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Dinah
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According to the Hebrew Bible, Dinah was the daughter of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Israelites and Leah, his first wife. The episode of her abduction and violation by a Canaanite prince, and the subsequent vengeance of her brothers Simeon and Levi, commonly referred to as "The Rape of Dinah", is told in .
h, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to see amongst the people of Shechem, where her people had made camp and where her father Jacob had purchased the land on which he pitched his tent.
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According to the Hebrew Bible, Dinah was the daughter of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Israelites and Leah, his first wife. The episode of her abduction and violation by a Canaanite prince, and the subsequent vengeance of her brothers Simeon and Levi, commonly referred to as "The Rape of Dinah", is told in .
The rape of Dinah
Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to see amongst the people of Shechem, where her people had made camp and where her father Jacob had purchased the land on which he pitched his tent. Shechem the son of Hamor, the prince of the land, "seized her and lay with her and humbled her. And his soul was drawn to Dinah ... he loved the maiden and spoke tenderly to her," and Shechem asked his father to obtain Dinah for him, to be his wife.
Hamor came to Jacob and asked for Dinah for his son: "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," Multiply upon me great dowry and gift, and I will give according as you will say to me; but give me her as a wife. And the sons of Jacob answered hamor and his father sutely and spake thus because he had defiled Dinah their sister: And they said to him we cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one who is uncircumsised; for that were disgrace unto us.
So the men of Shechem circumcised themeselves; and "on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon (shimon) and Levi, Dinah's brothers, (the Talmud said that when they stood up to protect her honor, then they were really considered "her 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 in 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 on me by making me odious 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?""
Origin
See also documentary hypothesis and biblical criticism
and , which tell of Jacob's purchase of land at Shechem and his erection of an altar are believed to come from the Elohist source within Genesis, while the rape-and-vengeance story at comes from the Jahwist. Julius Wellhausen dated the Jahwist text to c.950 BC and the Elohist to c.850 BC; subsequent scholars have questioned Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis and revised his dating, often drastically, but the general view is that Genesis does combine originally separate strands and does not pre-date the 1st millennium BC. The Jahwist's rape story at Genesis 34 was designed to cast a bad light on the northern kingdom of Israel, which had Shechem as its first capital, the Jahwist text itself originating in the southern kingdom of Judah. The brief Elohist account of the purchase of land by Jacob in Genesis 33 represents the northern kingdom's more peaceable account of the origins of Shechem, the Elohist being a northern text.
Two layers of narrative have been suggested within Genesis 34 itself, an older account ascribing the slaughter of Shechem and to Simeon and Levi alone, and a later addition (verses 27 to 29) involving all the sons of Jacob. Alexander Rofe has suggested that the verb describing Dinah as "defiled" was added at this time also, as elsewhere in the Bible only married or betrothed women are "defiled" by rape; the fact that Genesis 34 is the sole exception suggests that it "reflects the late, postexilic notion that the idolatrous gentiles are impure [and] the prohibition of intermarriage and intercourse with them." The anachronistic view of defilement in the Dinah story, and the preoccupation with racial purity, indicate a date in the 5th or 4th centuries BC, when the restored Jewish community in Jerusalem was similarly preoccupied with anti-Samaritan polemics.
Some scholars have questioned whether Dinah was actually raped at all: the story is vague about what happened between Shechem and Dinah (the verb translated as "humbled" or "violated" can also mean "to subdue"), and the older version of Genesis 34 may therefore reflect a custom of abduction marriage.
Literature
The novel The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant, is a fictional autobiography of Dinah based on historical texts. In Diamant's version, Dinah falls in love with Shalem, the Canaanite prince, and goes to bed with him in preparation for marriage. Simon and Levi, Jacob's sons, instigate the discord between Jacob and the men of King of Shechem out of fear for their own prosperity.
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