The Debasement of Dinah

This article is excerpted and adapted from a larger, as-yet unpublished critique of feminist biblical scholarship first presented as “Rejecting Patriarchy: On Clarifying the Objectives of Feminist Biblical Scholarship” at the SBL 2014 Annual Meeting in Biblical Hermeneutics & Women in the Biblical World joint session discussing Carol Meyers’ call for the rejection of the term patriarchy in biblical scholarship. See Carol Meyers, “Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Society?”Journal of Biblical Literature 133.1 (2014): 8-27. 

Caroline Blyth, The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34: Interpreting Dinah’s Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).  See similarly Susanne Scholz, Rape Plots: A Feminist Cultural Study of Genesis 34 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2000).

I first developed this argument along with my colleague, Risa Levitt Kohn in our piece on Parshat Vayishlah in The Women’s Torah Commentary (Tamara C. Eskenazi and Andrea L. Weiss, eds.; Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2008), 183-201.  We were asked to write a commentary on  this parsha; however, the translation was provided for us by a third party, putting us in the curious position of writing in our commentary that the word ‘innah, found in the biblical text in translation alongside our commentary as “rape,” did not in fact mean rape.  The understanding developed by Levitt Kohn and I drew on many other studies since the 1990s that argued for ambiguity in the text’s description of Shechem’s actions toward Dinah, and likewise questioned the traditional understanding of “rape” here: e.g. Lyn M. Bechtel, “What If Dinah is not Raped?” JSOT 62 (1994), 19-36; Meyer Gruber, “A Re-examination of the Charges against Shechem Son of Hamor,”Beit Mikra 54 (1999), 119-127 [Hebrew]; Ellen van Wolde “Does ‘Innâ Denote Rape? A Semantic Analysis of a Controversial Word,” VT 52 (2002): 528; N. Wyatt, “The Story of Dinah and Shechem,” UF 22 (1990): 433-458.

For an excellent discussion of this see Alice Keefe, “Stepping In / Stepping Out:  A Conversation between Ideological and Social Scientific Feminist Approaches to the Bible,” Journal of Religion & Society 1 (1999): 1-14. Feminist scholars who are social scientist historians include Carol Meyers and Susan Ackerman: see for example Carol Meyers’ Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and more recently Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  Susan Ackerman: “Digging up Deborah: Recent Hebrew Bible Scholarship on Gender and the Contribution of Archaeology,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66.4 (Dec., 2003), 172-184; “Material Remains and Social Relations: Women’s Culture in Agrarian Households of the Iron Age,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (ed. William G. Dever and Sy Gitin; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003).

Although it is possible that there were occasions when women did have a say: see the story of Rebekah in Gen 24:58, when her family asks her whether she is willing to go with Eliezer to marry his master’s son; although the context here may be about when she will go rather than if she will agree to go at all, when it comes to the marriages of her own sons, in Gen 27:46-28:2 Rebekah has Isaac send Jacob back to her own family to find a wife.