What do you do when the cause is righteous, and the action is atrocity? When the perpetrator faces zero consequences, and the only available justice is violent? Questions that every generation of this world has faced, and which emerge from Genesis 34.
Whereas the first part of the chapter leaves us angry, the second leaves us confused as well as angry. Why is God so silent? Jacob was a deceiver, but his sons went further in deceiving the entire city of Shechem. They kill every man in the city as they recover from being circumcised, steal from their homes and take their women and children. The revenge for the rape of their sister, Dinah, sits at one end of the extreme and at the other sits her father Jacob, who seems only worried about reputational damage to himself. The reply from his sons is a question left unanswered; it just sits there, lingering for a few millennia.
“Their proposal seemed good to Hamor and his son Shechem. 19 The young man, who was the most honoured of all his father’s family, lost no time in doing what they said, because he was delighted with Jacob’s daughter. 20 So Hamor and his son Shechem went to the gate of their city to speak to the men of their city. 21 “These men are friendly toward us,” they said. “Let them live in our land and trade in it; the land has plenty of room for them. We can marry their daughters and they can marry ours. 22 But the men will agree to live with us as one people only on the condition that our males be circumcised, as they themselves are. 23 Won’t their livestock, their property and all their other animals become ours? So let us agree to their terms, and they will settle among us.” 24 All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male in the city was circumcised. 25 Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. 26 They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. 27 The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city wheretheir sister had been defiled. 28 They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. 29 They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses. 30 Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me obnoxious to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land. We are few in number, and if they join forces against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed.” 31 But they replied, “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” (Genesis 34 v 18-31)
The story is abhorrent. The argument over the heavy revenge from the brothers and the selfish response from Jacob drowns out the voice of the silence of Dinah and the male population of Shechem and the enslaved women and children, who were innocent of her rape.
The chapter ends with an unanswered question. It’s like a case study. The truth is, the situation of collateral damage is continually played out throughout history. In the Russia–Ukraine war, already over 3,000 children have died according to the UN, but it agrees that the number is likely to be far higher. On February 28th in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, 168 girls were killed by a strike on a military compound nearby that went terribly wrong, a ‘rogue strike’—filed under collateral damage. But 168 girls are gone. At least 36,000 Iranian protesters during the January 8-9th nationwide protests never came home, killed by their own security forces. Such reports are in everyone’s historical experience, and all are invited into the silence of the unanswered question of v. 31.
God does not appear to condemn the massacre at Shechem or vindicate it. The chapter ends with an unanswered question. The writer leaves us with a father anxious about the retribution caused by his sons, who reduce justice to revenge. The unanswered question follows the actions, which carry their own unanswered question, which should be given over the lifeless bodies of the innocents: Should a righteous cause automatically sanctify every action taken in its name? The story doesn’t give us an answer, but it refuses to let us look away from the question.
In a story where Shechem faced zero consequences for being a rapist. His father was trying to benefit economically from this violation. Dinah’s father says nothing about the atrocity to her. So her brothers believed that the only justice for being violated was violent justice, to take matters into their own hands and become the judge of the story. We are left hanging, questioning who was right and who was wrong. The Bible doesn’t help us. The story is written with uncomfortable precision. Who is right and who is wrong? God knows is our answer.
Missions Paul 