Hebrew Myths (37 page)

Jacob let Leah’s sons settle the matter. They told Hamor deceitfully: ‘Alas, we cannot allow our sister to marry an uncircumcised Hivite; but if the men of Shechem will accept circumcision, our father’s house and yours may then be securely allied by marriage.’
³⁶⁶

(
d
) Hamor consulted with the leaders of Shechem, who agreed that every male should undergo immediate circumcision. Three days later, when the Shechemites’ members were inflamed, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s full brothers, secretly entered the city, sword in hand, massacred Hamor, Shechem, and all their bedridden subjects, and took Dinah away. Jacob’s other sons followed close behind. They sacked the houses of Shechem, drove off flocks, herds, asses from its fields, enslaved women and children. Jacob cried indignantly: ‘You have made me odious in the eyes of every Hivite, Perizzite and Amorite! Now they will band together and destroy us.’ But Simeon and Levi asked: ‘Could we allow our sister to be treated as a harlot?’
³⁶⁷

(
e
) Some say, that though six hundred and forty-five Shechemite men and two hundred and seventy-six boys were circumcised, yet Hamor had been warned by his aged uncles, and by his father Hadkam, son of Pered, that this breach of custom would vex all Canaan, and that they would themselves raise an army to punish such impiety. Hamor explained that he had accepted circumcision only to deceive Jacob’s sons: at Shechem’s wedding feast, when the Israelites lay drunken and at ease, he would give the signal for their massacre. Dinah secretly sent her bondmaid to tell Simeon and Levi of Hamor’s plan. They vowed that by the following night no man would be left alive in Shechem, and attacked the city at dawn. Though withstood by twenty bold Shechemites who had evaded circumcision, they killed eighteen: the other two ran and hid in a bitumen pit.
³⁶⁸

(
f
) Hamor’s Amorite allies, hearing the distant din of battle, hastened to Shechem and locked the city gates behind them, lest Jacob’s other sons might reinforce Simeon and Levi. But Judah scaled the wall, flung himself on the enemy, and felled scores of them. Reuben, Issachar, Gad and the rest broke down the gate and rushed in, dealing death right and left. Together they slaughtered all the men of Shechem, besides three hundred infuriated wives who were hurling stones and tiles from the rooftops. Blood poured down the streets like a river. A second army of Amorites and Perizzites then came marching across the plain. Jacob took sword and bow, stationed himself at the gates and, crying ‘Shall my sons fall into the hands of these Gentiles?’, leaped at the enemy, cutting them down as a reaper does com. Soon all was over. Jacob’s sons divided the spoils, including numerous bondmen and children; also eighty-five virgins—one of whom, by name Bonah, Simeon made his wife.
³⁶⁹

(
g
) Others say that Hamor had given Dinah leave to rejoin her family; but that she would not stir from Shechem’s house, even
after the massacre, sobbing: ‘How dare I show my face among kinsmen?’ Only when Simeon swore to marry her himself, did she accompany him.
³⁷⁰

(
h
) Dinah was already pregnant by Shechem, and bore him a posthumous daughter. Her brothers wished to kill the child, as custom demanded, lest any Canaanite might say ‘The maidens of Israel are without shame!’ Jacob, however, restrained them, hung about his grand-daughter’s neck a silver disk on which were engraved the words ‘Holy to God!’, and laid her underneath a
thorn bush
—hence she was called ‘Asenath’. That same day Michael, in the shape of an eagle, flew off with Asenath to On in Egypt, and there laid her beside God’s altar. The priest, by name Potiphera, seeing that his wife was barren, brought Asenath up as his own child.

Many years later, when Joseph had saved Egypt from famine and made a progress through the land, women threw him thank-offerings. Among them was Asenath who, having no other gift, tossed Joseph her silver disk, which he caught as it flew by. He recognized the inscription and, knowing that she must be his own niece, married her.
³⁷¹

(
i
) After Joseph forgave his brothers, and sent them back to Canaan, his gifts included embroidered garments, and a load of myrrh, aloes, ointments and cosmetics for Dinah, who was now not only his sister and mother-in-law, but also a sister-in-law, having married Simeon and borne him a son named Saul.

Dinah at last died in Egypt. Simeon brought the bones home to Canaan, and buried them at Arbel, where her tomb is still shown. Others, however, say that Simeon divorced Dinah, and that she became the second wife of Job the Uzzite, when God restored him to prosperity. Job fathered seven sons and three daughters on her.
³⁷²

***

1
. Shechem, like Troy, was sacked in revenge for a princess’s abduction by the king’s son. Both Greeks and Hebrews seem to have borrowed this theme, separately, from the Ugaritic
Keret
epic, in which the God El orders Prince Keret to besiege Udum, where his lawful spouse Hurriya has taken refuge with her lover—though the King of Udum honourably offers to compensate his loss. In both cases the historical facts have been romantically obscured: the Trojan War was fought, it seems, for control of the Black Sea trade; Shechem was destroyed after a territorial dispute between Joshua’s Israelites and their Hivite allies.

2
. Dinah is said to have differed from her sisters—all born as twins to Jacob’s other sons—in having a separate birth (see 45.
f
). Hers must therefore be regarded as an independent tribe of the Leah federation, which enjoyed not patriarchal but matriarchal, or semi-matriarchal, government—like the Epizephyrian Locrians of Calabria, about whose constitution Aristotle wrote a treatise. Patriarchy and matriarchy still co-exist in parts of Central Africa, as they did in ancient Greece: Hera’s High Priestess of Argos attended meetings of the twelve-tribe Amphictyonic League, but was expected to wear a beard—all the other representatives being men.

3
. Dinah’s rape by Shechem suggests that, not long after Joshua’s invasion of Canaan, her small tribe was overrun by Amorites of Shechem and that her allies, the Leah tribes of Simeon and Levi, took revenge by massacring them. Dinah then married Simeon—that is to say, the two tribes became temporarily united; but when Simeon forfeited his lands (
Genesis
XLIX. 5–7), and the tribal remnants joined Judah as a sub-clan (
Joshua
XIX. 1–9; 1
Chronicles
IV. 24 ff)—which may explain why Simeon has been omitted from Moses’ Blessing in
Deuteronomy
XXXIII.—Dinah lost her identity. However, we learn from a midrash that Asenath, Dinah’s daughter by Shechem (ingeniously identified with Asenath, the High Priest of On’s daughter—
Genesis
XLI. 45 ff) married Joseph. In other words, the tribe of Ephraim took over her former lands, an event anachronistically mentioned by Jacob in
Genesis
XL, when he blesses Ephraim, giving him ‘one
shoulder
above your brothers, which I won from the Amorites with my sword and bow.’ ‘Shoulder’ in Hebrew is
shechem
, and Jacob was conferring the sovereignty of Israel on Ephraim; because Shechem served until David’s time as the political centre of Israel. A shoulder was the royal portion in Greece: when Creon expelled Oedipus from Thebes he laid the haunch, not the shoulder, before him at a sacrificial feast—as a token of his deposition.

4
. The suggestion in
Genesis
that Dinah’s downfall was caused by visiting the daughters of the land—that is to say, taking part in Canaanite orgies—disguises the fact that most Israelite girls did so in those early days, and points a familiar Jewish moral: ‘Mothers, keep your daughters at home!’

5
. Jacob’s fight against the Amorites has been invented to account for his boast, in the Blessing, that he won Shechem with his own sword and bow (
Genesis
XLIX. 8–9).

6
. Midrashic commentators are at pains to show that Simeon and Levi did not merely massacre defenceless men, but fought gallantly against ten times their own number; also that Joseph correctly married his niece, not the daughter of an Egyptian priest.

7
. The circumcision of the Shechemites is a puzzling incident, since all Palestinians, except the Philistines, are said by Herodotus to have practised it; but perhaps the Shechemites, here called ‘Hivites’, were recent Achaean immigrants. The custom had spread eastward from Egypt, where the use of flint lancets (
Exodus
IV. 25) proves its great antiquity.

8
. That Dinah married Job after he made his peace with God, has no Scriptural sanction. But since both characters had suffered greatly for no fault of their own; and since we are told nothing about the woman who, in the last chapters of
Job
, bore Job seven sons and three daughters to replace those killed by a hurricane in the first chapter, Dinah’s name at once suggests itself for such a marriage of convenience.

9
. Asenath, daughter of Dinah, is a midrashic invention. Asenath, Joseph’s wife (see 56.
5
), has a genuine Egyptian name unconnected with a thorn bush (
sneh
in Hebrew).

10
. Gabriel took the shape of an eagle because Potiphera’s temple was sacred to the god Ra, and housed his Sun-eagle, or Phoenix, a bird greatly venerated by Israelite sages (see 12.
f
and 20.
k
).

11
. The medieval
Sepher Hayashar
supplies a long account of wars fought between Jacob’s sons and the Amorites, with swords, shields, spears, enormous boulders, and loud war cries. This Homeric fiction has been historically well conceived. Tappuah, Shiloh, Hazor, Beth-Horon, Sartan, Mahanaim and Gaash, the seven place names it mentions, are all ancient Ephraimite cities; and Ephraim himself (because he was born in Egypt at a later date) is carefully omitted from the roll of Israelite champions. It seems most improbable, however, that this war reflects even a genuine tradition of Joshua’s later conquests, since the place names correspond with those found in the
Testament of Judah
(end of second century
B.C.
) and the somewhat later
Book of Jubilees.
The Beth-Horon battle seems to be a reminiscence of that fought by Judas the Maccabee against the Syrian general Seron (1
Maccabees
III. 16).

(
a
) While Jacob camped by the Tower of Eder in Judah, he was grieved to hear that Reuben had seduced Rachel’s bondmaid Bilhah, mother of Asher and Naphtali, his own half-brothers.

Many years later when Jacob, on his deathbed, addressed each of the twelve patriarchs in turn, he told Reuben: ‘Though the eldest son, and first proof of my manhood; though of great strength and fountain-like impetuosity; yet you have defiled my bed, and shall therefore not rule your brothers!’
³⁷³

(
b
) Some say that Reuben was avenging Leah’s wrongs; for after Rachel’s death, Jacob set Bilhah’s couch beside his own. Reuben cried angrily: ‘My mother Leah suffered scorn enough while Rachel lived. Must she still bear it patiently?’ He took away the couch and set Leah’s in its place; then, because this plain warning went unregarded, he forced Bilhah—so that Jacob might never touch her again.
³⁷⁴

(
c
) Reuben, on his deathbed, gave a different account of the matter. Having watched Bilhah bathe in a secluded stream, he could not sleep until he had enjoyed her. His opportunity came one evening when she lay drunken and naked in the tent. Although Bilhah remembered nothing afterwards, God saw Reuben’s act and punished him for seven months with a cruel disease of the genitals. At length he confessed his sin to Jacob, and did seven years’ penance—abstaining from wine, meat, dainties and merry-making.
³⁷⁵

(
d
) Reuben, Jacob’s first-born, should have inherited his blessing, priesthood, and kingship over Israel; but because he had sinned, the blessing was laid upon Joseph; the priesthood on Levi; the kingship on Judah. Jacob excused himself to Reuben: ‘I served Laban for Rachel’s sake, not for your mother Leah’s. The ploughing and sowing I did in Leah should have been done in Rachel, and Joseph should have been my first-born. The first-born’s right, therefore, is his by equity.’
³⁷⁶

(
e
) Some charge Reuben with seducing Zilpah also.
³⁷⁷

***

1
. No greater reproach attaches to Bilhah than to Tamar, seduced by Amnon (2
Samuel
XIII); to Bathsheba, seduced by David (2
Samuel
XI; XII); or to Dinah, seduced by Shechem (see 49). Hebrew myths treat women as fields to be ploughed and sown by godlike heroes—passive, and thus necessarily guiltless if the wrong farmer should enter. Sexual prohibitions in the Mosaic Law are addressed to men alone; and though proof of adultery sentences the woman as well as her lover to death by stoning, she is punished as an involuntary participant—like the luckless animal with which a man has committed bestiality (
Leviticus
XX. 10–18). The first-century Pharisees, however, despite a New Testament libel on them (
John
VIII), never stoned an adulterous couple: the woman was allowed to plead ignorance of the Law and, since the seducer could not suffer apart from her, both went free. Jesus therefore, by his timely quotation of
Deuteronomy
XVII. 2–7, must have saved the adulterous woman from Samaritan judges, who obeyed Moses literally, rather than from Pharisees.