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

be an awkward metaphor but certainly suggests the functional equivalent of rape. 6 And feminist Bible scholar Ita Sheres insists on translating the Hebrew text even more forcefully: “[Shechem]
tortured
her.” 7
    While none of the English translations of the Bible use the word “rape,” some commentators insist that no other meaning can be gleaned from the Hebrew text. According to one Bible critic, the “three-fold repetition” of verbs and “ascending order of violence”—“[He] took her, and
lay
with her, and
humbled
her”—“quashes the idea of seduction,” and the same critic insists that the Hebrew phrase customarily translated as “[he] lay with her” really ought to be rendered in blunt street slang: “[he]
laid
her.” 8
    Still, the very next sentence of the biblical text assures us that Shechem falls promptly, powerfully, and poignantly in love with his victim. Again, the biblical author uses a string of verbs to make the point: “And his soul did
cleave
unto Dinah…, and he
loved
the damsel, and
spoke comfortingly
unto the damsel” (Gen. 34:3). After reporting the sexual encounter itself in a single sentence, the narrator turns his attention to the real concern of his story: the ardent courtship of Dinah by Shechem, the elaborate negotiation of a marriage contract, the cunning efforts of her brothers to prevent the marriage from being consummated, and the massacre that crowns their efforts.
    So the Bible itself allows the possibility that something other than forcible rape may have taken place. For example, the storyteller later uses the word “defiled” to describe what Shechem does to Dinah: “Now Jacob heard that he had
defiled
Dinah his daughter” (Gen. 34:5). The word “defiled” is used elsewhere in the Bible to describe
forbidden
sexual relations rather than
forcible
ones: the adultery of a straying wife(Num. 5:12–14), for example, or the consorting of a priest with a harlot (Lev. 21:4–7). 9 A reference to the “defiling” of Jacob’s daughter by the smitten young prince might be understood to mean only that the two of them were not married when they made love to each other.
    As if to elevate and even sanctify the love that Shechem feels toward Dinah, the biblical writer pauses to point out that Shechem “cleaves” to Dinah. The only other passage in the Hebrew Bible where the word is used in the same sense—“to describe a loving relationship between two human beings” 10 —is the story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, where God creates Adam and Eve, and then blesses the bond between them as an expression of the natural order of human life: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave
unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). The oblique reference in the story of Dinah and Shechem to the very first man and woman can be read as an endorsement of Shechem’s good will toward Dinah, whether he first approached her as a rapist, a seducer, or a suitor.
    Some scholars have detected traces of both rape
and
seduction in the biblical text, a seeming contradiction that can be explained by the fact that the oldest strands of the biblical narrative are probably the work of two distinct authors, one known as “the Yahwist” because he (or she) calls the deity by his proper name, “Yahweh,” and the other known as “the Elohist” because he calls the deity by the Hebrew word “Elohim,” a term that may literally mean “the gods.” (See appendix: Who
Realty
Wrote the Bible?) The blending of two separate versions of the story of Dinah by the editors or redactors who gathered together the texts that we know as the Bible may explain why one sentence in Genesis 34 emphasizes Shechem’s abuse of Dinah while the very next sentence emphasizes his love for her. One Bible scholar has decoded the text of Genesis 34 in a way that suggests the Yahwist was describing a rape, the Elohist was describing a seduction, and the so-called