Dinah

In the Hebrew Bible, Dinah (Hebrew: דִּינָה, Modern Dina Tiberian Dînā ; "judged; vindicated") was the daughter of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Israelites, and Leah, his first wife. The episode of her abduction and violation by a Canaanite prince, and the subsequent vengeance of her brothers Simeon and Levi, commonly referred to as the rape of Dinah, is told in Genesis 34.

The rape of Dinah

17th century depiction of the rape of Dinah.

Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to visit the women of Shechem, where her people had made camp and where her father Jacob had purchased the land where he had pitched his tent. Shechem the son of Hamor, the prince of the land, "took her and lay with her and humbled her. And his soul was drawn to Dinah ... he loved the maiden and spoke tenderly to her," and Shechem asked his father to obtain Dinah for him, to be his wife.

Hamor came to Jacob and asked for Dinah for his son: "Make marriages with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us; and the land shall be open to you," and Shechem offered Jacob and his sons any bride-price they named. But "the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and his father Hamor deceitfully, because he had defiled their sister Dinah," saying they would accept the offer if the men of the city agreed to be circumcised.

So the men of Shechem were deceived, and were circumcised; and "on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and came upon the city unawares, and killed all the males. They slew Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went away." And the sons of Jacob plundered 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."

"Then 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 shall be destroyed, both I and my household.' But they said (Genesis 34:31), 'Should he treat our sister as a harlot?'"

Origin

This portion of the Book of Genesis deals primarily with the family of Abraham and his descendants, including Dinah, her father Jacob, and her brothers. It strives to tell the story to their descendants who were to come. The traditional view is that Moses wrote Genesis as well as almost all the rest of the Torah, doubtlessly using varied sources but synthesizing all of them together to give the Hebrews a written history of their ancestors. This view, which has been held for the past several thousand years although it is not explicitly mentioned in either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible, holds that Moses included this story primarily because it happened and he viewed it as significant. It foreshadows later happenings and prophecies further along in Genesis and the Torah dealing with the two violent brothers.

Modern-day scholars often view Genesis as a combination of originally separate strands that does not pre-date the 1st millennium BC as a unified whole.^[1] Modern scholars have suggested two layers of narrative within Genesis 34 itself, an older account ascribing the slaughter of Shechem to Simeon and Levi alone, and a later addition (verses 27 to 29) involving all the sons of Jacob.^[2]

Jonathan Kirsch suggests that the narrative reflects a combining of two separate traditions: a Yahwist narrator describing a rape, and an Elohist speaker describing a seduction.^[3]

One contemporary biblical scholar, Alexander Rofé, has suggested that the verb describing Dinah as "defiled" was added at this time also, as elsewhere in the Bible only married or betrothed women are "defiled" by rape, assuming that the writer of Genesis could not possibly have considered rape to be defilement in and of itself. He instead proposed that such a description reflected a "late, post-exilic notion that the idolatrous gentiles are impure [and supports] the prohibition of intermarriage and intercourse with them." Such a supposed preoccupation with racial purity would indicate a date in the 5th or 4th centuries BC, when the restored Jewish community in Jerusalem was similarly preoccupied with anti-Samaritan polemics.^[4] Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that rape did indeed take place; the verb translated as "humbled" or "violated" in chapter 34 can also mean "to subdue".^[4]

Dinah in rabbinic literature

The Midrash contains a series of proposed explanations of the Bible by rabbis which are generally rejected or ignored by Christians but often accepted, at least in part, by believers in Judaism. It provides many further hypotheses of the story of Dinah, suggesting answers to questions such as her offspring from Shechem and possible links to later incidents and characters. One implicates Jacob in Dinah's misfortune: when he went to meet Esau he locked Dinah in a box, for fear that Esau would wish to marry her,^[5] but God rebuked him in these words: "If thou hadst married off thy daughter in time she would not have been tempted to sin, and might, moreover, have exerted a beneficial influence upon her husband" (Gen. R. lxxx.).^[5] Dinah herself, widowed by her brothers' action, demanded that Simeon marry her^[6] and remove her shame. Her brother Simeon promised to marry her; but she did not wish to leave Shechem, fearing that after her disgrace no one would take her to wife (Gen. R. l.c.);^[5] she was later married to Job however (Bava Batra 16b; Gen. R. l.c.).^[5] When she died, Simeon buried her in the land of Canaan. She is therefore referred to as "the Canaanitish woman" (Gen. 46:10).^[5] Shaul (ib.) was her son by Shechem (Gen. R. l.c.).^[5] According to Rabbinic Literature, her child after her rape by Shechem was Asenath, the wife of Joseph.^{[citation needed]}

Early Christian commentators, including Jerome assign some of the responsibility to Dinah, in venturing out to visit the women of Shechem. This story was used to demonstrate the danger to women in the public sphere as contrasted with the relative security of remaining in private.^[7]

Simeon and Levi

According to the Midrash, Simeon and Levi were only 14 and 13 years old, respectively, at the time of the rape of Dinah. They possessed great moral zealousness (later, in the episode of the Golden Calf, the Tribe of Levi would demonstrate their absolute commitment to Moses' leadership by killing all the people involved in idol worship), but their anger was misdirected here. On his deathbed, Jacob cursed their anger and divided their tribal portions in the land of Israel so that they would not be able to regroup and fight arbitrarily. One midrash told how their father Jacob later tried to restrain their hot tempers by dividing their portions in the land of Israel, and neither had lands of their own. Therefore Dinah's son by Shechem was counted among Simeon's progeny and received a portion of land in Israel, Dinah herself being "the Canaanite woman" mentioned among those who went down into Egypt with Jacob and his sons (Gen. 46:10).^[5] When she died, Simeon buried her in the land of Canaan. (According to another tradition her child from her rape by Shechem was Asenath the wife of Joseph, and she herself later married the prophet Job (Bava Batra 16b; Gen. R. l.c.).^[5]) The Tribe of Simeon received land within the territory of Judah and served as itinerant teachers in Israel, traveling from place to place to earn a living. The Tribe of Levi received a few Cities of Refuge spread out over Israel, and relied for their sustenance on the priestly gifts that the Children of Israel gave them.

Travel to Egypt

When Jacob's family prepares to descend to Egypt Genesis 46:8-27, the Torah lists the 70 family members who went down together. Simeon's children include "Saul, the son of the Canaanite woman."^[6] The medieval French rabbi Rashi hypothesized that this Saul was Dinah's son by Shechem.^[6] He suggests that after the brothers killed all the men in the city, including Shechem and his father, Dinah refused to leave the palace unless Simeon agreed to marry her^[6] and remove her shame (according to Nachmanides, she only lived in his house and did not have sex with him). Therefore Dinah's son is counted among Simeon's progeny, and he received a portion of land in Israel in the time of Joshua. The list of the names of the families of Israel in Egypt is repeated in Exodus 6:14-25.

The Red Tent

The novel The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant, is a fictional autobiography of Dinah. In Diamant's version, Dinah falls in love with Shalem, the Canaanite prince, and goes to bed with him in preparation for marriage. Simon and Levi, Jacob's sons, instigate the discord between Jacob and the men of the King of Shechem out of fear for their own prosperity, even though Dinah tells them the truth.

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Jewish Encyclopedia. 1901–1906.  Check date values in: |date= (help)

Further reading

• Yael Shemesh, "Rape is Rape is Rape: The story of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34)", ZAW 119 (2007), pp. 2–21

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dinah.

External links

• Dinah's Abduction from a Jewish perspective at Chabad.org
• Blyth, C. (2008). "Redeemed by His Love? The Characterization of Shechem in Genesis 34". Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33: 3. doi:10.1177/0309089208094457.