprising to discover that the name Hamor has the meaning of a “red ass,” the very image associated with Set .

In the biblical story, after the son of Hamor raped Dinah, he asked his father to arrange a marriage. Hamor proposed to Jacob that the children of both families intermarry. Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, replied that the Israelites would go along with the marriage if the Shechemite males all agreed to be circumcised. The Shechemites accepted this condition but Simeon and Levi had a secret agenda. When the males were recovering from the operations and unable to fight well, the two brothers secretly entered the city and slaughtered the king’s family. Jacob, afraid of the consequences, fled with his family from Shechem to Bethel.

It would seem that for some reason the biblical editors substituted the story of the rape of Dinah for the story about the homosexual rape of Horus/Jacob by Set/Esau. The basis for the story was the Greek myth of Danaus and Aegyptus, a source that we previously noted (see Myth #47) had an influence on the genealogy of the Hamitic branch of Noah’s family.

The only complete account of the Greek myth appears in the writings of Apollodorus, a Greek writer of the first century B.C. The summary presented here is adapted from his narrative.

Danaus and Aegyptus were the twin sons of Belus, king of Egypt. The monarch appointed Aegyptus ruler over Arabia and Danaus ruler over Libya (i.e., that part of Africa west of the Nile). Eventually, Aegyptus conquered Egypt and named the country after himself. Danaus, fearing his brother’s power, fled from Libya to the Greek kingdom of Argos, where he persuaded the current ruler to make Danaus king. Aegyptus pursued Danaus and proposed that his fifty sons marry Danaus’s fifty daughters (called the Danaides in Greek myth). Danaus, fearing a plot against his life, agreed, but secretly instructed his daughters to hide knives in their wedding beds and kill their husbands on the wedding night. All but one of the daughters carried out the instructions and the surviving husband succeeded Danaus to the throne.

On the surface, the biblical story of Dinah bears a startling resemblance to the Greek legend. In both stories, a king proposed a group marriage between the members of his family and a less powerful family; the less powerful family consented to the marriage but secretly plotted to kill the king’s sons; the less powerful family massacred the king’s sons and move to a new territory. (In an isolated fragment of text from another source, the Danaides killed Aegyptus’s sons while still in Egypt and then fled to Argos.) Also, the daughters of the less powerful family are known as the Danaides (i.e.,“daughters of Danaus” in Greek) and the central character of the less powerful family in the biblical story is Dinah, sharing the same root name as Danaus and the Danaides.

The main distinctions between the biblical and Greek stories are:

As to the first point, we have already observed that Hamor/“red ass” stands in as a substitute for Esau/“the hairy red” man, and both substitute for the red-skinned donkey god Set. Since Hamor substitutes for Esau, and Esau is Jacob’s twin, we have eliminated the first distinction. As to the second objection, we can show that Genesis, too, has a family of fifty children.

Genesis divides the family of Jacob into two main factions—a Rachel group consisting of the two sons of Rachel and the two sons of her handmaid Bilhah, and the Leah branch, consisting of her six sons and the two sons of her handmaid Zilpah. Genesis 46 gives a list of all the sons and grandsons born to each of Jacob’s wives before they came into Egypt. In that list, Leah has thirty-four sons and grandsons and her handmaid has sixteen more, a total of fifty. Since the biblical authors generally count grandsons among the sons of a family, the Leah branch has fifty sons. And not only do we have fifty children of Jacob, both Genesis and Apollodorus divide the fifty children into eight subgroups.