| | The family-friendly Bible has what is hopefully a fictional account about what happens to Jacob's daughter Dinah, and an entire city as a result.
Dinah is raped by Shechem, son of the leader Hamor. Rape and other sexual disfunction have come up a lot in the Bible so far, men wanting to rape women, angels, fathers having sex with their daughters, brothers with their (half)sisters. Were men that horrible back then that women were consistently at the risk of being stolen away or raped by the men around them? Rape is too horrible and frequent nowadays, it scares me to think that it may have been even more common back then. Give the way women are regarded overall in the Bible, and in most of human history, I guess it's not surprising.
When her brothers hear about this horrible act, they go to have a talk with Hamor. They lie to Hamor and say that everything will be okey-dokey if all the men in the city circumcises themselves. We already found out earlier that God thinks male genital mutilation is pleasing to him, for whatever reason.
The townsfolk do this, and while they are still getting over the pain of the circumcision, Dianh's brothers kill the entire city, plundering the city ("plunder" is the Bible's own description: verse 29) and seizing all the livestock. While it is noble to defend one's raped sister, the Bible does not say the entire city was to blame for this. It is mass slaughter and plundering for the crime of one man.
Jacob gets wind of this (maybe the stench of an entire city of dead bodies reached his nose) and he does not rebuke his sons for the mass murder. He just says they have to high-tail it out of there before the neighboring peoples try to attack Jacob in retaliation for what his sons did. The brothers reply, ""Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?" (34:31, NIV) Certainly, as painful and life-changingly horrible as raping someone is, there was some solution besides making all the males in town painful mutilate themselves so that they could then be killed en masse.
In the next chapter, neither God nor Jacob seem to condemn this. Certainly God, who opens and closes wombs, removes legs from serpents, and does other tricks throughout the Bible, could have found a way to punish Shechem and/or his father. Or in his omniscience and omnipotence, he might prevented Dinah from the forever-scarring experience of rape in the first place or at least warned someone about it so they could prevent it.
I guess God was too busy doing things like wrestling.
PS Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved. |
| | Posted 3/10/2009 5:35 PM - 130 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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