The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The revisionist approach to the rape of Dinah reaches a crescendo in the work of one Bible critic, Meir Sternberg, who boldly insists that Jacob, “the tale’s least sympathetic character,” is guilty of “egocentricity” and “cowardice” and even “immorality” because his only stated concern about the massacre of Shechem is wholly self-serving. “[T]he slaughter is reprehensible only in its consequences,” writes Sternberg. By contrast, he argues, Simeon and Levi are “the real heroes” of Genesis 34. “Their concern has been selfless and single-minded: to redress the wrong done to their sister and the whole family,” Sternberg concludes. “Their idealistic and uncompromising stance makes them the most intricate, colorful, and attractive characters in the story.”30

  Against the background of the Holocaust, of course, the sword-bearing sons of Jacob seem far more compelling to us than their pragmatic and pacifistic father. For the same reason, the resistance fighters who made a heroic last stand against the Nazis in the streets and sewers of the doomed Warsaw ghetto strike us as nobler than their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, who boarded the boxcars and rode into Auschwitz, even if the fighters ended up just as dead as the victims of the gas chamber. But the real question, the tough question, is not how to die but how to live, and it is a question that is being asked—and answered—in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Hebron and Nablus in our own times.

  The taunting words of Simeon and Levi—“Is our sister to be treated as a whore?”—may be blood-stirring and soul-shaking, especially in the light of recent history, but it turns out to be the wrong question to ask at a time when men and women in what we still call the Holy Land are all too willing to raise a sword against each other because each one persists in regarding the other as a stranger.

  “FOR THE HONOR OF OUR SISTERS”

  The Bible confirms that something convinced the rest of the Canaanites not to revenge themselves upon the Israelites for the slaughter of Shechem, as Jacob feared they would do. One explanation is found in the passage that follows the story of Dinah in the Book of Genesis: God abruptly orders Jacob and his clan to leave the place where the blood of Shechem and his people was spilled, and to pitch their tents at another site in Canaan. Jacob purifies his household by ordering the removal of any idols and other paraphernalia of idol worship, and then the clan sets off toward its new encampment at a place called Bethel. Jacob’s fear that the Canaanites will muster against the Israelites turns out to be unfounded.

  “And they journeyed,” we are told in Genesis, “and a terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob” (Gen. 35:5).

  The traditional interpretation of the passage is that the ritual of purification conducted by Jacob and his clan, an act of obeisance to the Almighty, induces God to keep the Canaanites at bay: “a terror of God” is what deterred the Canaanites from revenging themselves for the deaths of their countrymen. But the modern reader might be tempted to conclude that terror of Simeon and Levi had something to do with it—and, for that reason, the way of Jacob’s warrior sons threatens to overshadow Jacob’s way in the moral and political calculus of various decision-makers, both Arab and Jew, in the modern Middle East.

  Something closer to Simeon and Levi, for example, can be seen in the pioneers of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century, who organized self-defense units in the towns and villages of Russia. “Violence must be answered with violence,” declared the manifesto of one of the early Jewish bands. The leader of another movement appeared to invoke the memory of Dinah when he wrote that armed self-defense was not less than “[a war] for the honor of our sisters, for our national honor, for our future as a nation.”31 The veterans of those early skirmishes served as role models—and, in some instances, as leaders—of the Haganah, the underground army of the Zionist movement in Palestine, which was organized to protect the Jewish community against Arab violence and later prevailed against the armies of seven Arab nations that declared war on Israel as soon as the tiny Jewish state declared its independence in 1948. To the men and women who struggled to create the Jewish homeland, and especially to the survivors of the Holocaust, the destiny of the Jewish people now passed into the hands of what Menachem Begin called “a new specimen of human being … completely unknown to the world for over 1800 years, ‘the fighting Jew.’”32

  Over its first half century of statehood, Israel came to rely on the sword to protect and preserve itself against the enmity of its Arab neighbors and, perhaps more crucially, the Arabs who live among Jews in Israel itself and the lands that Israel secured during the Six-Day War. The military prowess of the Israel Defense Forces fundamentally changed the very image of the State of Israel from a David to a Goliath. Only recently has Jacob’s way reasserted itself in Israel, and the fighting Jew has been forced to learn once again when and how to sit down and talk.

  Significantly, Yitzhak Rabin—a veteran of the Haganah who repeatedly distinguished himself on the battlefield in Israel’s struggle for independence and survival—went on to earn a Nobel Peace Prize precisely because of his willingness to make peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Rabin commanded the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, but he will be best remembered for shaking hands with Yasir Arafat. Significantly, Rabin is also an exemplar of “the new Jew”—a soldier and a statesman, a man who knows when to make war and when to make peace, a vigorous hybrid of Jacob and his warrior sons.

  But it is equally significant that Rabin was felled not by an Arab but by a fellow Israeli who insisted that he had been called upon by the Almighty to slay the man who made peace with the stranger. The assassination of Rabin demonstrates exactly why the example of Simeon and Levi is so treacherous—all it takes to strike down a towering figure like Rabin is a little man with a loaded gun who had managed to convince himself that God handed it to him and bid him use it. One can almost hear the impudent question that Simeon and Levi put to Jacob—“Is our sister to be treated like a whore?”—on the lips of the assassin who murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

  A close reading of Genesis 34 allows us to see that the Bible offers two visions of the stranger and two approaches to dealing with him: one that exhorts us to make war, the other that encourages us to make peace and even, as the story of Dinah and Shechem may secretly suggest, make love. “I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life,” says Moses to the Israelites (Deut. 30:19), as if to suggest that the correct choice is so obvious that only a fool or a miscreant would choose the wrong one. But the Bible is not always so clear and straightforward in its moral instruction, and much mischief has been done over the centuries and millennia precisely because zealots can always find chapter and verse to justify even the most grotesque article of faith or plan of action.

  In fact, no matter how excessive the revenge of Simeon and Levi on Shechem may appear to us, the Bible suggests that Jacob’s way and the warrior’s way are appropriate, each in its own time. “To every thing there is a season,” we read in a celebrated passage of Ecclesiastes: “A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace” (Eccles. 3:1, 8). Tragically, the Bible never tells us with clarity or certainty how and when to choose between them. The enigmatic fragment of Genesis in which Dinah’s story appears, like so much of the Bible, can be used to validate either one.

  * Shechem is both the name of a lovestruck prince in Genesis 34 and the name of an important place in biblical history. The site of ancient Shechem, located forty-one miles north of Jerusalem, near the modem town of Nablus on the West Bank of the Jordan River, is the first place in Canaan where God appears to Abraham and promises the land to his descendants (Gen. 12:6–7). Shechem was briefly the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel and later an important ritual center for the Samaritans, a people who embrace certain Jewish scriptures and observances but separated themselves from the Israelites in antiquity. Some Bible scholars see in the character called Shechem an al
legorical figure who symbolizes the place called Shechem, and they argue that Genesis 34 is merely an account of the struggle between the Canaanites and the Israelites for sovereignty in the region in ancient times. But the tale of Dinah and Shechem is so rich and so resonant—“the most graphically human story … [in] the whole of Genesis,” according to British scholar Julian Pitt-Rivers—that it cannot be dismissed as mere allegory.

  + Shechem’s father, Hamor, is described as a “Hivite” in the Masoretic Text of the Bible, and a “Horite” in the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Bible. Some biblical scholars suggest that Hamor and his clan were actually Humans, a people of the ancient Near East whose native land was located to the north and west of Canaan. Other scholars have argued that Jacob and his sons were linked to the so-called Habiru, an enigmatic people once believed to be nomadic invaders who ranged across the ancient world. Especially intriguing is the mention of the Habiru in connection with the conquest of the city of Shechem in the Amarna Letters, a cache of Egyptian diplomatic correspondence dating back to the nineteenth century B.C.E. However, recent biblical scholarship no longer identifies the Hebrews with the Habiru, a term that is now understood to refer generally to landless people of various tribes and nations who were reduced to the status of fugitives and refugees, mercenaries and slaves, throughout the ancient Near East.

  * When Jonathan and Saul are later slain in battle with the Philistines—actually, Saul chooses to take his own life to avoid capture by “these uncircumcised”!—David delivers a famous eulogy in which he declares of Jonathan: “Wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women”—a line that has inspired much speculation about David’s sexual orientation (2 Sam. 1:26). These words from Holy Scripture were recently invoked in a debate in the Knesset, the national legislature of Israel, over the rights of gay men and women under Israeli law. Yael Dayan, daughter of another war hero of Israel, succeeded in drawing the ire (and raising the blood pressure) of some of her fellow members of the Knesset by “outing” David; she argued, on the strength of David’s eulogy of Jonathan, that the two of them were gay lovers.

  * An Orthodox rabbi in Israel recently invoked the example of the slain Simeonite prince in condemning contemporary Jews who marry non-Jews. The subtext of the rabbi’s remarks was clear enough to his audience, and he was later criticized for indirectly calling for the murder of Jews in mixed marriages. So we can see that the Bible is not a dead letter in the debate over morality in our own world, especially in the land of the Bible!

  * No one who was spared the experience of the Holocaust is qualified to second-guess the character or conduct of the innocents who found themselves in the grip of Nazi Germany and its collaborators. We may speculate on the lessons of history, but we are not entitled to blame the victims of mass murder for the tragic fate that befell them, and it is not my intention to do so.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TAMAR AND JUDAH

  Then he asked the men of her place, saying: “Where is the harlot, that was at Enaim by the wayside?” And they said: “There hath been no harlot here.”

  —GENESIS 38:21

  Tamar reclined against the trunk of an ancient olive tree at a fork in the road near the village gate. Her face was artfully veiled, and between her breasts she wore a tiny cloth sack of balsam and myrrh that she had cadged from one of the village women. Beneath her robe of blue cotton, the afternoon heat began to raise a fine sweat on her skin. A scent—of myrrh, of lemons and oranges, of the private places of her body—suffused her garment like a perfume.

  She watched the road with half-closed eyes and waited for the man called Judah. She had heard that he was on his way to the festival at Timnah and she counted on catching his eye as he passed by. If her plan worked, he would not recognize Tamar as his own widowed daughter-in-law. Instead, Judah would take her for a common whore. And, more than that, his passion would be aroused and he would seek her favors in the nearby olive grove.

  On that, Tamar thought to herself, everything now depended.

  And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

  —GENESIS 38:1

  And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; and he took her, and went in unto her.

  —GENESIS 38:2

  Judah had wandered into the district a few years before, a lone Israelite among the native people of Canaan. He was seeking to put himself at a distance from his stern father, an Israelite chieftain called Jacob, and a gaggle of brothers who competed for the old man’s favor.

  The prospect of settling as a stranger among the Canaanites was more agreeable to Judah than staying in the household of his father. Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, had been set upon and killed by some wild beast while tending the old man’s flocks—or so the brothers had told Jacob when they returned from the distant hills with Joseph’s blood’ stained robe. The brothers consoled their father and competed with each other in displaying their grief, but they watched each other with cautious eyes: Would one of them tell the grieving father what had really happened in the place where Joseph disappeared?

  So Judah decamped from his father’s place in the hill country near Hebron and moved into the lowlands where the Canaanites tended their fields and their flocks. Near the Canaanite village of Adullam, Judah and a few of his men pitched their tents in a meadow that belonged to a villager named Hirah. When Hirah and his men approached the Israelite squatters, Judah hailed them with one hand raised in greeting and the other hand on the short sword that he wore on his hip.

  And she conceived, and bore a son; and he called his name Er. And she conceived again, and bore a son; and she called his name Onan. And she yet again bore a son, and called his name Shelah….

  —GENESIS 38 3-5

  As it turned out, Hirah did not seek to drive Judah and his band of Israelites out of the meadow. Indeed, he saw a chance to profit by the encounter. Like all newcomers, Hirah calculated, they would be willing seekers of advice and buyers of land and goods. So Hirah befriended the stranger and offered to sell him houses and fields and livestock, and Judah was soon the master of his own estate: a plot of open land, an orchard of lemon and orange trees, a flock of sheep and another of goats.

  Judah built a house, dug a well, raised a wall of rough stone to mark the boundaries of his land. The fields were planted with wheat, and the flocks were allowed to graze in the distant wadis. Before long, a few of Judah’s kinfolk heard of his good fortune, and their tents began to blossom like wildflowers around the compound. Judah boldly married a Canaanite woman, the daughter of a neighboring landowner named Shua. And Judah’s wife, a shy, soft-spoken woman known as Bathshua—daughter of Shua—gave him three sons.

  Soon enough, Judah was a chieftain in his own domain, surrounded by dutiful Israelites who sought his favor and protection even as they had once attended on Jacob. Judah sent gifts to his father’s house at Hebron to demonstrate his wealth—a Canaanite weaving, a vessel of worked silver, a ram or a ewe—but Judah preferred to stay within his own walls. He did not want to face his father with the burden of his guilty knowledge about the fate of Joseph, a slave in Egypt—or, perhaps more likely, dead.

  As time passed, Judah continued to rely on Hirah’s knowledge of the curious dialect spoken by the locals and his willingness to offer advice on their ways in everything from sheepshearing to well-drilling. But Judah learned that he was still at the mercy of the Israelite graybeards who had attached themselves to his compound and constantly reminded him of his duties as the chieftain of his own clan. “The Law decrees …” was their tiresome refrain, and they were constantly nudging him in one direction or another.

  “The worship of Baal is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” the elders insisted, and so Judah forbade the Canaanites who lived among them as servants and shepherds to sacrifice to their own gods.

  “The Canaanites are fornicators who seduce our young men and t
urn our young women into whores,” they cried, and Judah forbade the Israelites to visit the temple prostitutes who offered their bodies as altars for the worship of Astarte, the goddess of fertility, in the nearby Canaanite towns.

  “Your firstborn must marry so that the clan will survive into yet another generation,” the old men carped, reminding Judah that a grandson was all the more crucial because his own wife had ceased giving him sons. And so Judah cast about for a wife for his eldest son, the one called Er.

  Judah mentioned the matter to Hirah, of course, and soon his old friend appeared at Judah’s door with a match to propose.

  “I have found a suitable wife for your firstborn son,” Hirah said. “A flower of Canaan! And so your son may be assured of a willing woman with a fertile womb.”

  “Perhaps I should send back to my father’s house for a woman of our own people,” Judah mused. “That’s what the old men say.”

  “Your father’s spies!” Hirah hissed, saying out loud what Judah had always suspected. “If you allow your father to pick a wife for your son, you will put a spy in his bed. Far better that you should choose Tamar—”

  “Tamar?” asked Judah. The name meant “date palm,” and Judah was reminded of the oasis where he and his brothers had struck a bargain with the caravaners who carried Joseph off to Egypt.

  And Judah took a wife for Er his first-born, and her name was Tamar.