Preaching Dinah’s Silence

A few months ago we were preaching the life of Jacob in my local church, and I was given Gen. 35; as I came to prepare, I noticed that our preaching plan skipped over Gen. 34. On one level, no problem: in dealing with big chunks of Scripture we often do that; on another, though, I was uncomfortable. I’ve commented before in public about my concern over preachers – including me – silently passing over the several narratives of sexual violence that Scripture records; in view of this, I did not feel able to pass from Gen. 33 to Gen. 35 and silently ignore Dinah’s experience of rape, and the bizarre and violent events that followed. I read these texts again in my personal devotions this week, recalled struggling with how to preach them, and reflected on how current they are just now. Dinah is raped by Shechem; Jacob, her father, does not care (the text powerfully locates this in part in the disfunction of Jacob’s family: ‘Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob…’ (1) – the description distances Dinah from Jacob by recalling Jacob’s preference for Rachel over Leah); her brothers, by contrast are incensed. Shechem, the rapist, wants to make things right by marrying her, and his father tries to arrange that. Dinah’s brothers use this desire to construct a trap, and then we are presented with the comically grotesque image of the men of Shechem trying, and of course failing, to fight whilst just-circumcised. Jacob laments the vengeance in the end, because it has disturbed his plans to settle by the city. As I say, my first decision was that I had to face this text; not for the first time in preaching, I found that my insistence on treating a text left me with a problem. How should we – how should I, as a man – preach this strange story? If all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, &c., how is this God-breathed Scripture in any way useful? Rightly or wrongly I found the clue in Gen.. 33:18-20. Jacob camped in sight of the city, and bought the piece of land where he pitched his tent. It sounds innocent enough, but the cities of Canaan have not had a good press so far in Genesis. Abraham walked away from the cities on the plain, and saw them destroyed by fire because there were not ten righteous people amongst them; Isaac would not take a wife from the people of the land – and was disgusted when Esau did (twice). In Gen. 35:1, when it seems Jacob’s story is getting back on track, it is with God’s command to go to Bethel, a place in the wilderness. Camping in sight of the city was not a good move. And so I read Gen. 34 as a narrative of what happens when God’s people compromise on the holy demand to be separate; that demand can be, and often has been, misread, of course, but it is there and serious; there are cultural patterns that are so distorted that it is impossible to live well within them. Jacob’s compromise, camping in sight of the city, implicates him and his family in cultural patterns that are inevitably destructive. Dinah, tragically, is the one who suffers most from this. For me, the most striking thing about Gen. 34 is Dinah’s silence. She is raped; her father chooses to do nothing (5); her brothers are outraged, and plan revenge; the rapist proposes to marry her; his father seeks to smooth things over. She is raped, and a bunch of men talk about how to deal with it. What did Dinah feel? Was she longing for revenge, prepared to marry Shechem, wanting only to come home quietly? Men speak and argue about her and around her, but her voice is conspicuously silent. The Bible is unremittingly honest about what Yeats called ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ (‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ – originally in Last Poems (1939), but variously anthologised). Human beings are, and so human culture is, warped, broken, and sinful. By camping in sight of the city, Jacob enters this culture, and he, and his family, become entangled in its warped threads. One of the fundamental breaks in human culture is patriarchy – a part of the first curse (Gen. 3:16), and a seemingly-unremitting distortion of human life ever since. Dinah is raped, and then a bunch of men try to work out how to turn this event to their various advantages; her voice is just ignored. The story has happened ten thousand thousand times through history; as I...

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