Dinah
GENESIS 34
Simeon and Levi Slew Hamor and Schechem by Gerard Hoet.
THE PERILS OF INTERMARRIAGE. THE BROTHERS DIDN’T LIE. A LATER ADDITION?
Dinah was raped by Shechem; in return, her brothers killed Shechem and all the men of his town. Was this the right thing to do?
After crossing the Jabbok and meeting up with his brother, Esau (who, contrary to Jacob’s expectations, bore no grudge against him), Jacob continued on to the city of Shechem. There, his only daughter, Dinah, was seized and raped by a certain Shechem (he had the same name as that of the city), the son of the city’s ruler, Hamor. Subsequently, young Shechem asked his father to purchase Dinah as a bride for him, and Hamor approached Jacob with that proposal; in fact, he suggested that this marriage might inaugurate a general intermarrying of the population of the city with Jacob and his family.
When Jacob’s sons returned from their shepherding and heard the news of the rape, they were outraged. Rather than simply turning down Shechem’s proposal, however, they devised a stratagem. If Shechem would agree to have his son and all the other men of the city circumcised, they said, then indeed Dinah could become Shechem’s bride. The Shechemites cooperated and organized a mass circumcision of all males. Then Jacob’s sons went into action:
On the third day, when they [the Shechemites] were in great pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and, entering the city unawares, killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem at sword-point and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house and left. Then the other sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered the city, because their sister had been defiled. They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, everything that was in the houses, they captured and made their prey. Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I will be wiped out, along with my whole household.” But they said, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?”
For ancient readers, this violent tale was something of a mystery. As usual, what interested them was the message the story was intended to convey—but this was precisely what was most problematic about the Dinah episode. The story is told with a chilly neutrality, so that even at the end, there is no way to know whether the Bible is seeking to claim that the reaction of Simeon and Levi was justified or not. Jacob, of course, seems to think it was not, but we are never quite sure if he is right. Indeed, it is altogether appropriate that the story itself should end with a question mark—“Shall our sister be treated as a whore?” Along with this is the fact—quite surprising for the Bible—that God is nowhere mentioned in this narrative, almost as if the Dinah episode had somehow been exempted from the usual biblical concern with the divine will.
As ancient interpreters pored over this text, however, they found one indication, however slight, of what Scripture had really intended by relating this episode. That clue came in a brief passage describing the reaction of Dinah’s brothers when they first heard the news of their sister’s rape:
Jacob heard that he [Shechem] had defiled his daughter Dinah. His sons were with his cattle in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they arrived . . . Jacob’s sons came in from the field when they heard of it, and the men were indignant and very angry, because he [Shechem] had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter, and such a thing ought not to be done.
The indicated phrase appears to be what literary critics call “implied quotation.” That is, the narrative does not say outright, “The brothers said, ‘Such a thing ought not to be done’” (this is called direct quotation, asserting that these are precisely the words they spoke). Nor does it say, “The brothers said that such a thing ought not to be done” (indirect quotation, which gives the substance of what was said without actually quoting it). Implied quotation is one more step away; it simply says that the brothers were “indignant and very angry” and then juxtaposes some further words; the juxtaposition implies, without saying so outright, that these further words explain what precedes them and thus represent the brothers’ point of view. They must have said to each other words to the effect that Shechem had committed an outrage and that such a thing ought not to be done.
Read in a somewhat different way, however, these same words can take on a different meaning. For if—in keeping with the last of the Four Assumptions—one believes that the entire text of the Bible is divinely inspired or in some other way comes from God, then it might appear that “such a thing ought not to be done” actually represents God’s own judgment on what happened. After all, Genesis does not specifically attribute these words to the brothers; could they not be an editorial aside by the divine narrator? That is what ancient interpreters said:
You [God] gave a sword to take revenge on the strangers who had loosed the adornment of a virgin to defile her, and uncovered her thigh to put her to shame, and polluted her womb to disgrace her; for You said, “It shall not be thus”1—yet they did so.
[The angel of Jubilees says]: And let it not be done thus henceforth again that a daughter of Israel shall be defiled.
Jubilees 30:5
A Tale of Intermarriage
One important issue throughout biblical times (and afterward) was that of intermarriage. Numerous texts in Genesis suggest that marriage with Canaanites, for example, was to be avoided: Abraham goes to great lengths to insure that Isaac will not marry a Canaanite woman (Gen. 24:1–4), and Isaac instructs his son Jacob, “You shall not marry one of the Canaanite women” (Gen. 28:1). Indeed, biblical law prohibits contracting marriages with the Canaanites and other people of the region:
Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following Me, to serve other gods . . . For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be His people, His treasured possession.
Concern with this issue did not diminish over time—quite the contrary. The Bible reports that long after the heyday of Israelite power—following the conquest of Judah by the Babylonians and the subsequent exile, and the return from exile—intermarriage was, perhaps more than ever, of great concern. When, in this postexilic period, Ezra discovered that some of his fellow Jews had taken wives from various foreign peoples (Ezra 9:1), he was sorely aggrieved; despite the emotional (and financial) cost involved, he urged his countrymen to divorce their foreign wives, and they did so:2
[The men said to Ezra:] “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. So now let us make a covenant with our God to divorce all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law. Take action, for it is your duty, and we are with you; be strong, and do it.” Then Ezra stood up and made the leading priests, the Levites, and all Israel swear that they would do as had been said. So they swore.
Against this background, the story of Dinah seemed to have an obvious lesson for ancient interpreters: don’t intermarry! It was bad enough that Jacob’s daughter had been raped. But the fact that the Bible then goes on to narrate Hamor’s proposal that Jacob’s family intermarry with the people of the city—that is, that Dinah’s marriage to his son is to be only the first in a long series of marriages between the two peoples—certainly seemed to suggest to ancient interpreters that the rape itself was not the story’s real subject. Intermarriage was.3
And let it not be done thus henceforth again that a daughter of Israel shall be defiled. For, the punishment had been decreed against them in heaven that they were to annihilate all the Shechemites with the sword, since they had committed an outrage in Israel . . . [Indeed,] if there is a man in Israel who wishes to give his daughter or his sister to any foreigner, he is to die. He is to be stoned because he has done something sinful and shameful within Israel. The woman is to be burned because she has defiled the reputation of her father’s house; she is to be uprooted from Israel . . .
For this reason I have written for you in the words of the Torah everything that the Shechemites did to Dinah and how Jacob’s sons said, “We will not give our daughters to a man who has a foreskin, because for us that would be a disgrace” [Gen. 34:14]. For it is a disgrace, for any Israelites who give [their own daughters to foreigners] or for any who take one of the foreign women [for their sons], because it is impure and despicable for Israel. Israel will never become cleansed of this impurity so long as it has one of the foreign women [in its midst] or so long as there is anyone who has given one of his daughters to any foreign man.
Jubilees 30:5–15
The Brothers Did Not Lie
In the above passage, the author of Jubilees makes a subtle argument. Why, he asks, should the Torah have bothered to narrate this whole story at such great length, when it could have summarized the whole thing much more quickly, and more delicately, in a sentence or two? (Shechem “outraged” Dinah, so her two brothers went and killed the whole town.) Certainly there was no reason to include all of Hamor’s words about the benefits of intermarriage, first to Jacob and his sons (Gen. 34:9–10), and then to his own people (Gen. 34:20–23), if the point of the story was the rape alone. And why should the Torah then go on to narrate the lie that the brothers told the Shechemites: “We’re not allowed to marry our sister off to anyone who is not circumcised, so you’ll all have to undergo circumcision”? They never intended to allow Shechem to marry Dinah.
Jubilees’ answer to the first question is that the Torah’s purpose was precisely to highlight the real point of the story, which was not the rape per se, but the subsequent proposal of marriage. “For this reason I have written for you in the words of the Torah” everything that happened. As for the second question, well, from Jubilees’ point of view, the brothers did not lie. As far as this author was concerned, it is indeed a disgrace for any Israelite to marry his daughter to a non-Israelite, that is, “to a man who has a foreskin.” The rest of what they said may have been a trick, but not that part: those words were meant for every subsequent Israelite to hear and obey.
Other ancient interpreters dealt with the Dinah story in different ways. Intermarriage was not so important to some of them, but the apparent lie of Jacob’s sons was still a problem. One ancient interpretive approach therefore sought to claim that there had been a split in Jacob’s family: ten of his sons actually wanted Shechem to marry Dinah—those were the ones who proposed the mass circumcision. But Simeon and Levi (who were full brothers of Dinah, related by their mother as well as their father) could not go along with this; the rape needed to be avenged. Consequently, they must have urged against the circumcision proposal—and even after they were overruled, they still went and killed the Shechemites anyway. Thus, no one lied: the proposal of circumcision was sincere, and Simeon and Levi were equally sincere in opposing it and then doing what they did. (This line of interpretation is found in two ancient texts, an old Greek poem by a certain Theodotus and the somewhat later Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.)4
Neither circumcision nor intermarriage was an issue in the later Christian church; medieval Christians therefore read the story allegorically. Nevertheless, Shechem and Hamor were understood as outstanding symbols of evil, indeed, of the devil himself. And meanwhile, what of poor Dinah? Ancient interpreters never liked loose ends—in keeping with their overall view of Scripture (and life!), everything had to work out for the best. One ancient tradition thus identified Dinah as the (otherwise anonymous) wife of the biblical sage Job (see Testament of Job 1:5–6)—in other words, she did get married after all. As for the rape, according to one tradition it did result in the birth of a child, Dinah’s daughter, who was either given up for adoption or else magically transported to Egypt by an eagle. In either case, she ended up in the house of the Egyptian official Potiphera, who gave her the Egyptian name Asenath; some years later, she was married to none other than her long-lost uncle, Joseph (Gen. 41:45). Everything did indeed turn out for the best in the end.
For modern scholars, the purpose of the story of Dinah has always seemed somewhat mysterious.5 It has no apparent etiological message, indeed, no long-term consequences at all. Dinah herself is not reported to have become pregnant as a result of the rape; in fact, she is never heard of again. The slaughter of the Shechemites did not bring about any act of reprisal. The incident appears to be referred to only once more in the Bible, when Jacob, near death, gathers his sons together to offer each his fatherly blessing. For Simeon and Levi, however, he has no blessing to give; all he can think of, apparently, is their cruel act of revenge years earlier. Here is what he says to them:
Simeon and Levi are brothers; tools of violence are their stock-in-trade.
May I never enter into their company, nor take pleasure in their assembly.
For in their anger they would kill a man, and in a good mood, hamstring an ox!
Cursed be their anger, how fierce! Their wrath is harsh indeed.
I shall divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.
The absence of any etiological point or any subsequent Canaanite revenge was not the only puzzling thing about this incident. According to the narrative, the city of Shechem is annihilated: all the males are killed, and the women and children and animals are carried off as captives. Shechem is left a ghost town. Yet later on, in the books of Joshua and Judges, the city is apparently again a thriving metropolis. Was it left to stand empty from the time of Jacob until after the exodus and then repopulated by Israelites in the time of Joshua (see Josh. 20:7; 21:21; 24:25)? There is no indication in the Bible that Shechem had been a ghost town, and such a hypothesis is in any case not supported by the archaeological record. But if not, then what did happen? These later books of Joshua and Judges speak about Shechem as if the slaughter had never happened.
The same apparent ignorance of the whole Dinah story is reflected—rather more surprisingly—in the words of Jacob himself. A little later in Genesis, Jacob says, in an oblique reference to the city of Shechem, that he conquered it “from the Amorites with my sword and with my bow” (Gen. 48:22). But in the Dinah story, Jacob quite explicitly has nothing to do with the conquest—he is opposed to it, which is why he condemns his sons’ anger in the passage seen above, as well as in another passage immediately following the incident (Gen. 34:30). Why then should he be taking credit in Gen. 48:22 for a conquest that he elsewhere had nothing to do with and even repudiated? And why should he say that the people of Shechem were “Amorites” when the Dinah narrative itself identifies Hamor and his family as Hivites (Gen. 34:2) and the surrounding peoples in the area as “Canaanites and Perizzites” (Gen. 34:30)? It is almost as if these two texts in Genesis, the Dinah narrative in Genesis 34 and Jacob’s words in Gen. 48:22, had never met.
Another problem for modern scholars is the identity of Hamor, father of the villain. As mentioned, Hamor and his son were both killed in the slaughter. Yet the same name, Hamor, appears hundreds of years later, in the book of Judges (Judg. 9:28)—and this Hamor, too, is also said to be the father of a son named Shechem and the ruler of the city of Shechem, just like the one in the Dinah story. Two people can, of course, have the same name, and they can also decide to give their sons the same name; they can even both have been rulers of the same city in different periods. Still, these two appearances of a “Hamor, the father of Shechem,” chronologically separated by centuries, seemed a further complication in the puzzle. How did it all fit together?
A Late Addition
All such considerations have eventually led to one modern theory about the story of Dinah: it may not be nearly as ancient as the other parts of Genesis.6 In fact, it may have been added in only at the latest stages of the editing of that book. That would explain why, in Gen. 48:22, Jacob can take credit for conquering Shechem: at the time those words were written, there was no tale of the rape of Dinah and the massacre led by Simeon and Levi. The same is true of the city of Shechem in the books of Joshua and Judges: these books know nothing of the sack of Shechem in Jacob’s day, for the simple reason that the story that appears in Genesis did not yet exist.
According to this approach, such a hypothesis also explains another minor curiosity about Dinah, the precise way in which her own birth is announced. For all of Jacob’s other children, Genesis is quite consistent: it always says, “And [name of the mother] conceived and bore a son.” Then comes a sentence explaining the meaning of the name, “And she named him X, saying . . . ,” or else, “And she said . . . and she called him X.” In the case of Dinah, however, one finds none of this. After narrating how Leah gave birth to Zebulon and why he was given that name, the Bible adds the terse notice: “Afterwards, she bore a daughter and named her Dinah” (Gen. 30:21). No “and Leah conceived” and no “And she called her name Dinah, saying . . .” Some readers may see in this unequal treatment an instance of biblical sexism, but, quite apart from any sexism, the terseness of Dinah’s birth notice would seem to fit well with the hypothesis that the whole Dinah story was a later addition.7 Presumably, there was no mention of Dinah’s birth in an earlier version of Genesis, but once the tale of Dinah’s rape and revenge was inserted, by necessity there had to be some mention of Dinah being born. Whoever set out to meet this need did the absolute minimum—no mention was made of Dinah’s mother conceiving, and no reason was thought up for the name she received.
Apart from Gen. 30:21 and the Dinah story itself, there is one other mention of Dinah in the Bible: it comes in Genesis 46, in a list of Jacob’s descendants. There the Bible enumerates all the sons and grandsons Jacob had with Leah, his first wife. Dinah is not mentioned within the list itself, but only in the summary statement at the end: “These are the sons of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob in Paddan-Aram, along with Dinah his daughter; altogether his sons and daughters numbered thirty-three.” It is odd that Dinah is not mentioned in the right place (after Zebulon, whose birth just preceded hers). Odder still is the fact that the numbers don’t work out. The text says that there were thirty-three “sons and daughters” (in fact there was only one daughter, Dinah), but despite what the text says, Dinah has apparently not been included in the total. Thirty-three is actually the number of sons listed; if Dinah is added, the total is thirty-four. Could there be any clearer indication, according to this approach, that the mention of Dinah, here as in the birth announcement, was altogether an afterthought?
A Reason to Get Mad
But why would someone have inserted the Dinah story into the book of Genesis? According to this theory, the reason is not hard to discern: it lies precisely in the words cited above, Jacob’s “blessing” of Simeon and Levi in Genesis 49.
These blessings of Jacob’s, in the view of most modern scholars, are among the oldest passages in the Pentateuch. In each blessing, Jacob says something about the nature, and sometimes the future, of the son or sons in question. Thus, in the passage seen, Jacob does not simply condemn Simeon and Levi for their anger, but says what will happen to their tribes as a result:
Cursed be their anger, how fierce! Their wrath is harsh indeed. I shall divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.
Unlike the other tribes, Simeon and Levi will end up without their own home territory. And so, indeed, did it turn out: the Simeonites were eventually absorbed into the territory (and population) of Judah, while the Levites ended up being “divided” and “scattered” among different tribes, with only a few isolated cities to call their own. (Actually, most modern scholars see in these words attributed to Jacob not an actual prophecy that later came true, but another vaticinium ex eventu, a pseudoprediction of events that had already taken place.)
But imagine that there is as yet no story of Dinah in the book of Genesis. An ancient Israelite, reflecting on these words attributed to Jacob, would have had one obvious question: why are Simeon and Levi being described as angry and wrathful? There is nothing else in all of Genesis to suggest such a thing. Yet the passage is quite insistent: “Cursed be their anger, how fierce! Their wrath is harsh indeed.” In fact, the sentence before this one asserts that these two are, if provoked, even capable of murder: “in their anger they would kill a man.” I think I have correctly translated this as a hypothetical generalization, “would kill a man,” but many translations render this as an actual statement of fact, “in their anger they have killed a man.” Such an understanding of the words would only sharpen the question: What is Jacob talking about? Whom did Simeon and Levi ever murder?8
Thus, if the story of the rape of Dinah and her brothers’ bloody revenge is a later addition to Genesis, this theory holds, its purpose is clear: it was an editor’s attempt to provide some context for Jacob’s words of reproof. Once the Dinah story had been inserted, ancient readers no longer had to guess why Jacob calls Simeon and Levi wrathful or whom the two brothers had killed—they killed the entire male population of Shechem! In other words, Jacob’s excoriation now seemed to be an allusion to the bloody tale recounted in Genesis 34. But is it really? Let us take another look:
Simeon and Levi are brothers; tools of violence are their stock-in-trade.
May I never enter into their company, nor take pleasure in their assembly.
For in their anger they would kill a man, and in a good mood, hamstring an ox!
Cursed be their anger, how fierce! Their wrath is harsh indeed.
I shall divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.
Gen. 49:7
There is no mention here of Shechem or Hamor, no reference to the rape or the phony circumcision proposal, nothing about the brutal collective punishment or the sacking of the city. The only line that seems to allude to the incident really does not: it speaks of killing “a man,” whereas the story says that they killed a whole city. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing in the story about hamstringing an ox. On closer inspection, Jacob’s words do not allude to the Dinah story at all; quite the contrary: the Dinah story has been inserted in an attempt to provide some context for Jacob’s otherwise incomprehensible condemnation of his two sons.
Where did the Dinah story come from? According to this theory, it could not have been made up out of whole cloth, the ad hoc invention of some later editor. The same arguments just seen make that virtually impossible. For, if such an editor had set out to create a new story tailor-made to fit Jacob’s actual words, surely that story would have had nothing to do with a rape or the destruction of an entire city. Instead, it should have told how some hapless stranger wandered into the company of Simeon and Levi (thus evoking Jacob’s “May I never enter into their company”). The stranger would then unaccountably arouse the brothers’ anger and end up being hacked to pieces by their tools of violence. The victim would certainly be one lone individual (“in their anger they would kill a man”)—not a whole city!—and after doing away with him, the brothers would then go off and hamstring his ox for good measure. No, the Dinah story does not seem to have been a later invention; it must have been an already existing story, a story of rape and the unfair revenge that followed, which a later editor then took up and adapted (but only imperfectly) to fit the circumstances of Genesis.
The words of the Dinah story themselves provide modern scholars with further evidence supporting this hypothesis. In the original story, the Israelite group in question must have been a substantial population—otherwise, why would Hamor make it sound like he was proposing the merger of two peoples? “Make marriages with us: give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves; and the land shall be open to you, dwell in it and trade in it and get property in it” (Gen. 34:9). But Jacob and his sons were not yet a people, they were one single family—and at the time he did not have “daughters,” but only Dinah. Elsewhere Hamor, seeking to persuade his countrymen to absorb Jacob and his sons, says, “for behold the land is large enough for them” (Gen. 34:21). Again, this would hardly be a worry for an entire city if only a single family were joining them; the words would be more appropriate if referring to a whole tribe or conglomeration. Perhaps the most striking evidence that the original story had to do with a much larger, and later, group of Israelites is what the text says about the rape itself: “For [Shechem] committed an outrage in Israel, to lie with a daughter of Jacob” (Gen. 34:7). But at the time there was no “Israel,” only Jacob and his immediate family.
Modern scholars do not have any precise theory as to what the context of the original story might have been. Perhaps this story had first been told about the city of Shechem at some later time.9 One thing seems clear, however: the approach outlined thus far would hold that the original story involved a somewhat larger group of Israelites going into the city and massacring all the males. Circumcision may be painful, even incapacitating, but it strains credibility to assert that circumcision alone is what enabled two attackers to slay an entire urban population. More likely, in the original story the circumcision simply helped a doughty band of ten or twenty or fifty attackers overcome a larger number of opponents. But once the story was inserted in Genesis, that doughty band had to be reduced to two people, Simeon and Levi, since they are the only ones whom Jacob excoriates for the massacre.10
Who inserted the story in Genesis? A clue, according to this same approach, is to be found in the narrative’s report of what happened to the Shechemites in the attack:
Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city unawares, and killed all the males . . . And the other sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and plundered the city, because their sister had been defiled. They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and made their prey.
In short: all the males were killed, but their wives, children, livestock, and possessions were given to the brothers as booty.
Those who think of the Old Testament as an unending series of cruelties may not be particularly struck by the specific character of the brothers’ revenge, but it is actually at something of a halfway point between the biblical practice of 
erem (total annihilation of everyone and everything) and the sparing and enslavement of a captured population. What the brothers do here is similar to what, for example, the Israelites do to the Midianites in Numbers 31: kill the men and spare the women and children and possessions. The same policy is reflected in a certain law in the book of Deuteronomy:
When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.
This is precisely what Jacob’s sons do in Genesis 34—almost as if they were obeying the above law even before it was given to Israel. Indeed, the telltale expression mentioned earlier, “For [Shechem] committed an outrage in Israel,” is found in four other places in the Bible; one of them is in the same book of Deuteronomy (22:21). This may not amount to proof positive, but it has suggested to some that the editor responsible for inserting the Dinah story might well have been someone particularly connected with Deuteronomy or at least familiar with its laws.
In conclusion, for some modern interpreters the entire story of Dinah is a late addition to the book of Genesis, inserted in order to account for Jacob’s otherwise referentless allusion to the violent tempers of Simeon and Levi in Gen. 49:5–7. For this purpose, an editor imported and only slightly modified an originally unrelated tale, probably one that had been situated much later in the biblical period, during the time of the Judges. (Such a tale would fit well with the overall depiction of the lawlessness and civil disorder found in the book of Judges.) If this theory is correct, then the original version of this story had no connection with Israel’s founding family: Jacob never had a daughter, and Simeon and Levi never massacred the Shechemites. If that is the case, then should we just forget about Dinah? Or does her story still have something to say to modern readers—about anger and revenge, about violence against women, perhaps even about the theme of intermarriage championed by ancient interpreters?