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Context No. 1021 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 34:24-31: in context

24All who went out of the gate of his city listened to Hamor, and to Shechem his son; and every male was circumcised, all who went out of the gate of his city. 25On the third day, when they were sore, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword, came upon the unsuspecting city, and killed all the males. 26They killed Hamor and Shechem, his son, with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went away. 27Jacob’s sons came on the dead, and plundered the city, because they had defiled their sister. 28They took their flocks, their herds, their donkeys, that which was in the city, that which was in the field, 29and all their wealth. They took captive all their little ones and their wives, and took as plunder everything that was in the house. 30Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have troubled me, to make me odious to the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites. I am few in number. They will gather themselves together against me and strike me, and I will be destroyed, I and my house.” 31They said, “Should he deal with our sister as with a prostitute?”

Dinah, Jacob's daughter, has been violated by Shechem, a local prince, who then wants to marry her. Her brothers pretend to agree to a marriage alliance on the condition that all the men of Shechem be circumcised. Then, while the men are incapacitated with pain on the third day, two of Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, take swords, enter the city, and kill every male, including Shechem and his father, plunder the town, and carry off the women and children. Jacob is horrified, but not for the reason we might expect: he fears the reprisal that will come on his small household. And the brothers have the last, cold word: should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?

This is the bible at its morally tangled edge, and it does not tell us what to think; it makes us wrestle. There is a real wrong to avenge; Dinah was violated, and her brothers' rage has a genuine root. But the response is monstrous, a deceitful abuse of the sign of the covenant, circumcision, turned into a weapon, and the slaughter of an entire town for the crime of one man. Neither side comes out clean. The brothers' closing question, should he treat our sister like a prostitute, is not wrong exactly, but it is used to justify mass murder. And Jacob's objection is disturbingly self-interested; he grieves the danger to himself, not the innocent dead. Scripture leaves it raw, and Jacob will remember it on his deathbed, cursing the cruelty of Simeon and Levi's swords. The passage refuses to give us heroes. It shows how a legitimate grievance can curdle into atrocity, how zeal for a sister's honor can become an excuse for wholesale slaughter, and it warns that vengeance, even for a real wrong, has a way of consuming far more than justice would.

When I have been genuinely wronged, do I let a legitimate grievance curdle into a response far beyond justice, and can I bring even my rightful anger under God rather than letting it consume?

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