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47  eight Biblical Sex Parashat Vayishlach (Genesis 32:4–36:43) David Brodsky People in premodern societies understood the world in fundamentally different ways from those of us living in contemporary Western cultures. As philosopher Michel Foucault and others have shown, these variations in worldview are often rooted in changes in the meaning of language or in the very lack of a word or concept in the premodern world. Language is not just the mode by which we express ourselves to others; it is also the way we formulate our thoughts to ourselves. A language’s lack of a term for a concept, therefore, may be indicative of more than just the difficulty in expressing the concept; it may be indicative of the lack of the concept in general. For example, as scholars have shown, the lack of any term for homosexuality in the premodern world suggests that such cultures lacked the binary homo-/heterosexuality in which contemporary Western cultures operate.1 In Parashat Vayishlach, we encounter a similar cultural gap between our contemporary understanding and the worldview of the premodern societies in which the Biblical narratives are embedded. Vayishlach describes what has become known as the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), but the text offers us no precise term for rape, a linguistic anomaly indicative of a gap between modern and ancient Biblical and rabbinic understandings of rape. In Genesis 34, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, “went out to see the daughters of the land.” She went to meet other women of the area in which her family had recently settled. In the process, a man of a neighboring community, named Shechem, “lay with her and oppressed her” (va-yishkav ‘otah va-ye‘annehah). Shechem then came to desire Dinah, so his father, the prince of the region, negotiated with Jacob and Dinah’s brothers for Shechem to marry her. The brothers were scandalized by what had happened, a disgrace (nevalah) that “ought not be done in Israel,” though precisely what this scandal was is never defined. Readers generally assume that Dinah’s brothers found her rape to be the disgrace, but I argue that the real scandal was Shechem’s having sex with Dinah without her father’s permission. In either case, the brothers then tricked Shechem and his people into circumcising themselves and joining the Israelite community, only to swoop down on them while they were recovering from the circumcision and slaughter them all. The story leaves the reader with many questions, not least of which is whether Dinah was raped. In the context of “he lay with her,” of course, one would be naive to assume that the “oppression” was not a reference to rape. And yet the Hebrew root ‘-n-h (in va- 48 David Brodsky ye‘annehah), even in the grammatical stem in which it is found here, can be simply a generic term that can mean “to humble” or “to degrade” someone. Although this “humbling” is connected by the text to the sexual interaction, the sex itself could have been consensual. Nevertheless, we assume that the author of the story intended to state that Dinah was raped. The question of whether Dinah was raped points to a larger problem for modern readers of this ancient story: Biblical Hebrew lacks a word that is specifically or even primarily devoted to expressing the concept of rape. Thus, even if the author wished to tell us that Dinah was raped, he or she lacked the language to do so in a clear and succinct way. The task for us will be to determine if and how these linguistic differences (between Biblical Hebrew and modern English) represent differences in understanding of the notion of rape. In addition, although the rabbis of the Talmudic Period used a different root (‘-n-s) to express the concept of rape, they, too, lacked a term that was explicitly or even primarily devoted to this concept. Although Biblical and rabbinic sources lacked a term that was exclusive for rape (their terms for rape were generic for force or degradation), this difference from modern parlance does not imply that the authors of these texts had no notion of rape. Rather, their understanding of rape differed from that of the modern English-speaking reader. In both Biblical and rabbinic literature it is quite clear that the victim of rape is precisely that, a victim, and he or she is, therefore, completely innocent of any wrongdoing and not deserving of any punishment. This...

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