The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible by Jonathan Kirsch Page A

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.

R APIST , S EDUCER, OR S UITOR ?
     
    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 issomething 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