Genesis 34:31 "Like a whore should our sister be treated? "
[MS: In the story of the rape of Dinah there is violence, deception murder and mayhem. Who is at fault? It's complicated and subtle - and therefore a gripping tale about humans and their troubles - and the Divine.
Alter's Essay and Notes focus on:
- Moral blindness, why do people do what they do and why don't they fear the consequences? Is this a young lovers story like Romeo and Juliet? Is it a revenge story to uphold virtue? Is it about how cunning strongmen manipulate to conquer by deception and murder? Is it about an excuse to go to war of self-defense? And is Jacob's silence the worst cowardice. See 34:31
- It's an ancient text but, why does it all seem so familiar today? How does the Bible use "literary style" ( like puns, word choice, allusions and laconic understatement) to make it into a whole but very fast-moving story - a work of literature, of great art.
- And, what is this Bible storytelling, like in an epic novel, doing in a "religious" text about the Divine and Israel? Are they compatible?]
[MS: Alter recommends the famous Meir Sternberg for a "shrewdly perceptive analysis of the story of the rape of Dinah, concluding his discussion with a general description of the spectrum of rhetorical devices ... through which biblical narrative conveys moral judgments of its characters. See Art of Biblical Narrative, pp.18-21. Meir Sternberg major work was the Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Sternberg won an Israeli Prize in 1996 for contributions to literary theory. ]
Alter's Introduction essay and some notes on the parsha:
p. xxix In the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), she is first
referred to as “Leah’s daughter”—and not Jacob’s daughter, for it is Leah’s sons, Simeon and Levi, who will exact vengeance for her. ... After the act of violation, Shechem is overcome with love for Dinah, and he implores his father, “Take me this girl [ yaldah ] as wife.” Speaking to his father, then, he identifies—tenderly?—the victim of his own lust as a girl-child. When he parleys with Dinah’s brothers, asking permission to marry her, he says, “Give me the young woman [ na ʿ arah ] as wife,” now using the term for a nubile woman that is strictly appropriate to betrothal negotiations. After the brothers stipulate their surgical precondition for the betrothal, the narrator reports, “And the lad [naʿar] lost no time in doing the thing, for he wanted Jacob’s daughter.” Suddenly, as the catastrophe of this gruesome tale becomes imminent, we learn that the sexually impulsive man is only a lad, probably an adolescent like Dinah—a discovery that is bound to complicate our task of moral judgment.
p. xxx It should be clear from all this that a translation that respects the literary precision of the biblical story must strive to reproduce its nice discrimination of terms, and cannot be free to translate a word here one way and there another, for the sake of variety or for the sake of context. .... however, that some compromises are inevitable because modern English clearly does not coincide semantically with ancient Hebrew in many respects. ...To take a more extreme example, a term that has no semantic analogue in English, the Hebrew nefesh, which the King James Version ... translates as "soul" refers to the breath of life in the nostrils of a living creature and by extension, “lifeblood” ... it is also used.... having roughly the sense of “very self.” ...one is compelled to abandon the admirable principle of lexical consistency and to translate, regretfully, according to immediate context.
p.xxxi Finally, though many recurring biblical terms have serviceable English equivalents (like “lad” for naʿar ), there are instances in which a translation must make another kind of compromise because, given the differences between modern and biblical culture, ... terms in the two languages do not adequately correspond. Consider the tricky case of verbs for sexual intercourse. [MS Alter has an extended discussion of translation of "verbs used for sex in the Bible." pp. xxxi-xxxii]
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Alter Notes
34:4 . Take me this girl. “Take,” which indicated violent action in the narrator’s report of the rape, now recurs in a decorous social sense—the action initiated by the father of the groom in arranging a proper marriage for his son. .... Shechem refers to Dinah as yaldah, “girl” or “child,” a term that equally suggests her vulnerability and the tenderness he now feels for her.
34:7 . a scurrilous thing in Israel. This use of this idiom here is a kind of pun. “A scurrilous thing in Israel” ( nevalah beYisraʾel ) is in later tribal history any shocking act that the collective “Israel” deems reprehensible (most often a sexual act). But at this narrative juncture, “Israel” is only the other name of the father of these twelve children, and so the phrase also means “a scurrilous thing against Israel.”
34:7 continued: for he had done a scurrilous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter, such as ought not be done. This entire clause is a rare instance in biblical narrative....the narrator conveys the tenor of Jacob’s sons’ anger by reporting in the third person the kind of language they would have spoken silently, or to each other. It is a technical means for strongly imprinting the rage of Jacob’s sons in the presence of their father who has kept silent and, even now, gives no voice to his feelings about the violation of his daughter.
34:19 the lad. There was no previous indication of Shechem’s age. The term naʿar is the masculine counterpart of the term he used for Dinah in verse 12 and suggests that he, too, is probably an adolescent.
34:26 and they took Dinah from the house of Shechem . Meir Sternberg (1985), who provides illuminating commentary on the interplay of opposing moral claims in this story, shrewdly notes that this is a shocking revelation just before the end of the story: we might have imagined that Shechem was petitioning in good faith for Dinah’s hand; now it emerges that he has been holding her captive in his house after having raped her.
34:27 for they had defiled their sister. This angry phrase becomes a kind of refrain in the story. ....Precisely in this regard, the element of exaggeration in these words should be noted: only one man defiled Dinah, but here a plural is used, as though all the males of the town could in fact be held accountable for the rape.
34:31 Like a whore should our sister be treated? The very last words of the story are still another expression—and the crudest one—of the brothers’ anger and their commitment to exact the most extravagant price in vindication of what they consider the family’s honor. ... It is surely significant that Jacob, who earlier “kept his peace” and was notable for his failure of response, has nothing to say, or is reported saying nothing, to these last angry words of his sons. (Only on his deathbed will he answer them.) This moment becomes the turning point in the story of Jacob. In the next chapter, he will follow God’s injunction to return to Bethel and reconfirm the covenant, but henceforth he will lose much of his paternal power and will be seen repeatedly at the mercy of his sons, more the master of self-dramatizing sorrow than of his own family. This same pattern will be invoked in the David story: the father who fails to take action after the rape of his daughter and then becomes victim of the fratricidal and rebellious impulses of his sons.
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[MS: Alter believes that the two go together, unique Hebrew Bible literary style and a religious text, depending on what one means by "religious" , that is, dogma or something non-dogmatic, in my view.
[MS: In this 1975 article in Commentary Magazine, Alter describes the challenges of translating the Bible using the tools of literary analysis. After three books by Alter and an entire translation of Tanach, one appreciates in 2022, the lifetime of work to create the field.]
This collection discusses the themes mentioned above.]