Shadowland: Beginnings

Shadowland: Beginnings: Week 39

משחק בינגו

The Massacre - Genesis 34

This is not the sort of incident to include in the biography of the founder of your religion. How old was Dinah? When they left Laban, she was 3, given the intervening births by Bilhah and Zilpha. But we don't know how long they were in Shechem before Dinah went out on the town. Simeon and Levi were preteens when they left Laban, and strong enough to kill a village full of people in this chapter. So at least 4 years. Hence the youngest age for Dinah given by commentators is 7 (especially Islamic commentators).

34:1 As with Abram in Egypt, the people of the land where God did not tell him to go are a bad influence, and others suffer for Jacob's sin.
34:2 Dinah is unprepared to deal with the culture of immorality. I don't think this was rape, but fornication. But then as now, it is not always easy to tell the difference.
34:3 "His soul clave unto Dinah." The same phrase used of Jacob's love for Rachel in 29:18. Ironically, Shechem really loves Dinah - the very thing Leah has longed for the last 13 years.
34:5 Jacob does not deal with the crisis, not in prayer, not even with one of his schemes. (He is probably out of ideas, and it *is* a thorny problem.)
34:12 In the legal codes of the region, and later in the law of Moses, the penalty for rape/fornication of a woman not married or betrothed was to pay the full bride price and be forbidden to divorce her. "You break it, you buy it."
34:13 Because Jacob failed to take leadership, his sons take the lead in implementing *their* deceptive scheme.
34:16 Part of the covenant with Abraham was *not* intermarrying with the Caananites. If nothing else, because they were destined to be wiped out by Israel in 500 years. Jacob's acquiescence to this deal is further disobedience.
34:23 This is potentially the beginning of another Sodom and Gomorrah situation. God's chosen (if not very worthy) people intermarrying with and compromising with a people destined to destruction. "Friendship with the world is emnity with God." And you can see why, with the problems it causes.
34:25 Shechem acted in good faith (apart from the fornication/rape), but is betrayed by Jacob's sons. Because of this great evil, Simeon and Levi forfeited what would have been their birthright after Reuben's sin. But this also solves the problem of intermarriage, and serves as a foreshadowing of the future conquest of Caanan. See Genesis 35:5.
34:28 Note that God forbade them to take spoil at the future conquest.
34:30 Even now, Jacob is not concerned with the enormity of the evil which his sons have committed, but with the personal danger it puts him in. More than 40 years later, after Israel has had time to reflect over the wickedness, he prophesies at his death: “Simeon and Levi are brothers–their swords are weapons of violence. Let me not enter their council, let me not join their assembly, for they have killed men in their anger and hamstrung oxen as they pleased. Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel! I will scatter them in Jacob and disperse them in Israel” (Gen. 49:5-7)
By contrast, the apochryphal book of Judith says in 9:2 "Lord, God of my forefather Simeon! You put a sword into his hand."