Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Vayishlach, tells the story of Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s daughter, who, after moving to a Canaanite city with her family, attempts to explore the local community on her own. While Dinah is “out visiting the daughters of the land,” a Hivite prince, Shechem, notices her, and proceeds to “take her, lay with her, and humble her [vayaaneha].” Just after their encounter, Shechem speaks kindly to Dinah, professes his profound love for her, and seeks permission for the two to marry.

Later commentators by and large read the verb “vayaaneha,” which can also be translated as “afflicted” or “oppressed,” as indicating assault. This characterization is supported by the reaction of Dinah’s brothers, who are horrified to learn of her encounter with Shechem: “The men were distressed and very angry, because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter—a thing not to be done.” In their emotional state, they carry out a murderous rampage against Shechem and his entire city, after which they seize Dinah and remove her from Shechem’s home. With the exception of one brief mention in a long list of genealogies at the end of Breishit, Dinah is never again named in the Torah.

Dinah’s saga—as well as her silence—has spoken to generations of feminist interpreters who have expanded upon a minority view within the tradition that reads “vayaaneha” as simply describing a sexual encounter, including one that is consensual. These scholars also point to the text’s assertion that Shechem did indeed love Dinah, and to the tenderness and kindness with which the text notes he addresses her in the verse following their encounter. Inspired by the text’s glaring omission in describing how Dinah felt, several feminist commentators have similarly suggested that Shechem and Dinah had a true, loving, and consensual sexual relationship—one that she actively chose and pursued of her own accord.

This reading is perhaps most famously expressed in Anita Diamant’s 1997 feminist novel, The Red Tent, in which Diamant imagines these events from Dinah’s perspective. The Red Tent gives voice to Dinah’s love for Shechem, along with her despair at his murder and her anger toward her brothers’ violent rampage, which robbed them of a life together. Other more recent texts have also taken up this interpretation: In Dirshuni, a collection of contemporary feminist midrashim, the scholar Dini Deutsch Frankel rereads and rewrites Dinah’s story, even changing her name from Dinah (literally meaning “her rules”) to Dini (“my rules,” and intriguingly also the author’s own name). Frankel also shifts the language of the verse in question by playing with the Torah’s lack of vocalization: The text notes that Shechem “vayishkav otah,” literally meaning “he lay her,” in which the word “otah” figures Dinah as a direct object of Shechem’s behavior. However, because the Torah has no vowels, the same letters could be read as “itah,” which would mean that Shechem lay “with her,” a description of an action undertaken together rather than done by one party to another.

Frankel’s retelling emphasizes that the only moment of force in this story happens when Dinah’s brothers take her, unwillingly, from Shechem. Their violent retaliation and hostile kidnapping of their own sister is seemingly justified, for in their minds Dinah’s choice simply could not have been her own. In patriarchal systems, when subjugated individuals act of their own agency, they are often seen as being “taken” or “seized” by a nefarious external source. Consider, for example, how contemporary anti-trans rhetoric imagines that trans men and boys are just young “girls” who have been seized and “seduced” by strategically planted, dangerous ideologies that convince them to transition. Indeed, knowledge and relationships do take something from patriarchy, but it is not the subjugated people themselves—it is control and domination. With this in mind, we must be open to a reading in which Shechem did not “take” Dinah, but rather, Dinah herself took back her own agency and autonomy from her brothers. They responded in the way dominating powers tend to respond when power is taken from them—with unrelenting violence under the guise of protection.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.