With each
passing story in Genesis, the narrative is becoming more vivid and more
visceral. The stories of creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah are
behind us when there were only allusions to horrors and almost always a
clear-cut answer.
Since Abraham,
Genesis has been giving us increasingly complex and difficult moralities to
struggle with. These don’t have simple answers. It would be easy to condemn
Jacob for not caring about avenging Dinah’s rape. However, he also has to
consider his entire family, and that they will now be hunted.
Moreover, we have the duplicitous
actions of the circumcision. This is meant to be a sacred sign, not something
to be taken lightly, and certainly not something to be use as a weapon against
enemies. Yet that is exactly what was done. It is a clever solution, and, if
anything, reminds us of the kind of cleverness that Odysseus and the Greeks
would resort to, not unlike the Trojan Horse as horses were considered sacred
to the Trojans. To take a gift that is supposed to be in reverence to the gods
and make it into a weapon is duplicitous and the very least, blasphemy at worst.
And we’re not given a concrete
answer with the Genesis story. The rape is clearly wrong. Using the
circumcision as a vehicle for revenge is dubious at best. Looting the city and
stealing away all the women and children is not good at all, but serves to
underscore the seriousness of the punishment for such a crime.
Jacob’s concerns are valid, and yet
so are the brothers’ for the violated sister. We are pre-civilization, here.
This is tribal families attempting to survive in a harsh world, and
responsibility is to blood, first. Hamor and his family proved the caliber of
their family with Dinah’s rape. The comment about treating Dinah like a whore
establishes that Hamor’s family would not be fit to join into the Abrahamic
Covenant.
I’m still unsure about using the
circumcision as a weapon, yet it’s done. We don’t have any official word from
God about this, at all. In fact, God has been relatively quiet since Abraham.
Might be something about that.