This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Andy Oram
16 March 2025
One of the least popular stories in the book of Genesis—which otherwise is perhaps the most cited text in human history—is the story of the rape of Dinah. It’s sordid from start to end, replete with sexual violence and mass murder. Children are not likely to learn these verses in Bible study, whether Jewish or Christian, and those who return to the book of Genesis as adults are puzzled and repelled by a story with no context and no relationship to main events of Genesis.
So I think Dinah’s story is due for another look. In this essay, I’ll show that the story of Dinah reveals some important lessons for the Jewish people: their precarious existence, resourcefulness, and ability to recover from disaster.
These themes are at the core of the Jewish Bible (the Tanach or Christian Old Testament), which, as Nietzsche observed, is the story of a people and a nation. And I think that the themes of Dinah resonate in the psyche of most Jewish Israeli residents today.
Leading author Anita Diamant offered an important service by resurfacing Dinah in her novel The Red Tent. Her feminist re-interpretation is important and brilliant (and in my opinion stands as a fine work of art), but the novel doesn’t address the situation discussed by the Genesis author. It’s time to revisit the actual words of Genesis and learn its lessons.
Dinah’s story (minus Dinah’s own point of view) is the subject of the self-contained Chapter 34 of Genesis. The chapter is quick to read, so instead of retelling it I’ll highlight the points important to the lessons I find.
Dinah is out in the community, perhaps doing charity work or perhaps just getting to know the local women, when the son of the local henchman, Shechem, notices her and rapes her. So far, an all-too-familiar story of women’s abuse and subjugation.
But Shechem takes an unusual turn. Unlike many Don Juans and other rapists (see, for instance, the story of Amnon and Tamar in II Samuel 13—a story that echoes later in this essay), Shechem does not just discard his victim after satisfying his lust. His being is drawn to her, and he loves her (or least thinks he does). So he goes through normal societal channels to make Dinah his wife.
How could Shechem make right an act of extreme physical violation? We don’t recognize a way to do so today, now that we recognize the life-long ramifications of rape. But in ancient times, where social controls on individual behavior were weak and women were considered very little outside their usefulness to men, a remedy was available.
Deuteromomy 22:28-29 says that a rapist can redeem his act by paying the woman’s father and taking her as a wife. This tidy solution, so disgusting to us today, was probably a common policy of that time and age. Certainly, Shechem’s non-Jewish family resorts to it. Shechem’s father extends an offer of marriage to Dinah’s father Jacob. (All this time, Shechem’s tribe had held Dinah essentially hostage in his house.)
And what about Jacob? How will he treat this outrage? Genesis 34:5 says that he "acts like a deaf-mute"—he does nothing. The text justifies this by saying that his sons weren’t at home. It makes sense that an old man facing possible violence would wait until he was fortified by his arms-bearing sons to react.
Unfortunately, Jacob continues to be passive and useless as the story continues—just like King David in the story of Amnon and Tamar. King David suffered greatly for his inaction (because his son Absalom filled the moral gap with an act of vigilante justice, and then led a dangerous revolt against David). We will see what Jacob’s sons do in the face of his own passivity.
Now comes the key to understanding the crucial place of the Dinah story in the Jewish canon. It would have remained the queasy account of an individual crime had Shechem and his father stopped with the marriage proposal. But they take the dilemma to a much higher level.
His father says, "Marry among us, give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for you. You will become residents." (Genesis 34:9-10.)
Most certainly, Shechem’s father, the head of the tribe (whose name was Ḥamor, which happens to mean "donkey" in Hebrew), was trying to act supremely welcoming and generous, in the understanding of his place and time. He wanted to show Jacob’s tiny party of God-worshipers that they would have full freedom and equality and become part of his tribe through intermarriage. In other words, he was inviting Jacob to assimilate.
This is what Jacob’s family (the first Israelites) could not accept. They did not want to melt into the local environment and culture and disappear from history. The Israelites recognize the domination that lay behind Ḥamor's invitation. And recognize that their people were to embark on a grander role.
Two of Jacob’s children understood. But what could they do? If they refused the offer from Ḥamor and Shechem, they would probably lose their sister, and if they tried to take her by force they would simply bring death on themselves from the resistance of Shechem’s tribe.
Again, Dinah’s own desires are not reflected in this story. Anita Diamant pursues the plot line that suggests she was happy with Shechem. Because Schechem’s tribe did not release her, Jacob’s family could not ask her for her opinion, so they had to attempt a rescue. But in any case, events have moved far beyond the personal relationship of Dinah and Shechem. We are now talking about the survival of a people, a religion, and a world view.
The rest of chapter 34 lay out the bold plot of Jacob’s children in the face of their seemingly unsolveable dilemma. How do they rescue their identity and continued existence, along with their sister, against overwhelming military forces?
The solution is not pretty. It relies on naked lies and on exploiting the vulnerability of men weakened by ancient surgical practices. Jacob’s children did not hold back after achieving their main goal; they couldn’t resist some pillage and rape of their own. But the solution is undisputably ingenious. It’s the operation of a group with its back against the wall. You can read about it in verses 34:13-29.
This turn in the plot suggests a tragic irony. By requiring that the tribe of Shechem circumsize themselves, could the sons of Jacob have converted them to Israelites and solved the problem peaceably? I have to assume that this was unfeasible—that the sheer number of Shechemites and their well-established idolatrous practices would have overwhelmed Jacob’s small family. Nevertheless, his sons apparently blend into their tribe the women and children whom they kidnap during their rescue operation.
So indeed, troubling questions about Simeon’s and Levi’s plot remain. We all wish this story could have turnd out differently.
It is a sad but unavoidable truth that an entire population can suffer from the sins of the powerful people among them. The Bible recognizes this repeatedly. (See, for instance, Jeremiah 5:26-31.) In this story, we do not know which members of Shechem’s tribe participated in Dinah’s detention, but it is the whole tribe that pays the price.
Jacob continues to be self-centered and unaware. Although he’s the family patriarch, he says nothing in favor of the rescue, or in opposition to it, and therefore maintains plausible deniability. But later he complains to the ringleaders of the operation (his sons Simeon and Levi) that they’ve made the family’s position difficult through their violence. He leaves Simeon to languish in a jail in Egypt for an extended amount of time (Genesis 42), and is still demeaning the two of them on his deathbed (Genesis 49:5-7). However, Jacob never offered an alternative plan. Of course, he turned to deception routinely in his own career (although he never showed a hint of violence, save for wrestling with an angel).
Simeon and Levi have gotten a bad rap. They knew they had to hold aloft the values of their ancestors and their God. They looked annihilation in the face and found an impressive way to evade it.
Many people seeking their own survival, and the survival of their values and visions, have engaged in questionable attacks or escapes throughout history. Jews have had to do so numerous times. Simeon and Levi—flawed as their action was—prefigure history.
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