Dinah Series

Dinah

Dinah is the seventh child and only daughter of Jacob and Leah.

Shechem asked his father to attain Dinah as a wife for him. At this time in history, it is not unusual for marriages to be arranged in this manner. Here, Hamor is making the arrangements for the marriage between Shechem and Dinah. Jacob will represent his daughter Dinah and suggest an appropriate dowry for Jacob and Leahs’ seventh child and only daughter.

Hamor came to Jacob and asked for Dinah to become Shechem's wife. Shechem had seen her, that she was beautiful and desirable, and now he wanted to marry her. Hamor said, "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." Shechem offered Jacob and his sons any bride price they named. However, "the son of Leah and Jacob” answered Shechem and his father Hamor deceitfully because Shechem had defiled their sister Dinah"; they said they would accept the offer if the men of the city agreed to be circumcised (This would certainly be an unusual request for any of us.)

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 and Leah, 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 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 and disgrace on me by making me detestable 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, 'Should he treat our sister as a harlot?'" (Genesis 34:31).

LAST MENTION OF DINAH IN THE BIBLE

When Jacob's family prepares to descend to Egypt, Genesis lists the 70 family members who went down together (Genesis 46:8–27). Dinah is listed explicitly in verse 15 ("These are the sons of Leah, that she bore to Jacob in Padan Aram, and Dinah his daughter."). The Torah does not tell us anything about what happened to her for the remainder of her life, nor if she ever married and raised a family."

GENESIS 34 - 17TH-CENTURY DEPICTION OF THE RAPE OF DINAH.

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. The traditional view is that Moses wrote Genesis and almost all the rest of the Torah, doubtlessly using varied sources but producing 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 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 in Genesis and the Torah dealing with the two violent brothers.

Scholars speculate that Genesis combines separate literary elements with different values and concerns and does not pre-date the 1st millennium BC as a unified account. Within Genesis 34 itself, they suggest two layers of narrative: an older account ascribing the killing of Shechem to Simeon and Levi alone and a later addition (verses 27 to 29) involving all the sons of Jacob. Another argues that the narrative combines a *Yahwist narrator describing a rape and an *Elohist speaker describing a seduction.

* The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist, the Priestly source, and the Elohist. The existence of the Jahwist is somewhat controversial, with several scholars, especially in Europe, denying that it ever existed as a coherent independent document. Nevertheless, many scholars do assume its existence. The Jahwist is so named because of its characteristic use of Yahweh for God.

On the other hand, another critical scholar assumes that the earlier authors would not have considered rape to be *defilement in and of itself and posts that the verb describing Dinah as "defiled" was added later (elsewhere in the Bible, only married or betrothed women are "defiled" by rape). He instead says 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." Therefore, such a supposed preoccupation with ethnic purity indicates a late date for Genesis in the 5th or 4th centuries BC, when the restored Jewish community in Jerusalem was similarly preoccupied with anti-Samaritan arguments." “Defilement," in the opinion of some, refers to interracial sex rather than rape.