2024_05_31 Insight Post- Karen Heal
This week’s reading- Genesis 34
Dinah’s story in Genesis 34 is not about her at all; it’s about how a family revenges its stolen “property.” What’s more, sometimes the villains are sympathetic—and the heroes are horrible. It’s hard for a modern person to get any moral from it.
Other facts confuse it further. The villain was merely following local marriage customs by offering to pay generously for Dinah’s dowry. The heroes were deceitful and cruel in their revenge. (Keep in mind that this is the same set of brothers who sold Joseph into slavery.) The father was passive, angered only by how this incident made him look to the neighbors.
Ancient scholars, however, had plenty of ideas about what was going on here: Dinah was a loose woman who got what she deserved; or religious intermarriage was forbidden; or that Dinah’s abasement was God punishing Jacob, her father, for breaking his vow to return to Bethel (Genesis 28). The story may have some cultural cues that informed ancient readers, but that nuance is lost to us. We could make better sense of it if only we knew the characters’ motivations.
That’s why I’m grateful that God does! “For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” 1 Samuel 16:7. He knows what’s really in the hearts of the people in this story, and he uses their flawed actions to bring the world a little closer to Jesus’s arrival. It also gives me peace to know that I don’t have to (and shouldn’t) judge peoples’ motivations because God judges perfectly, and I can’t.
The last we hear of Dinah in Scripture is in Genesis 46, when Jacob’s family moves to Egypt after Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. Historic rabbinic tradition has fashioned some weird finales, though. Dinah is said to have birthed a daughter who was adopted in Egypt and then married to Joseph. Also, in the apocryphal book “The Testament of Job,” Dinah ends up being Job’s second wife.
Thankfully, whatever their motivations in this debacle, God used these people to further His purposes. He will judge and reward them—and us also—based on our commitment to Him.
Karen Heal
Prayer Team member