Dinah raped at Shechem



 

Judith’s City of ‘Bethulia’

Part Two (iii): Shechem (continued)

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

  

 

 

‘O Lord, the God of my ancestor Simeon, remember how you armed Simeon with a sword to take revenge on those foreigners who seized Dinah, who was a virgin, tore off her clothes, and defiled her; they stripped her naked and shamed her; they raped her and disgraced her, even though you had forbidden this’.

 

Judith 9:2

 

 

 

 

Since Judith here recalls an unsavoury incident that had occurred at the city of Shechem, then this would add force to the location of her town of ‘Bethulia’ as Shechem (see Part Two (ii)). That the rape of Dinah had occurred at Shechem is apparent from the geographical lead-in of Genesis 33:18-20:

 

After Jacob came from Paddan Aram, he arrived safely at the city of Shechem in Canaan and camped within sight of the city. For a hundred pieces of silver, he bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, the plot of ground where he pitched his tent. There he set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel.

 

The pagan Canaanite, Shechem, who defiled the virgin, turns out to be somewhat more honourable than, later, David’s eldest son, Amnon, who, having raped his half-sister, Tamar, then abandons her as “a desolate woman”. See my:

 

The vicissitudinous life of Solomon's pulchritudinous wife

 

https://www.academia.edu/34418620/The_vicissitudinous_life_of_Solomons_pulchritudinous_wife

 

But none of that ‘honourableness’ is about to impress the vengeful brothers Simeon and Levi. In the following Genesis 34:1-31 account of the incident one will notice a stark contrast between Jacob’s reaction to it and that of Simeon and Levi – and how different is Jacob’s estimation of Simeon (and Levi) when compared to Judith’s glowing account of her ancestor:

 

Dinah and the Shechemites

 

Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land. When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her. His heart was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. And Shechem said to his father Hamor, ‘Get me this girl as my wife’.

When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with his livestock; so he did nothing about it until they came home.

Then Shechem’s father Hamor went out to talk with Jacob. Meanwhile, Jacob’s sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were shocked and furious, because Shechem had done an outrageous thing in Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter—a thing that should not be done.

But Hamor said to them, ‘My son Shechem has his heart set on your daughter. Please give her to him as his wife. Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. You can settle among us; the land is open to you. Live in it, trade in it, and acquire property in it’.

Then Shechem said to Dinah’s father and brothers, ‘Let me find favor in your eyes, and I will give you whatever you ask. Make the price for the bride and the gift I am to bring as great as you like, and I’ll pay whatever you ask me. Only give me the young woman as my wife’.

Because their sister Dinah had been defiled, Jacob’s sons replied deceitfully as they spoke to Shechem and his father Hamor. They said to them, ‘We can’t do such a thing; we can’t give our sister to a man who is not circumcised. That would be a disgrace to us. We will enter into an agreement with you on one condition only: that you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters and take your daughters for ourselves. We’ll settle among you and become one people with you. But if you will not agree to be circumcised, we’ll take our sister and go’.

Their proposal seemed good to Hamor and his son Shechem. The young man, who was the most honored of all his father’s family, lost no time in doing what they said, because he was delighted with Jacob’s daughter. So Hamor and his son Shechem went to the gate of their city to speak to the men of their city. ‘These men are friendly toward us’, they said. ‘Let them live in our land and trade in it; the land has plenty of room for them. We can marry their daughters and they can marry ours. But the men will agree to live with us as one people only on the condition that our males be circumcised, as they themselves are. Won’t their livestock, their property and all their other animals become ours? So let us agree to their terms, and they will settle among us’.

All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male in the city was circumcised.

Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses.

Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, ‘You have brought trouble on me by making me obnoxious to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land. We are few in number, and if they join forces against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed’.

But they replied, ‘Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?’

 

Later, a dying Jacob will ‘curse the anger’ of the fiery pair of brothers (49:5-7):

 

‘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’.

 

No such negative sentiment as this will arise from Judith, however. Had not God himself “armed Simeon with a sword to take revenge on those foreigners who seized Dinah …”?

And now Judith will reverse the ancient crime of the pagan Shechem by personally overcoming the god-less “Holofernes” who wishes to take sexual advantage of her. She, like Simeon, will be ‘armed with a sword’ to accomplish the deed (Judith 13:14-16):

 

Judith shouted,

‘Praise God, give him praise! Praise God, who has not held back his mercy from the people of Israel. Tonight he has used me to destroy our enemies’.

She then took the head out of the food bag and showed it to the people.
‘Here’, she said, ‘is the head of Holofernes, the general of the Assyrian army, and here is the mosquito net from his bed, where he lay in a drunken stupor. The Lord used a woman to kill him. As the Lord lives, I swear that Holofernes never touched me, although my beauty deceived him and brought him to his ruin. I was not defiled or disgraced; the Lord took care of me through it all’.

 

In this heroic action, Judith - as the faithful have long recognised - prefigures the Virgin Mary:

https://icxcmary.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/esther-judith-mary/

 

Another Old Testament heroine is Judith.  The way she prefigures Mary is somewhat different.  As we know from Genesis, God put enmity between the woman and the serpent, who represent Mary and the devil, respectively, and through the power of her Son, the Woman would crush the serpent’s head.  Well, Judith is an image of this mystery, for she saved her people by cutting off the head of the evil and tyrannical general, Holofernes.  Judith, like Esther and like Mary, was exceedingly beautiful and devout, and was held in high honor by her people.  When their faith wavered in the face of the threats and power of the enemy, she counseled them to trust in God, and not put Him to the test by placing a limit on how long they would wait for Him before they would surrender to their enemies.  For God would deliver them at the proper time by the hand of a woman.

 

After Judith had killed the enemy leader and returned victorious to her people, they sang to her (and this is used in the Latin Rite on certain feasts of Our Lady): “You are the exaltation of Jerusalem; you are the great glory of Israel; you are the great pride of our nation!  You have done all this single-handedly; you have done great good to Israel, and God is well pleased with it.  May the Almighty Lord bless you forever! … The Lord Almighty has foiled them by the hand of a woman!” (Jdt. 15:9-10; 16:6).  Our Lady is the Woman at whose hand (or rather, under whose foot) God has foiled the designs of our evil enemy, the devil. God has chosen her to bring the Savior into the world and to stand with Him and to wield the power He has given her to protect us from evil and to neutralize its power and influence in our lives.

 

There is much more that can be said about Old Testament prefigurings of the Mother of God, but let this suffice for now.  Let us realize that just as the mystery of Christ was known in Heaven for all eternity, the mystery of his Mother was known as well—for how could there be an incarnate Son considered in isolation from the one who gave flesh to Him?  So the mystery of both Mother and Son was intimated in the stories of salvation history, until their complete revelation in the fullness of time—and the ever-deepening understanding of these divine mysteries in the ongoing life of the Church, until the Lord returns in glory.