The story of Dinah’s rape in the Book of Genesis has always haunted me. It strikes me as an early, darker version of the Little Red Riding Hood archetype (and I am not the first to think so). This young girl wants to visit some older women in a nearby town, she is raped on her way there by a powerful and respected prince, and then all the men in her life either want to profit from her rape or violently protect their own manly honor—but no one seems particularly concerned or upset for Dinah herself or interested in her experience of trauma as a child.
While I grew up as an evangelical child hearing some awful takes on biblical passages (for example, that David committed adultery with Bathsheba instead of rape), I fortunately never heard anyone describe Dinah’s experience as anything other than violence. The Bibles I read always used the word “rape” in their translations and the evangelical and non-denominational pastors who I heard speak on this passage also always said Dinah was raped.
As an adult, however, I have increasingly encountered other, more troubling perspectives that victim-blame or just straight-up blame Dinah for her traumatic experience of abuse. While many of these victim-blaming perspectives are unsurprisingly from white American evangelicals, there is also a long tradition within Judaism of blaming Dinah.
Before considering these perspectives and what they tell us about adults in power, let’s start with Dinah’s story from the text.
Dinah’s Story
Here is the story from Genesis 33 and 34: After meeting with his estranged brother Esau, Jacob is traveling with his family and stops at the town of Shechem in Canaan. He makes camp in a field near the city, buying the field from King Hamor the Hivite, who rules the town (33:18-19). Sometime later, Dinah—the young and only daughter of Jacob and Leah—wants to visit some older Hivite women in the town (34:1). Either on her travels or while visiting, she is observed by Hamor’s son, Prince Shechem. The prince is described as “the most honored man in his family” (34:19). When this celebrated prince sees Dinah, he decides to rape her. We don’t know what his original intentions were prior to raping her (whether it was killing her afterwards or just discarding her, the text does not say), but after raping her, the text says he “fell in love” with Dinah and “began expressing his feelings to her” (34:3). He becomes so infatuated with Dinah, in fact, that he orders his father, King Hamor, to “get this girl for me so that I can marry her” (34:4).
While Dinah is held at Shechem’s house, news of the rape reaches Jacob. But Jacob “did nothing” because “all his sons were out in the fields with the cattle” (34:5). In other words, Jacob wanted his sons to complete their chores before he bothered to do anything—all while Dinah remains captive in her rapist’s possession. It is Hamor who makes the first move, coming out “to talk with Jacob” (34:6).
While Jacob and Hamor are discussing the matter, news of the rape reaches Dinah’s brothers while they are still working “in the fields.” They are understandably “very angry” because “Shechem had brought shame to Israel by raping Jacob’s daughter.” Unlike Jacob, Dinah’s brothers react immediately, dropping their work and returning home “as soon as they heard about the terrible thing Shechem had done” (34:7).
When Dinah’s brothers return home, however, they encounter Jacob and Hamor, seemingly talking calmly. Hamor immediately turns his attention to Dinah’s brothers, telling them how a marriage between Dinah and her rapist would benefit them sexually and financially: “This marriage will show we have a special agreement. Then our men can marry your women, and your men can marry our women. You can live in the same land with us. You will be free to own the land and to trade here” (34:9-10). Prince Shechem also appears and tells Dinah’s father and brothers that he will “do anything” and “give you any gift,” “if you will only allow me to marry Dinah” (34:11-12).
After hearing Hamor and Shechem’s proposal, Jacob is again silent and inactive. As Dinah’s brothers are the ones who respond in the text, not Jacob, the text itself seems to indicate that it is Dinah’s brothers who need to be convinced by the proposal, rather than her father. And the brothers are clearly not convinced that exchanging money for raping their sister is an honorable trade: “Jacob’s sons decided to lie to Shechem and his father because Shechem had done such a bad thing to their sister Dinah” (34:13).
Here is what the brothers do: They tell the Hivites that “we will allow [Shechem] to marry [Dinah] if you do this one thing: Every man in your town must be circumcised like us.” If the Hivite men circumcise themselves, “then your men can marry our women, and our men can marry your women. Then we will become one people.” But, they warn, “if you refuse to be circumcised, we will take Dinah away” (34:15-17).
There’s a catch, of course: the brothers have no intention of becoming one people with the Hivites of Cannan. Their goal is avenging their sister. So, after Hamor and Shechem convince all the Hivite men to circumcise themselves, two of Jacob’s sons—Simeon and Levi, both young teenagers at the time—attack and kill all the Hivite men, including Hamor and Shechem, while they are recovering (34:25). Then they free Dinah from Shechem’s house and return home. Sometime later, the rest of Dinah’s brothers return to the city and pillage everything, stealing “all their animals, all their donkeys, and everything else in the city and in the fields”—and the text notes that the brothers “even took [the Hivite] wives and children” (34:28-29).
Finally, at the very end of the story, Jacob at last speaks. His one and only comment in the entire story is a rebuke to Simeon and Levi: “You have caused me a lot of trouble. All the people in this place will hate me” (34:30). But Simeon and Levi fiercely and emphatically reject the rebuke: “Should we let these people treat our sister like a prostitute? They were wrong to do that to our sister!” (34:31).
And that is the end of the story. The next chapter in Genesis, Chapter 35, begins an entirely new narrative, with Jacob having his family purge themselves of all their Hivite idols and clothing (presumably all the goods they just stole), bury them under an oak tree, and flee the area. “The people in the surrounding cities,” the text tells us, “wanted to follow and kill them, but God filled them with such great fear that they did not go after them” (35:5). We also never hear about Dinah again, except for a brief mention of her in Chapter 46. When Jacob and his family go to Egypt to join Joseph, the text tells us that Dinah is among the group (46:15).
How the Early Church Viewed Dinah
Now that you have the facts about Dinah’s story from the biblical text in your mind, I want to walk you through several interpretations of her story from several different groups of people. We will look at interpretations from 3 groups: the early Christian Church, modern evangelicals, and Jewish rabbis throughout history. Let’s start with the early Christian Church, specifically the view of Saint Jerome. Jerome is best known for several acts: translating the Bible into Latin (which became known as the Vulgate), translating the Jewish Scriptures from the original Hebrew (instead from the Greek Septuagint), and writing about how Christian women living in big cities like Rome can lead moral lives.
Jerome’s writings on the lives of Christian women are especially relevant to our current topic. This is because Jerome directly used Dinah’s rape as a morality tale about why Christian women should fear the non-Christian world and live ascetic lives. Yael Shemesh, in a review of Joy A. Schroeder’s 2007 book Dinah’s Lament: The Biblical Legacy of Sexual Violence in Christian Interpretation, notes that this use of the story—“teaching women to remain in the private sphere and to avoid the dangers lurking in the public sphere”—started with Jerome. Examples of Jerome’s usage of Dinah’s rape in this way can be seen in his letters to young women like Eustochium, a high-ranking noblewoman and consecrated virgin who put herself under Jerome’s guidance.
The most famous of Jerome’s letters to Eustochium is Letter 22, which Jerome wrote to her after she made a vow of perpetual virginity. In this letter, he encourages Eustochium to stay home and live modestly, writing, “Go not from home nor visit the daughters of a strange land, though you have patriarchs for brothers and Israel for a father. Dinah went out and was seduced.”
In another letter (Letter 107) to a different young woman, Jerome addresses the question of how to bring up an infant daughter as a virgin consecrated to Jesus. In his instructions to her as to the child’s education and training, Jerome says the child must be shielded from not just pain “(the bite of a viper”) but also worldly pleasures like sexuality (“the golden cup of Babylon”). In this context, Jerome again references Dinah:
We read of Eli the priest that he became displeasing to God on account of the sins of his children; and we are told that a man may not be made a bishop if his sons are loose and disorderly. On the other hand it is written of the woman that she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with chastity. If then parents are responsible for their children when these are of ripe age and independent; how much more must they be responsible for them when, still unweaned and weak, they cannot, in the Lord’s words, discern between their right hand and their left—when, that is to say, they cannot yet distinguish good from evil? If you take precautions to save your daughter from the bite of a viper, why are you not equally careful to shield her from the hammer of the whole earth? To prevent her from drinking of the golden cup of Babylon? To keep her from going out with Dinah to see the daughters of a strange land? To save her from the tripping dance and from the trailing robe? No one administers drugs till he has rubbed the rim of the cup with honey.
As you can see from Jerome’s takes, Christians have been victim-blaming Dinah for her rape since the beginning of Christianity. Jerome, in fact, does not seem to believe Dinah was raped. He instead says she was “seduced”—both by “the daughters of a strange land” with their “tripping dance” and “trailing robes” as well as sexually by Prince Shechem. In other words, Jerome sees Dinah’s story as a story about the consequences of her sin: her apparently horrible desire to have female friends outside her family and go out dancing in pretty clothes. Jerome finds Dinah’s desire so mortifying that he repeatedly references it when instructing other young women to never leave their homes, never wear pretty things, and never do anything too fun.
How Evangelicals View Dinah
While some evangelicals view Dinah as a victim of rape (see, for example, Wendy Stringer writing for The Gospel Coalition or Kevin DeYoung’s sermon at Clearly Reformed), many do not. Many view her as a horny floozy or a party girl who got what she was asking for—or even a seduced romantic who just got in over her head with an older man. Very few, however, see her as entirely innocent.
One example of how evangelicals lay blame on Dinah comes from Ligonier Ministries, founded by American Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul. In their commentary on what they call “Dinah’s Humiliation,” the organization links Dinah’s rape to the destruction of the city of Sodom: “In all likelihood, Jacob and his family knew what happened to their relative Lot after he became too close to the residents of Sodom (Gen. 19). Unfortunately, the next event in Israel’s history [Dinah’s rape] proves Jacob and his children did not learn from Lot’s mistakes.” In other words, Ligonier believes (1) the destruction of Sodom happened because Lot and his family became too Sodom-like and (2) the rape of Dinah happened because Dinah wanted to become too Hivite-like (or Canaan-like).
As if blaming Dinah’s rape on her desire to assimilate with her neighbors was not bad enough, Ligonier literally says Dinah has daddy issues and that her daddy issues led to her sinful assimilation desires. They argue that the story’s beginning of identifying Dinah as the daughter of not just Jacob, but also Leah, indicates that “the mention of Leah is important here.” Specifically, Leah was “unloved” and “any children produced by the union were regarded similarly”—which would necessarily include Dinah. Neither Leah nor Dinah were loved by Jacob, they are claiming, and thus “Israel’s regard for Leah set Dinah up for a fall” (emphasis added). They go on to argue that Dinah fell “in love with the culture when she goes to be with the women who lived in Shechem,” but that it was “irregular for women in her day to go freely wherever they wished” because she could “learn many sins and meet pagan men through these women.” Indeed, they add, “The foolishness of being too involved with the inhabitants of the Promised Land is soon made manifest when Shechem (the prince, not the city) seizes Dinah and humiliates her (34:2). Actually, this is just another way of saying he raped Jacob’s daughter.”
The message here is clear (and stereotypically evangelical): because Dinah lacked her father’s love, she sinfully sought approval from peers and tried to fit in with the outside world, resulting in her being raped by an evil outsider.
This take is not unique to Ligonier among evangelicals. In his infamous Character Sketches, disgraced homeschool leader and accused sexual predator Bill Gothard retells Bible stories to illustrate either good or bad personal character. Volume 1 of this series includes a retelling of Dinah’s rape, summarized by Gothard as a story about how “Dinah’s thoughtless initiative brought danger and disgrace to her family.” Dinah, Gothard imagines, was “a young girl in her mid-teens” who “wandered into a strange city with the intention of exploring and making new friends”—but did so without asking her father for permission, a personal embellishment Gothard adds to the story. This is her downfall. According to the survivor advocacy organization Recovering Grace, Gothard essentially argues that “Dinah’s foolish mistake was to forgo seeking her father’s counsel and instead go into a pagan town alone, unescorted by her brothers.” By leaving the umbrella of her father’s authority and protection, Dinah reaped what she sowed.
Perhaps the worst evangelical take I have encountered comes from an article written by Dennis Leap for Philadelphia Church of God. Leap’s article, entitled “Dinah’s Lesson to Young and Old” and including the subtitle “Here is what can happen if we get close to Satan’s world,” argues that Dinah was a “typical party girl”:
Dinah did not simply go into Shechem to look at the daughters of the land (girls her own age)—she got deeply involved with the Shechemite teenage girls in order to get to know them well. Dinah wanted to learn about their culture—their music, sports and celebrations. The word ra’a indicates that Dinah was definitely enjoying spending time with these pagan people. “Now as the Shechemites were keeping a festival, [Dinah] … went into the city to see the finery of the women of that country,” wrote Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, Chapter 21. This credible historian indicates that what we are about to read concerning Dinah took place because she attended a pagan festival. That doesn’t necessarily mean she attended only one festival; it is likely she attended more than one. You could say that Dinah was a typical “party girl.”
Leap urges young people today to learn fear of the outside world from the story of Dinah, continuing the tradition that Jerome began centuries before:
If we entangle ourselves in the spirit of this world, or with the people of this world, we will be defiled—often physically and always spiritually. Jacob’s lovely daughter Dinah had to learn this bitter lesson. None of us in God’s Church need to repeat Dinah’s grave mistake. This is the specific reason God saw fit to record this history.
Sadly, even the evangelicals who believe Dinah was raped cannot help but victim-blame her a bit. For example, Kevin DeYoung, who describes Dinah as being a “victim” of “rape” “violated in the most humiliating way,” imputes impure thoughts to Dinah for wanting to visit Hivite women, just like everyone else does:
She’s a victim, for sure. She is violated in the most humiliating way by this man, this princely man, who acts anything except as a princely man when he violates Jacob’s daughter Dinah. There is at the same time, if you look at verse 1, Dinah is a victim, full stop, of course. There is also a hint in verse 1 of what this passage is going to be about when it says that she went out to see the women of the land… Verse 1 is certainly not suggesting that Dinah bore blame for what happened. Absolutely not. But it is laying out this big theme for the chapter, because as Dinah goes to see the women of the land, the question is before us, “How will God’s people maintain their unique character and identity as they are surrounded by people who are not God’s people?”
I particularly like how DeYoung says, “Dinah is a victim, full stop,” but then does not stop and continues to lay out how she “wandered about, to look upon the pagan women of the city.”
How Jewish People View Dinah
When I read flattened Christian interpretations of the Jewish Scriptures, or interpretations that victim-blame or engage in other troubling actions, I often find help navigating the texts in healthier ways by turning to Jewish rabbis and their teachings. Genesis is a Jewish book, not a Christian book, after all. So, it makes sense that we should listen and pay attention to how Jewish people read their books.
For example, when evangelicals read about Elisha sending bears after children who tease him for his baldness in 2 Kings 2:23-24, they read that passage as condoning Elisha’s behavior and thus blame the children for bringing the bears’ attacks upon themselves. However, as I explained to US Catholic a couple years ago, Jewish people believe Elisha let his anger get out of control—and thus was in the wrong. That’s a very different take and is much more child-friendly: “The Talmud says that God actually punishes Elisha for letting his anger get the better of him. This perspective helps us rethink the whole story and put children at the center.”
That’s less the case with Dinah’s story, unfortunately. In fact, many Jewish rabbis have historically taught equally bad or even worse takes on her story than the early Christian church or white American evangelicals today. At the same time, they also hold the story with more complexity.
Let’s start with the complexity. According to Jewish rabbinic tradition and midrashic literature, there are several extra layers to Dinah’s story to consider. A good summary of all these layers comes from Jewish theologian Tamar Kadari’s article on Dinah for Jewish Women’s Archive: “The rabbis… offer many different explanations for the rape of Dinah, trying to understand the troubling story. They explain the rape as punishment for Jacob, punishment for Leah, or a result of Shechem’s evil, or they place the fault with Dinah herself. The rabbis also state that Dinah went down to Egypt with Jacob, and they name various potential husbands for Dinah.”
The first layer here to consider is a story that begins at the end of Genesis 33 but only in midrash. When Jacob makes camp outside Shechem, he builds an altar to God. According to midrash, after building the altar, Jacob declares to God, “You are God of the heavenly, and I am the ruler of the earthly.” Due to Jacob’s arrogant claim, God curses Jacob with the rape of Dinah: “Even the beadle in a synagogue does not assume authority on his own, but you assume authority on your own? Tomorrow, your daughter will go out and be violated.” This, of course, would make Jacob’s inaction and passivity the next day even worse. Clearly Jacob took no precautions to prevent Dinah’s abuse.
The second layer is the age of the young people involved. According to Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld, Dinah “was actually a rather young girl when the entire incident occurred, 6-8 years old.” Simeon and Levi were similarly young, only 14 and 13 years old according to midrash. These ages are very different from the evangelical portrayals of Dinah as a mature teenager and Simeon and Levi as grown warriors.
The third layer is Dinah’s apparent physical beauty and attractiveness to adults, even at such a young age. Midrash says that when Jacob meets with Esau in Genesis 33, Jacob locks Dinah in a box so that Esau will not see her and desire to marry her. Unfortunately, God Almighty disapproves of Jacob protecting his 6-year-old daughter from the lust of his grown brother, later telling Jacob, “If thou hadst married off thy daughter in time she would not have been tempted to sin.”
The fourth layer to consider is what Kadari describes as “punishment for Leah.” This is where Jewish thinkers come closest to the perspectives of Jerome and modern evangelicals. According to midrash, Dinah was her mother’s child. Meaning, Dinah was a lot like Leah. And Leah was apparently known for her sexual wantonness.
Here’s why. A few chapters earlier in Genesis 30, there is a story about how Leah’s son Reuben finds a special love plant that supposedly helps women become pregnant. Leah’s sister Rachel, Jacob’s favorite wife, begs Leah to give her some of the plant because Rachel cannot bear children at this point. Leah tells Rachel she can have some of the plant if Rachel lets Leah sleep with Jacob that evening (when Rachel had sexual rights to Jacob normally). The biblical text then says Leah “went out” to meet Jacob as Jacob was returning from working in the fields, to tell Jacob she had sexual rights that evening.
What does this have to do with Dinah? Well, Dinah, like her mother, also “went out” according to the biblical text. So, according to midrash, Dinah was—like her mother—going out specifically to find a sexual partner. Dinah went out “adorned like a harlot,” midrash says, just like how “Leah our matriarch was a harlot.” Indeed, midrash becomes blunt and crude at this point, declaring, “There is no cow that is prone to gore that does not have a calf that kicks. There is no woman who engages in promiscuity that does not have a daughter who engages in promiscuity.”
The message taught by many Jewish rabbis and midrash, then, mirrors the message of the early Christian church and evangelicals: that young women going out in public without the protection of men is dangerous. Indeed, some rabbis state this forthrightly, comparing Dinah’s actions to dangling meat in front of a dog. Kadari writes that,
Dinah desired to be seen, and not just to see others. She wanted the land’s young men to see her beauty, and Shechem did indeed see her and desire her. The Rabbis compare this to a person who goes into the marketplace holding a piece of meat in his hand, with a dog following him. Eventually the dog will succeed in grabbing the meat from his hand… Some Rabbis claim that Dinah is representative of the weakness from which all women suffer. God took the care to create woman from a rib, which is a concealed, modest place; notwithstanding this, women like to go out to public places (Gen. Rabbah 18:2). The instance of Dinah casts light on the danger at hand when any woman goes out to the marketplace (Gen. Rabbah 8:12).
There are, of course, many Jewish people who reject these perspectives, just as there are many Christians (evangelicals included) who reject these perspectives. Feminists and liberation theologians in both Judaism and Christianity have done significant work subverting sacred texts about violence against women and children for decades, centuries even. African American women also have their own unique history with Dinah’s story, as many enslaved African American women were called “Dinah”—sometimes derogatorily, and sometimes through personal reclamation. But all those facts could fill another 5,000-word article, so I will have to write about them some other time. For now, let us conclude by considering what these different perspectives on Dinah’s rape tell us about adults in power.
The Shame of Adults
As you have seen from people across the spectrum of history, place, and religion, many adults have significant difficulties with not victim-blaming Dinah for being raped. Some of these people struggle with merely labeling the experience “rape.” These difficulties and struggles are not fringe and limited to just one extremist group (like American evangelicals) but rather appear to be both normative and orthodox. They reflect the fact that the patriarchal victim-blaming of an abuse survivor is unfortunately a common, everyday experience reaching back centuries and millennia.
So, how do we fight back against this trend? How do we shift the Overton Window such that it is normative and orthodox to view Dinah’s situation as rape and the adults’ response to it wholly inadequate and to blame for the later consequences?
I think we need to put the story’s children in the center of our focus, starting with the ages of the children. While most of the bad Christian takes on Dinah’s rape render Dinah a mature teenager, Jewish people believe Dinah to be quite young: between 6 and 8 years old. And Simeon and Levi, rather than being foolish young men with strong muscles and ferocious tempers, are still boys: 14 and 13 years old.
These ages are important. A 6-year-old girl could have very different motives for visiting older women in the nearby town compared to a wild and rebellious teenage girl. No girl deserves to be raped, of course, but the accusations levied against Dinah by everyone—that she was a worldly, lustful, and conceited young woman—simply do not hold up when we are discussing a 6-year-old child, no matter how “mature” or “developed” that child may be.
Simeon and Levi’s ages also matter. Vengeful adults who murder their enemies in a fit of extrajudicial rage are one thing; young boys driven to vigilantism because their father and other people in power are doing absolutely nothing to help their sister are completely different matters. When you realize the boys are barely older than Dinah herself, and read how passive Jacob is in the face of this horrific emergency, you can see how they might feel desperate and like they had to act—damn the consequences. This might be the folly of youth, but if so, it is youthful folly. It is not the folly of adults like Jacob and Hamor, which is far more damning. (Also, it is notable to me that it is the older brothers, not the younger Simeon and Levi, who do the later pillaging and enslaving of women and children, bringing the cycle of abuse full circle.)
When you incorporate these ages into the narrative, it substantially changes the tenor. A 6-year-old girl wanting to visit friends simply cannot be misinterpreted as evil. Anyone imputing blame on a 6-year-old girl for wanting to visit friends has far more serious personal problems than the 6-year-old. I don’t care what patriarchs think about it, today or back in Dinah’s time. It is good and healthy for children (of all ages!) to have friends and community outside their family and to socialize with people different from their family.
A 6-year-old child also cannot be seduced, only groomed. While child development research has found that 6-year-old children are sexual beings, it has also found that children are not interested in sexuality in the same ways adults are. Those interests develop later. In short, any attempt to assign responsibility to Dinah for her traveling and being raped fall apart when we raise questions of age and consent.
Similarly, if Simeon and Levi were such young teens, one has to wonder: why did these young boys feel they had to do this adult act of warfare? Why is the actual adult and father so passive and silent? According to modern children’s rights theory, children who go to war are not soldiers; they are victims. Simeon and Levi went to war against the Hivites, yes. But they did so while children. So, why do we view them as willful agents of violence instead of distressed victims of a system that would not protect their sister?
In Isaiah 3, the prophet Isaiah speaks poetically but in adultist fashion of children taking the lead in a corrupted society where there are no good, moral adults. Is the story of Dinah’s rape an example of such a situation? Is this the quintessential example of how children will take matters into their own small, imperfect hands when adults are shameful cowards or selfish patriarchs?
I think so. I think Genesis 34 shows us exactly that. Dinah’s rape and her brothers’ reactivity show us the shame of adults: that adults will, time after time, do nothing but negotiate and cover up the rape of their children by powerful people.
Whether it is the honored Prince Shechem raping Dinah then or the jet-setting Jeffrey Epstein raping children today, Jewish patriarchs like Jacob and American leaders like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump say and do nothing but make peace with the abusers if the abusers help them profit. And the only people who are brave enough to speak up and fight back—whether it’s Dinah’s teenage brothers or a young survivor like Virginia Giuffre—are labeled troublemakers or mentally ill. Stereotyped by their resistance, they become scapegoats to villainize and distract from the adult evils.
This is the great shame of patriarchy and adulthood. They make loud noise about protecting children while they quietly sweep their own abused kids under the rug.