Cari Marshall

The story of Dinah, the only daughter of the patriarch Jacob, recounts an episode in which she goes out to see the “daughters of the land” but is raped, seduced, and/or abducted by Shechem, a Hivite prince, who subsequently falls in love with and wishes to marry her.

While her father is silent, Dinah’s brothers negotiate marriage terms in guile. After all the male residents of the town circumcise themselves (a precondition for intermarrying with Jacob’s family), Simeon and Levy slaughter all the men and rescue Dinah from Shechem’s house.

The various responses to the daughter’s debasement—the residents of Shechem, Jacob’s, the brothers’, and even Dinah’s silence—suggests a multivocal composition which centers on the question of intermarriage with the native “Canaanites” of the land.