The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (13 page)

“Take the spoils of the city,” Simeon had commanded his willing brothers, “because they have defiled our sister.”

Levi had been even more precise. “Take their sheep and their oxen, take everything you find in the city and everything you find in the fields,” he instructed them. “Take their wealth, and their little ones, and their wives, too.”

Now the brothers were returning from the day of conquest, driving before them a herd of many species—lowing cattle, wailing women, weeping children—and carts loaded high with clothing and bedding, silver vessels and objects of wrought gold, jars of wine and jars of oil, all the spoils of the now-empty city of Hamor.

If Simeon and Levi expected praise from their father, they were disappointed in their moment of glory. The fretful Jacob looked at them—their bloody clothing, their captive women, their spoils—and glowered with anger and fear.

“Do you know what trouble you have caused for me?” Jacob scolded
them, pacing back and forth in front of his house. “For all of us? You have made my name
stink
among the people of the land, the Canaanites and Perizzites. Today you have slain a hundred of them, but we are still few and they are many. Did you not realize that they will gather them’ selves together against me and slay
me
because of what
you
have done? I shall be destroyed, me and my house!”

Simeon was silenced by his father’s anger, but Levi spoke up for both of them in a voice that sounded like it came from a sulky adolescent rather than a bloodied warrior.

“What would
you
want us to do?” he cried. “Should our sister be treated as a whore?”

The Strange Affair of Dinah and Shechem

O
ne voice alone is not heard in the Bible’s account of the rape of Dinah, the voice of Dinah herself. While the menfolk speechify and haggle and plot among themselves and against each other, no one bothers to ask her whether she wants to marry Shechem or see him slain. Dinah’s silence, so odd and so provocative, reminds us that the biblical author conceals far more than he reveals in telling us the tale of Dinah and Shechem.

Only a single sentence is offered to explain Dinah’s role in the tragic affair: “[S]he went out to see the daughters of the land” (Gen. 34:1). Yet even this sparse bit of intelligence is tantalizing. To the stern rabbinical sages who interpreted and embroidered upon the story of Dinah, the sight of a single woman at liberty in the countryside was distressing and dangerous. Indeed, they could not rid themselves of the notion that a woman is a seducer by nature or, at best, a victim of her own vanity and curiosity. Thus, one ancient rabbinical sage suggested that Dinah ventured out of her father’s tent “adorned like a harlot,”
¹
and another rabbi speculated that Shechem hired a troupe of gaily clad women to sing, dance, and play in the streets in order to lure Dinah out of Jacob’s compound so he could ravish her.

“Had she remained at home, nothing would have happened to her,” goes the rabbi’s homily. “But she was a woman, and all women like to show themselves in the street.”
²

Contemporary readers, of course, recoil at such misogyny. But the ancient rabbis, no matter how sexist they may appear to us now, were responding to something extraordinary in the text itself. For a woman of the biblical era, young and unwed and living among strangers, to venture out of her father’s encampment and seek the companionship of local women is a bold and courageous act: Dinah is defying the strict and narrow protocols that governed the lives of the wives and daughters of the patriarchs. In fact, a feminist Bible critic named Ita Sheres has described Dinah’s excursion as an “outing,” a word that once meant only a day in the country but now suggests that Dinah engages in something even more daring: “[A] bold act that implied individuality and purpose,” as Sheres puts it.
³
Dinah is a woman who kicks over the traces of traditional morality and asserts her own authentic identity.

So daring and dangerous is Dinah’s adventure in the eyes of the biblical author that she is made to nearly disappear from her own story. But we can still detect faint echoes of Dinah’s voice in the text of Genesis 34. Some readers insist that she is whispering the words of a long-suppressed love story rather than a bloody tale of rape and revenge. Others argue that the real heroes of Dinah’s story are the sword’ wielding brothers who slaughter a whole people in her name. Long neglected and even suppressed by sermonizers and Sunday school teachers, Genesis 34 takes on new and urgent meanings in our own troubled world, where the distant descendants of Jacob and the modern counterparts of Hamor still encounter each other in the Holy Land.

None of the Hebrew words and phrases used by the biblical author to describe what Shechem did to Dinah are translated straightforwardly as “rape.” The Bible tells us that he “saw her, and he
took
her, and lay with her,” according to the conventional English translation, and then the biblical author adds one more intriguing phrase: “and humbled her” (Gen. 34:2). So we might ask: Does Shechem actually
rape
Dinah? Or is
something more subtle going on between the lovestruck young prince and the adventurous daughter of Jacob?

The Hebrew word innah, translated in some English-language Bibles as “humbled” (KJV/NEB) is rendered in other translations as “abused”
⁴
or “defiled” or “dishonored,” indicating a “degrading and debasing” experience by which “a girl loses the expectancy of a fully valid marriage,” mostly because she is no longer a virgin.
⁵
The distinguished Bible translator Ephraim Speiser, who wants to let us know that the Hebrew word implies the threat or even the use of physical violence, renders the word as “slept with her by force,” which may be an awkward metaphor but certainly suggests the functional equivalent of rape.
⁶
And feminist Bible scholar Ita Sheres insists on translating the Hebrew text even more forcefully: “[Shechem]
tortured
her.”
⁷

While none of the English translations of the Bible use the word “rape,” some commentators insist that no other meaning can be gleaned from the Hebrew text. According to one Bible critic, the “three-fold repetition” of verbs and “ascending order of violence”—“[He] took her, and
lay
with her, and
humbled
her”—“quashes the idea of seduction,” and the same critic insists that the Hebrew phrase customarily translated as “[he] lay with her” really ought to be rendered in blunt street slang: “[he]
laid
her.”
⁸

Still, the very next sentence of the biblical text assures us that Shechem falls promptly, powerfully, and poignantly in love with his victim. Again, the biblical author uses a string of verbs to make the point: “And his soul did
cleave
unto Dinah…, and he
loved
the damsel, and
spoke comfortingly
unto the damsel” (Gen. 34:3). After reporting the sexual encounter itself in a single sentence, the narrator turns his attention to the real concern of his story: the ardent courtship of Dinah by Shechem, the elaborate negotiation of a marriage contract, the cunning efforts of her brothers to prevent the marriage from being consummated, and the massacre that crowns their efforts.

So the Bible itself allows the possibility that something other than forcible rape may have taken place. For example, the storyteller later uses the word “defiled” to describe what Shechem does to Dinah: “Now Jacob heard that he had
defiled
Dinah his daughter” (Gen. 34:5). The word “defiled” is used elsewhere in the Bible to describe
forbidden
sexual relations rather than
forcible
ones: the adultery of a straying wife
(Num. 5:12–14), for example, or the consorting of a priest with a harlot (Lev. 21:4–7).
⁹
A reference to the “defiling” of Jacob’s daughter by the smitten young prince might be understood to mean only that the two of them were not married when they made love to each other.

As if to elevate and even sanctify the love that Shechem feels toward Dinah, the biblical writer pauses to point out that Shechem “cleaves” to Dinah. The only other passage in the Hebrew Bible where the word is used in the same sense—“to describe a loving relationship between two human beings”
¹⁰
—is the story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, where God creates Adam and Eve, and then blesses the bond between them as an expression of the natural order of human life: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave
unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). The oblique reference in the story of Dinah and Shechem to the very first man and woman can be read as an endorsement of Shechem’s good will toward Dinah, whether he first approached her as a rapist, a seducer, or a suitor.

Some scholars have detected traces of both rape
and
seduction in the biblical text, a seeming contradiction that can be explained by the fact that the oldest strands of the biblical narrative are probably the work of two distinct authors, one known as “the Yahwist” because he (or she) calls the deity by his proper name, “Yahweh,” and the other known as “the Elohist” because he calls the deity by the Hebrew word “Elohim,” a term that may literally mean “the gods.” (See appendix: Who
Realty
Wrote the Bible?) The blending of two separate versions of the story of Dinah by the editors or redactors who gathered together the texts that we know as the Bible may explain why one sentence in Genesis 34 emphasizes Shechem’s abuse of Dinah while the very next sentence emphasizes his love for her. One Bible scholar has decoded the text of Genesis 34 in a way that suggests the Yahwist was describing a rape, the Elohist was describing a seduction, and the so-called Redactor stitched the two accounts together into the ambiguous narrative that appears in the Bible.
¹¹

So the biblical account of Dinah and Shechem may preserve
two
separate and starkly different tales or “traditions” from the earliest history of the Israelites. One tradition is a pure and pristine love story—the courtship of Shechem and Dinah and the marriage negotiations that followed between their fathers and families, perhaps leading to a
successful marriage and a happy ending. The other tradition is a war story—the armed conflict between the clan of Jacob and the native-dwelling Canaanites whom they sought to displace. According to some scholars, a biblical author conflated the two stories and turned the encounter between Dinah and Shechem from a romantic liaison into a forcible rape in order to justify the slaughter of the Shechemites.
¹²

Seduction rather than rape may also be suggested in a passage of the Book of Judith, a work that was excluded from the biblical canon but is included in some Christian Bibles as a part of the Apocrypha (or Deuterocanon, in Catholic usage). Judith appeals to God in the name of her forefather, Simeon, and briefly recalls the massacre of Shechem and his people. Significantly, she credits God for sanctioning the violence against Shechem by bestowing upon Simeon the very sword that he used “to take revenge on the strangers who had loosed the adornment of a virgin to defile her” (Judith 9:2).
¹³
The same passage as translated in the New American Bible (NAB) is even steamier in describing Dinah’s treatment at the hands of Shechem, who is accused of having “immodestly loosened the maiden’s girdle, shamefully exposed her thighs, and disgracefully violated her body.” Notably, while Judith condemns Shechem for “shaming” and “dishonoring” and “polluting” Dinah, she does not assert that he actually raped her, and some of Judith’s phrases—“loos[ing] the adornment of a virgin”—somehow evoke a gentle if insistent seduction rather than a forcible rape.

One striking omission from the biblical text, however, raises even more troubling questions about the intentions, good or ill, of
all
of the characters in the tale. After the encounter between Shechem and Dinah is reported at the very outset of Genesis 34, we are told nothing more about Dinah or her whereabouts until the very end of the biblical text, when we discover for the first time that Dinah had apparently been sojourning in Shechem’s house since the day of their first encounter. Is she a prisoner and a hostage of Shechem, as conventional biblical commentary would have us believe? Or, as some scholars have dared to suggest, is she a willing and perhaps even a loving guest of the young man who is so smitten with her?
¹⁴