Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Now Dinah the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the region. When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the region, saw her, he seized her and lay with her by force.”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, September 21, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Shechem gets his in the end. The spectacular revenge that Dinah’s brothers take on her behalf, not just on Shechem, but on his entire city, leaves me a little breathless. Rape is wrong, and clearly has been recognized as such for millennia, or it wouldn’t be in this story. Shechem needed to be held accountable. He was absolutely not justified because he subsequently fell in love with Dinah and asked to marry her legitimately.
But Dinah’s angry brothers tricked him and his father and all the men in the city into getting circumcised in order to make them eligible to intermarry with Israel’s people, and then when they were all recovering from what is extremely painful surgery in adult men, the brothers swept in and killed them all in their weakened state. And stole all their things. And took their women and children as slaves (and probably did to those women the same and worse as was done to Dinah). So… um… was that okay?
Jacob was mad at his sons but only because of the negative impact on their relations with the other neighboring nations.
I guess you can admire how much Dinah’s brothers loved her. And their ingenuity in using their cultural requirement of circumcision to trick her rapist and his people. It makes for a dramatic story where the “good guys” win and justice (?) is done. But a little part of me wonders whether our societal obsession with revenge can’t be traced back to this and similar ancient stories. Does this mean it’s just a part of human makeup? Or something we’ve learned? I’d like to think the latter, because then maybe there’s a shot at unlearning it.
When have I felt the need to get even with someone? How did it turn out?
