Vayishlach 5784

Alternative Facts

And … we’re back.

Not (yet) on a weekly basis, but this week I have something to say and time to say it. I’m grateful to the people who’ve subscribed while the column has been on hiatus, presumably (!) in hopes it would return. And I’m glad to have the chance to reconnect with those who read it for a year and have been waiting faithfully.

I have two separate subjects this week, one that’s short and will perhaps be surprising to some of you, and another that I’m just beginning to think through. You will have to watch me developing that idea in real time.

The first thing I have to say about Parshat Vayishlach is a general thought with a specific point that’s applicable — in a big way — to our parashah. The big point is that Bible scholarship takes a long time to make its way into the Bibles and Chumashim that ordinary people read.

In our case, that applies to what happens to Dinah in Gen 34:2. The NRSV translates:

Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the region, saw her, he seized her and lay with her by force.

And that’s a widely held idea. But there’s a growing trend in scholarship to disagree with that traditional understanding. Those who want to pursue this question can have a look at n. 15 on p. 69 here, citing a dozen or so scholars who don’t think our text is saying that Dinah was raped by force.

Some, my teacher Mayer Gruber among them, say that the word יְעַנֶּֽהָ simply means that he “had sex” with her. It doesn’t tell us anything about what happened during this event. Others hear something negative in the word, but not rape — rather, perhaps, the family’s objection, which does not seem to be even that Shechem mistreated Dinah, but that (as David Kimhi wrote 800 years ago, in my Commentators’ Bible translation):

The defilement was that an uncircumcised man had sex with her.

I will leave this for readers to explore on your own. What I’m going to do now, instead, is to begin to work through some ideas that occurred to me on Sunday of this week, when I was learning the parashah (via Zoom) with a group that’s been meeting with me to read Bible for at least a couple of decades.

One of the things we’ve discussed over the years is the close relationship between the book of Genesis and the story of David. It’s utterly transparent in next week’s reading, Parashat Vayeshev, when “Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua, and he married her” (Gen 38:2). Since daughter in Hebrew is בת bat, this girl is obviously בת־שוע bat-Shua ‘the daughter of Shua’. But Bathshua is precisely the name used in the book of Chronicles (see 1 Chr 3:5) for David’s wife — one of them, at least, the one we know from Samuel and Kings as Bathsheba.

There are a few things that seem (to me) to link the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 with the story of Dinah and Shechem in Genesis 34. One is that both open by having one of Jacob’s children move away from the family. Judah goes “down” (ירד) to marry into a Canaanite family, just as Dinah in our story goes “out” (יצא) to see what the local girls are like and ends up with a Canaanite guy.

Both Judah and Dinah end up having sex in somewhat unusual circumstances. And there is also, as I see it, a big-picture connection between the stories. It’s more glaring in the case of Judah, but if you think about it, it applies to Dinah too. Both stories seem very disconnected with the rest of what happens in Genesis.

Simeon and Levi will kill all the males of the city of Shechem — but that seems to have no consequences for the story. Jacob is upset and thinks they are in for trouble, but instead the story continues as if the attack on Shechem had never happened. Similarly, Judah in Genesis 38 marries, has three children, is widowed, and arranges a marriage for his oldest son, all (apparently) in the few days it takes the Midianites/Ishmaelites to shlep Joseph down to Egypt, where the story picks up at the beginning of Genesis 39.

When that story continues, Judah is not living as we saw him in Genesis 38; he’s back with his brothers, interacting with them and taking a leadership role just as he did in Genesis 37. Gen 35:5 may be an attempt to patch the story of Dinah into the larger narrative, but Judah’s Canaanite family goes unexplained. Both his story and Dinah’s look like they will drive the plot in a different direction, but both are false leads.

Shechem, I should point out, is not just the name of the man who had sex with Dinah and fell in love with her (admittedly, in the wrong order). It’s the name of the city where Joshua (in chapter 24 of that book) recounts Israel’s history and renews the covenant between God and Israel. That’s also where Solomon’s son Rehoboam goes, in 1 Kings 12, “to renew” the monarchy, that is, to legitimize his rule over Israel as the successor to his father Solomon. As you may know, his attempt was a terrible failure, prompting the separation of the kingdom of Saul, David, and Solomon into two separate countries.

It’s not the kingdom with a descendant of David on the throne in Jerusalem that retained the name Israel — it’s the kingdom based among the Joseph tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh that bore that name in the ancient world. That was the powerful kingdom, far overshadowing Judah and its Davidic kings until it was finally conquered (in 722 BCE) and absorbed into the Assyrian empire, its population deported elsewhere and replaced by deportees from other Assyrian conquests.

Coming back to the Bible, we now need to have another look at the book of (drum roll, please) … Chronicles — that book where Solomon’s mother is called Bathshua. Another of the peculiarities of that book is that, though it begins with Adam and continues until the time of King Cyrus of Persia, it’s almost impossible to tell by reading it that the Israelites were ever enslaved in Egypt.

That means that certain things happen in Chronicles that — like the events of Genesis 38 — don’t make sense in a Torah context. David Rothstein explains, in his introduction to Chronicles in the indispensable Jewish Study Bible:

A notable feature of Chronicles is its reticence concerning several pivotal events in the nation’s history, e.g., the exodus from Egypt, the theophany at Sinai, and the “conquest” of Canaan. Many scholars see in these omissions Chronicles’ expression of the eternal connection between the people of Israel and its land as an unbroken chain, having no real starting point, nor involving a hiatus after the First Temple period.

It is an “alternative” history of Israel.

What’s going on in Chronicles, in Genesis 38, and here in the story of Dinah? In my doctoral dissertation, and frequently since, I quote the late American singer Jean Ritchie, who grew up in the “hollers” of Kentucky:

It was always a wonder to me how families living close to one another could sing the same song and sing it so different. Or how one family would sing a song among themselves for years, and their neighbor family never know that song at all. Most curious of all was how one member of a family living in a certain community could have almost a completely different set of songs than his cousins living a few miles away.

See her book Singing Family of the Cumberlands for more of her story. For our purposes, the point is that the Israelites told their story not just in one way, but in several, perhaps many, quite different ways. The Israelites whose ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt made their story everyone’s story, and the Torah is shaped to tell it; the book of Genesis, specifically, is shaped to get the Israelites down to Egypt in the first place so they can be enslaved there.

I don’t think we’ve talked much about it on this blog, but another conflict underlying Genesis is the conflict between the Davidic kingdom of Judah, based in Jerusalem, and the northern kingdom of the Joseph tribes — the historic kingdom of Israel — based (at different times) in or near Shechem. It was “obvious” to some (northern) Israelites that Joseph, the first-born son of Jacob with his intended first wife Rachel, was the true successor of the patriarchs and leader of the nation.

The southerners had a different perspective. Judah, David’s ancestor, was their man. It’s this week’s parashah that (politically) bumps off his three older brothers, Simeon and Levi (who massacre the men of Shechem in Genesis 34) and Reuben (who sleeps with one of his father’s wives in Gen 35:22), leaving the potential leadership in Judah’s hands.

It’s always good to remember that the Bible is an anthology. There are different strokes for different folks — or perhaps I ought to say “different vibes for different tribes.” I think Genesis 34, like Genesis 38, was part of a set of “alternative Israelite facts.” If that’s true, I wish we had even more of them. It would give us what I, at least, would really like to have: a much broader picture of the world of ancient Israel.