The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible by Jonathan Kirsch
Authors: Jonathan Kirsch
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so alien to the Israelites, the storyteller seems to say, that mass circumcision is necessary to purify them before a single daughter of Israel might be betrothed to their prince. Even then, the prospect of “marrying out” is so repugnant to Dinah’s brothers that they feel obliged to conduct a massacre to prevent the forbidden union. A fierce irony can be seen in the fact that Simeon and Levi feel free to turn the sacred rite of circumcision into a form of torture and trickery in order to prevent the wedding from taking place at all.
To the contemporary reader (and to a fair number of biblical exegetes), the use of a sacred ritual to render men helpless so they can be more easily slaughtered is not only a dirty trick but a sacrilege. At best, the mass circumcision demanded by Dinah’s brothers suggests a kind of rough justice—Shechem and all the menfolk of his tribe are scarified in the very organ that Shechem used to “defile” her in the first place. But the biblical author who retold the tale of Dinah and her brothers was not merely setting up a sadistic joke at the expense of Shechem. Rather, he was reminding his readership of what was regarded by the established religious leadership as an urgent threat to the very survival of the Israelites: the lure of strange gods and strange bedfellows.
“I H AVE L OVED S TRANGERS”
Although Genesis 34 purports to describe events of the far-distant past—long before the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh, long before they left Egypt under the leadership of Moses, long before they conquered and settled in Canaan—the story of Dinah and Shechem may have found its way into the Holy Scriptures in its current form as late as 400 B.C.E ., when the oldest strands of Israelite legend, lore, and law were gathered and woven together into the work that we now know as the Five Books of Moses.
At that moment in the history of Israel, according to the conventional wisdom of contemporary biblical scholarship, the priests and scribes who assembled and edited the Bible were in despair over the unhappy fate of the Israelites. The “united kingdom” of David andSolomon had fallen into ruin centuries earlier, and the exploits of these great and powerful kings were the stuff of legend. The northern kingdom, known as Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrian empire in 722 B.C.E ., and the northern tribes—the famous “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”—had been dispersed and largely destroyed. The southern kingdom, known as Judah, was conquered by the Babylonian empire in 587-586 B.C.E .; the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was razed, and the ruling class of the kingdom was deported to Babylon. A tiny remnant was allowed to return to Jerusalem sometime around 538 B.C.E ., when the Babylonian empire was itself conquered by the armies of the Persian emperor. Only after the Babylonian Exile came to an end, and the Israelites straggled back to Canaan, were the holy writings and the traditional lore stitched together into the book that we now know as the Bible, at least according to the consensus of contemporary biblical scholarship.
When the princes and priests of ancient Israel returned to Canaan, they found a land, a culture, and a community in deep crisis. Ritual sacrifices to Yahweh were no longer possible because the Temple had been destroyed, and the land of Canaan was filled with rival clans and tribes that worshipped a pantheon of strange gods and goddesses. Discouraged and disaffected by their long ordeal, the Israelites were tempted to consort with the strangers among them, to marry them and to worship their deities, sometimes by venerating forest groves and “high places,” stones and posts, graven images of gold and silver, and sometimes by availing themselves of the sexual services of temple prostitutes or participating in bacchanalian rituals or perhaps even offering human sacrifice. The priests and scribes who collected, compiled, edited, and rewrote the texts that make
To the contemporary reader (and to a fair number of biblical exegetes), the use of a sacred ritual to render men helpless so they can be more easily slaughtered is not only a dirty trick but a sacrilege. At best, the mass circumcision demanded by Dinah’s brothers suggests a kind of rough justice—Shechem and all the menfolk of his tribe are scarified in the very organ that Shechem used to “defile” her in the first place. But the biblical author who retold the tale of Dinah and her brothers was not merely setting up a sadistic joke at the expense of Shechem. Rather, he was reminding his readership of what was regarded by the established religious leadership as an urgent threat to the very survival of the Israelites: the lure of strange gods and strange bedfellows.
“I H AVE L OVED S TRANGERS”
Although Genesis 34 purports to describe events of the far-distant past—long before the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh, long before they left Egypt under the leadership of Moses, long before they conquered and settled in Canaan—the story of Dinah and Shechem may have found its way into the Holy Scriptures in its current form as late as 400 B.C.E ., when the oldest strands of Israelite legend, lore, and law were gathered and woven together into the work that we now know as the Five Books of Moses.
At that moment in the history of Israel, according to the conventional wisdom of contemporary biblical scholarship, the priests and scribes who assembled and edited the Bible were in despair over the unhappy fate of the Israelites. The “united kingdom” of David andSolomon had fallen into ruin centuries earlier, and the exploits of these great and powerful kings were the stuff of legend. The northern kingdom, known as Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrian empire in 722 B.C.E ., and the northern tribes—the famous “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”—had been dispersed and largely destroyed. The southern kingdom, known as Judah, was conquered by the Babylonian empire in 587-586 B.C.E .; the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was razed, and the ruling class of the kingdom was deported to Babylon. A tiny remnant was allowed to return to Jerusalem sometime around 538 B.C.E ., when the Babylonian empire was itself conquered by the armies of the Persian emperor. Only after the Babylonian Exile came to an end, and the Israelites straggled back to Canaan, were the holy writings and the traditional lore stitched together into the book that we now know as the Bible, at least according to the consensus of contemporary biblical scholarship.
When the princes and priests of ancient Israel returned to Canaan, they found a land, a culture, and a community in deep crisis. Ritual sacrifices to Yahweh were no longer possible because the Temple had been destroyed, and the land of Canaan was filled with rival clans and tribes that worshipped a pantheon of strange gods and goddesses. Discouraged and disaffected by their long ordeal, the Israelites were tempted to consort with the strangers among them, to marry them and to worship their deities, sometimes by venerating forest groves and “high places,” stones and posts, graven images of gold and silver, and sometimes by availing themselves of the sexual services of temple prostitutes or participating in bacchanalian rituals or perhaps even offering human sacrifice. The priests and scribes who collected, compiled, edited, and rewrote the texts that make
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