The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (11 page)

So some scholars suggest that the story of Lot and his daughters is intended by the biblical authors as a kind of “black propaganda,” a scurrilous tale meant to dishonor the hated Ammonites and Moabites: a “product of popular political wit,” explains one commentator, “by which Israel tried to repay her occasionally powerful enemies … for everything she had suffered at their hands.”
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Elsewhere in the Bible, they point out, we find the Moabites and Ammonites singled out among the many adversaries of Israel as worthy of special contempt: the Bible decrees that the child of an intermarriage between an Israelite and an Edomite or Egyptian might be admitted to the nation of Israel “in the third generation” but the offspring of a marriage with an Ammonite or a Moabite is to be permanently excluded (Deut. 23:4, 8-9).
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But the fact is that the Bible reserves a crucial role for these cave-born bastards in spite of their incestuous origins and the future clashes between their descendants and the Israelites. A Moabite woman named Ruth is destined to marry an Israelite man, and their bloodline will lead directly to the birth of David, the greatest of the kings of Israel (Ruth 4:18–22). An Ammonite woman named Naamah will be counted among King Solomon’s one thousand wives and concubines—and, fatefully, it is Naamah who will give birth to Solomon’s successor on the throne of Israel (1 Kings 14:21). And it is from the House of David and Solomon that the Messiah will come, in both the Jewish and Christian traditions.

So the mountain cave in which Lot and his daughters seek refuge turns out to be the womb of history, and their drunken couplings amount to a sanctified union that will bestow upon the world what the Bible regards as its ultimate savior. Neither the taboo against incest nor
the fear of divine retribution are sufficient to discourage these two audacious young women from doing what needs to be done to preserve their father’s seed. What appears at first to be merely black comedy or black propaganda is suddenly elevated into a sublime morality tale, a saga of the struggle of life against death, in which Lot’s unnamed daughters are the unlikely heroes.

A
clamor in the distance roused Jacob in the heat of the late afternoon, and he trudged to the door to see what the disturbance was all about. He heard the shrill keening of women’s voices, and he saw a small cluster of young women heading toward him, followed by a few of the field hands and, finally, one or two of the older women, who struggled to keep up.

“What is the trouble?” Jacob asked wearily, calling out from the doorway as the young women surged up to the house.

The women murmured and moaned, a few of them wept, but no one spoke.

“Well, then?” Jacob asked.

At last, one of the young women, a slender maiden with black eyes whom Jacob vaguely recognized as one of his daughter’s handmaidens, stepped forward and spoke up boldly.

“Our sister—your daughter—has been dishonored,” she announced, and then fell abruptly silent as the shrill cries of the women reached a new crescendo.

“Dishonored?” asked Jacob. “What do you mean?”

“Dishonored,” the young woman repeated, “by one of Hamor’s people.”

Jacob frowned. The Canaanites among whom he had settled were none too friendly toward Jacob and his clan, and Jacob had expended many ingratiating words—not to mention rich gifts of food, wine, cloth, and handiwork—to cultivate the man called Hamor, the local chieftain. Jacob had paid one hundred silver coins to Hamor for the parcel of land on which he built his house and raised up his sheepstocks, but Jacob was uncomfortably aware that he remained a stranger in the land of Canaan.

“Where is Dinah now?” Jacob demanded. “Tell me exactly what happened. And the rest of you—quiet!”

“We went to the well inside the town wall,” volunteered the young woman. “We went to see the women from the countryside who come to fill their water jars.”

“Yes,” Jacob urged her on.

“On the way, we passed some men sitting under an olive tree outside a big house,” the girl continued. “They shouted and laughed and mocked us. All of them except one who just stared and said nothing. That one waited, and when we came back, he walked up to Dinah and spoke very rudely to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘You’re a very pretty one,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a pretty one as you,’” answered the handmaiden, deepening her voice to mock the man whom she described. “ ‘I didn’t know there was one as pretty as you in the camp of the Israelites.’”

“And then?”

“He put his arm around her shoulders and walked with her toward a
grove of trees on the other side of the road,” she continued. “All the while saying: ‘You’re a very pretty one.’ When they reached the trees, Dinah stumbled and fell down, and he fell, too—right on top of her! They were still for awhile, and then I could see that he was pulling at her robe—–”

The young woman paused. For a moment, she seemed bewildered, as if fearing to say aloud what she had seen.

“Go on,” Jacob demanded.

“And then he dishonored her.”

The young woman stopped again. Should she tell
everything
she’d seen? Should she describe how, afterwards, the young man gently put his arm around Dinah and slowly walked with her? Should she mention how the young man was whispering into Dinah’s ear all the while, as if he were comforting her? The handmaiden paused again, staring at the ground in embarrassment.

“Go on!” Jacob commanded once more. The handmaiden looked up, caught his fierce gaze, and spoke plainly to the old man.

“The young man took Dinah, and he forced himself upon her, and he lay with her,” said the young woman. “And then he led her to the big house by the side of the road, and when she went inside, we ran back here to tell you what had happened.”

“And do you know the man who did this?” Jacob asked. “Do you know his name?”

“We have seen him before on the way to the well, him and his friends.” She paused. “The women at the well say his name is Shechem, and he is the prince’s son.”

The next day, a curious sight could be seen from Jacob’s doorway: Hamor, the prince of the land in which Jacob dwelled, was making his way along the road toward the compound where Jacob and his sons had
built their houses and pitched their tents. Hamor was accompanied by an agitated young man in the clothes of a nobleman and a guard of watchful soldiers who wore short swords at their side and carried spears in their hands. But Jacob was reassured by the expression on Hamor’s face: the old man seemed friendly enough and perhaps just a bit ill at ease to be approaching Jacob on his own parcel of land.

Jacob walked out of his house to greet the princely visitor and his entourage. Jacob’s sons, all twelve of them, were still in the distant meadows where the goats and sheep were fed and watered, and he fretted at how long they had tarried in their encampment. He would have preferred to welcome Hamor with his own strong sons near at hand.

Now Hamor stepped forward to greet Jacob, leaving the young man and his guard a few steps behind. The two men, each a chieftain among his own people, displayed an exaggerated courtesy to one another, as if each one were trying to outdo the other. Hamor introduced the young man as his son, Shechem, and then instructed him to wait outside while the two elders conferred with each other in Jacob’s house. Jacob made a show of ordering refreshments to be brought and a meal to be prepared, and wondered to himself when his own sons would return from the pastures.

“My daughter—” Jacob began, not quite knowing how to confront the chieftain with the ugly truth of what had happened.

“An honored guest in my home,” Hamor said smoothly, if perhaps too quickly. “We are looking to her every comfort.”

Before Jacob could press the point—after all, his daughter was a prisoner or a hostage, not a guest, of the prince—both men paused at the sound of angry shouting outside the door, the sound of scuffling and butting, one sharp cry of pain, Jacob hastened to the doorway and, to his relief, saw that his sons were back—and he saw, too, that someone had intercepted them on the way back from the fields and told them, of the indignity that had befallen their sister at Shechem’s hands.

Now all of Jacob’s sons were lined up in a ragged phalanx in front of his house, long wooden staffs in their hands, and they faced off the men-at-arms who had accompanied Hamor and Shechem to the camp of the Israelites. Simeon and Levi—Dinah’s full brothers, all of them the children of Jacob’s wife Leah—stood two paces in front of their brothers, menacing Shechem with tentative thrusts of their staffs. Hamor’s soldiers had not unsheathed their swords, but both fathers saw the red faces and hot eyes of the young men, and realized that a single gesture might set them to a bloody fight.

“Peace unto you,” said Hamor, stepping slowly and deliberately out of Jacob’s house.

Jacob followed Hamor, and he, too, addressed them in a soothing voice.

“Our good neighbor and lord Hamor is here to—”

“We have heard why he is here,” growled Simeon, daring to interrupt his father. “And we are ready to do what must be done to avenge our sister—”

“I do not know exactly what happened yesterday between my son and your daughter,” Hamor began. “Perhaps none of us really know—”

“Let me tell you what your son did to our sister if you truly do not know already.” Simeon stared hard at Shechem as he spoke, but Jacob waved him into silence.

“Here is what I came to say,” Hamor continued. “My son returned to my house at the end of the day in great excitement, and he described a young woman he had met on the road. He told me that she was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. And he said to me: ‘Get me this girl for a wife.’ So I come to you today, Jacob, and I say in all humility: The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter, and I pray you give her to him to be his wife.”