The Defiling of Dinah

Following Jacob, the next major figure in Genesis is Joseph.  Joseph is famous for having a fabulous coat and being a really good dream interpreter, for being buddies with the Pharaoh and being portrayed by Donny Osmond on Broadway.  It's without a doubt the gentlest story in the first few books of the Bible, which is probably why it had to be preceded by the disturbing tale of his seldom-mentioned sister, Dinah.

This came up in my image search for "Dinah," so this is what we'll use for mental imagery.

Dinah drew the eye of a prince named Shechem, the son of a guy with the comic-strip worthy name of Hamor the Hivite.  Shechem was stricken by Dinah's ... beauty?  Charisma?  Razor-sharp wit?

Huge, soft, round ... uh, lips?

Genesis ain't tellin', so we'll just assume she had a nice ass or something.  As is typical of it, the Bible isn't much for romance, skipping over the foreplay to get right to the boning:

"And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the country, saw her; and he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.  And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spake kindly unto the damsel." - Genesis 34:2-3

So Shechem cleaved unto her and had a jolly old time with her.  If you're wondering what Dinah's thoughts on any of this are, by the way, prepare to be disappointed.  We never get to know, so don't even ask.  The Bible's view on women is mostly that they're big, meaty tanks for two ovaries and a uterus, and that if they're not birthing a son or pleasing their manfolk, they better damn well be making sammiches.

Anyway, because we don't know Dinah's stance, the above passage is popularly interpreted as meaning she'd been raped.  Personally, I don't feel that all the loving and gentle words set a very rapey atmosphere.  In fact, it looks to me as though the idea of Dinah being raped was put forth as a lame excuse for what comes next.  To me, and maybe this is just me here, it sounds like Dinah and Shechem were involved in a sexy, illicit love affair.

Illicit, you say?  Yes - you see, Dinah couldn't marry Shechem because Shechem hadn't been circumcised, and in the Bible that little flap of dick skin makes all the difference.  If Shechem wasn't circumcised, it meant he wasn't Hebrew, and if he wasn't Hebrew, well ... Dinah may as well be fucking a llama as far as God is concerned.  And we all know how God feels about llama-boinking.  (He hates it.  Although he also hates incest and polygamy and we've already seen that, so what does he know?)

So I'm sure by this point our ovaries are collectively bursting with the need to know what happens to these starcrossed lovers.  Obviously it's nothing good, but what is this tragedy that befalls them?  Do they take their own lives as a result of their families' hostility, ala Romeo and Juliet or Pyramus and Thisbe?  Are they sabotaged by a jealous rival, like Tristan and Isolde?  Perhaps some great, tragic violence tears them apart, like Abelard and Heloise.

The truth is ... weeeeeeeeeeell ...

Shechem, head over heels for this random Jewish chick with the presumably great ass, goes straight to his father and demands that he find a way for him and Dinah to be wed.  Hamor is surprisingly okay with this, and he toddles off to talk to Jacob about getting these lovebirds hitched:

"Now Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his sons were with his cattle in the field: and Jacob held his peace until they were come.  And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him.  And the sons of Jacob came in from the field when they heard it: and the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter: which thing ought not to be done." - Genesis 34:5-6

Oh, Jacob.  Did punching God in the face and raping genetics leave you with a big, empty void in your life?  You have nothing left to accomplish, so you've just become a bitter old man?  Or did the fact that you had to do fourteen years of hard labour to marry Rachel leave you with a skewed idea of what courtship should be?  Come on Jacob, I know it's in your nature but try not to be a dick.

At this point, Hamor and Shechem state their case.  Hamor explains that his son is in love with Dinah, and that such a match would mean the unification of their houses.  He invites Jacob and sons to live on his land, trade with his people, and - hell, why not? - marry all his daughters!  Why have one wedding when you can have dozens!  Champagne and cake for all!

"And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife.  And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you.  And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein." - Genesis 34:8-10

Shechem even steps in to tell Jacob he'll do literally anything for the crusty old fart's favour to win Dinah's hand.  Jacob's sons, however, refuse (wait - since when was it their decision?) and point out that Dinah can't marry a man who hasn't been circumcised.  Well, that's no problem for Shechem, is it?  He just promised he'd do anything for Dinah.  A quick snip-snip, a few days of recovery and - bam! - problem solved!  They can get married, and we can all move on with our li--

"But in this will we consent unto you: if ye will be as we be, that every male of you be circumcised; then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people." - Genesis 34:15-16

Oh.  Well.  That is, um, quite the demand there, Jacob's sons-who-apparently-speak-as-one-entity.  So every male of the entire population has to be circumcised?  Why?  Just in case Dinah breaths some bad dick-skin air?  Just in case she's attacked by a passing foreskin?  Is that it?  Because seriously, what the fuck?  That's like if the American president's daughter wanted to marry an English prince, but couldn't until half of Britain had their appendixes removed, or some equally pointless and painful surgery.

What the fuck?

The only way I can justify this is that it's some kind of bizarrely elaborate bluff, an impossible demand that they know Shechem could never fulfill to spare them the embarrassment of outright saying no.  It's like when that friend you don't really like asks you to come to their thing, and you tell them you will just as soon as you're done counting the stars and convincing teenage girls that Edward Cullen is a creepy stalker.

And yet, likely to the huge fucking surprise of Jacob's sons, Hamor and Shechem just go, "eh, okay," and get to work.  They personally oversee the circumcision of every one of their male subjects.  No word on what the men themselves thought of this.

You want me to what because of why?

But my guess is that they probably didn't enjoy it.

Well, shit, guys.  What now?  Shechem actually went out and circumcised every dude under his regime.  The gig is up.  I think you might actually have to cave in and let your sister marry hi--

"And when it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren. took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males." - Genesis 34:25

...

...

...

What.

What.  Just - just - wait.  Wait.  So while ... all the circumcised dudes are resting ... two guys - two guys, like one more than one guy - sneak into the city and ... slaughter the entire male population in one day?  And they're just in too much dick-pain to defend themselves even a little?  From two guys in broad daylight?  I just ... what?

"And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son  with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went out." - Genesis 34:26.

I ... uh ...

"The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister." - Genesis 34:27

Hm ... well ...

"They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field.  And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and all their wives they took captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house."  - Genesis 34:28-29

Uh ... huh.  So I guess this counts as a tragic ending, then.  I might even call it overkill.  Though to be fair, combination deceit, genocide, plundering and enslavement is one way to take care of your sister's promiscuity.  Like how nuclear warheads are one way to take care of termites, or decapitation is one way to take care of a cavity.  Still, I can't shake the feeling it might be a little much.

The moral of the story seems to be, "do not piss off Israelites."  They will apparently fuck up you, your family, and literally everyone you know, enslave your women, kidnap your children, steal your sheep and anally rape all semblance of reason and sanity in the name of getting back at you.

Here's one of Jacob's sons and your wife after you tell him to keep his dog from crapping on your lawn.

Somehow I feel it makes them look a little ... unreasonable.  Jacob even says as much, chastising his sons for making him seem like a douchebag in front of all the other tribes (which really is going to far, Jacob.  I mean, what did you expect them to do?  Just let your daughter get married to a dedicated prince who beat insurmountable odds to win her hand like some kind of - oh, wait, that sounds kind of like you, doesn't it?  It does.  Yeah.  At least he could recognize the woman he was in love with and didn't marry someone else by mistake.  Dick.)  This is what really baffles me about this whole story.  Perhaps it was put there to illustrate the prowess of the Israelites.  But no - Jacob himself admits it was the wrong thing to do.  So what is it doing here?

Then, in the verse that puts the button on the whole thing, the brothers look at one another and ...

"And they said, Should he deal with our sister as with an harlot?" - Genesis 34:31

And that's it.  That's where it ends.  They ponder whether they should stone their sister to death for running off with Shechem, and the story just ends.   It's like whatever sicko wrote this story was expecting everyone to have a good laugh and then the scene to fade to credits sitcom-style.  (As a side note, wouldn't it be so much worse if you take the point of view that Dinah was raped, and they're still considering giving her harlot treatment?)  Do we learn what happened to Dinah?  No.  Do we learn what she thought of all this?  No.  Is she ever mentioned again?  No.  Does God play an part in this story, or does this story add in any way to the Genesis narrative?  No and hell no, other than maybe to make it more disturbing.

Stories like this are probably the strangest part about reading the Bible.  They fly out of left field, seem to cut off in the middle, have nothing to add or establish for later stories and are just generally twisted.  The most bizarre part, I think, is that somebody had to put them there.  When a bunch of Romans sat around and decided what was going in the very first Bible from the original Hebrew text, somebody among them must have pointed to the story of Dinah and said, "That!  That is certainly relevant and not at all deserving of being cut!  We can definitely benefit as a religion and a culture by preserving this story in our holy book!"  And everyone else there must have agreed with him.

Of course, the fact that they were Romans couldn't have had anything to do with it.

Genesis Presents: More Fun With Incest! (Starring the Only Righteous Man in Sodom)

Every once in a while, the Bible likes to throw in a story so insane, so debauched, so completely and utterly disgusting that it outshines all of the other craziness around it like a corpse in a hoarder's basement.  You may have thought that Sodom's city-wide angel gang-rape was that story for Genesis.  You would be wrong.  That honor goes to the story immediately following Sodom's destruction, the delicately titled Sin of Lot's Daughters.

You may remember Lot as the guy who was unfortunate enough to have the entire city of Sodom show up at his door demanding he bring his angelic houseguests outside to be ass-raped in the street.  The reason he had angels staying at his house in the first place was because he was the only righteous man in the city, and so he got to be escorted out of Sodom before God shat on it.  Take a guess at how long that righteousness lasts.  Now half it, because this is the Old Testament and people are a little messed up by default.

Lot and his two daughters, whom you may remember as the virginal young girls he offered to the rapists in place of the angels (stellar guy, this Lot), shack up in a cave after the annihilation of their home.  Things are a little boring living in a cave, and so the girls want to find some way to entertain themselves.  Understandably, one girl turns to the other and says:

"Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father." - Genesis 19:32

Man, kids in 3000 BCE, am I right?  Always a handful, getting their parents smashed so they can sex them up in the night and -- what the flying fuck, Bible?  Just ... just what the fuck?

So this girl, who can't be more than fifteen, gets Lot so drunk he literally doesn't notice her having sex with him:

"And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose." - Genesis 19:33

Then, the next night, the younger daughter (who must therefore be less than 15) does the same thing:

"And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose." - Genesis 19:35.

And if you're thinking this is all to teach some kind of valuable lesson about sin, this is clearly your first time reading Zero Contradictions.  The story ends like this:

"Thus were both the daughters of lot with child by their father.  And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.  And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Ben-ammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day." - Genesis 19:36-38

That's it.  There's no divine punishment, no moral to the story.  In fact, this is the last time Lot appears in Genesis.  It just ends with them naming their sons/brothers and the reassurance that a couple of ancient Israel's neighbouring nations were founded on incest.

Now, I want to ask a few questions:

A) What the hell kind of father is okay with getting blackout drunk with his two teenage daughters?

B) What the hell kind of human being, even when drunk, doesn't notice that they're having sex with their own children?

C) What the hell kind of messed-up teenager wants to rape her father (since that's what it is really - rape) so she can get pregnant with her own sibling?

D) What kind of fucked up city was Sodom that the first thing the most righteous man living there does upon his escape is knock his own daughters up?

E) Whey the hell do they have so much wine in a goddamn cave?  Is that all they grabbed when they were leaving Sodom?  Leave all of our belongings, but save the wine?

All right, so maybe I understand wanting to save the wine, but what about the rest?  I can forgive things like God forgetting he's omnipresent and Cain magically having a wife, but this is one story so inexplicably awful that it needs a reason to exist.

I did look, and the best explanation I could find was the Catholic Encyclopedia's insistence that the Israelites just thought the Moabites and Ammonites were such terrible people that they created this myth to explain why.  So yeah, there is really no reason for it to have survived in a holy text to the present day.  It's just a disgusting, awful story whose only real purpose is to remind us that God has a twisted sense of humour.  And really, there are enough of those as it is.

The Sin of Sodom

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of those terrible myths of mass destruction that conservative religious folk like to whip out as a cautionary tale, waving it grotesquely around in the faces of us dirty liberals until we finally agree with them just so they'll tuck it away.  Why, with all of our sick, heretical ideas like religious tolerance, gay rights, legal abortions, racial equality and separation of church and state, we're practically asking God to take a big, fiery crap on us.  In fact, according to some (crazy) people, we've already unleashed the floodgates of diarrhea hellfire and it's only a matter of time before God gets serious.

But just what exactly did Sodom do that was so terrible, so mind-numbingly awful that God felt the need to personally obliterate them?  "It's sodomy, you clueless pinko!" you cry, leaping from your hummer with a Bible in one hand and a half-dead illegal immigrant in the other.  "Homosexuals were taking over!  Don't you know that?  It's got the sin right in the name!"

Actually, it's the sin that's named after the city, hypothetical right-wing extremist, but ... you know what?  Never mind.  Indeed, the knee-jerk reaction is to look at the name and decide that Sodom must have been filled with men having loving, consensual relations with one another all the goddamn time, and that God was just playing favourites when he smote Sodom over, say, Egypt or China or India or Sparta.  He's just kind of a jerk like that.

But no.  That's not the case at all.  The real story, if anyone religious could be bothered  to read it, is so terrible that when I first read it, I poked my eyes out and renounced society to live as a hermit in the wilderness.  (I got better.  Then I realized there are no Skittles in the wilderness, so I came back.)  The real sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is so awful that, were I a celestial being, I'd probably smite the holy bejeezus out of them too.  They'd be lucky that fire and brimstone was all they got off with.  "Enough with the suspense!" you cry.  "Tell us what it is!"  Well, hypothetical reader, the sin of Sodom was ...

Angel gang-rape.

Not "angel" like David Boreanaz, or "angel" like a baseball player from LA.  Angels.  Harps and halos and feathery wings.  The kinds of things that grandmas collect ceramics of.  A group of people wanted to rape those in the butt.  Let the sheer awfulness of that sink in for a minute.

I suppose I should offer some backstory.  To be fair, God has already decided that Sodom is going down in flames when the angels arrive in the city.  (We can only imagine what their previous sins were.)  They're there to escort the only good man in all of Sodom, Lot, out of the city before shit starts going down.  The angels are prepared to spend all night on the streets, but Lot insists they come inside and kick up their holy feet:

"And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face turned toward the ground; And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early; and go on your ways." - Genesis 19:1-2

There's a bit of back-and-forth about not wanting to inconvenience Lot (maybe they were molting) and Lot insisting that they stay (he could use the feathers to make history's softest down pillow, or something), but eventually the angels agree to come inside.  Then ... this happens:

"But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night?  bring them out unto us, that we may know them." - Genesis 19:4-5

"Knowing" is the Bible's adorably quaint way of referring to sex.  So basically, this group of people show up at Lot's house in the middle of the night and ask him to bring his newly arrived house guests out into the street so that they can take turns raping them out in the open air.  Now, discerning readers may have noticed that this is a rather large group of people.  In fact, angel rape is such an event in Sodom that "all the people from every quarter" turned out to get in on the action.

Math time!  Let's assume that Sodom is a relatively modest city population-wise (so the numbers don't get too horrifying).  In the ancient Middle East, that's probably about 2000 people.  For a working number, we'll assume that 25% of that 2000 people are children under 15, which is close to what it is now (27%).  That leaves 1500 adults.  Now, only the men of the city are going to be raping, and assuming that the population of men and women are more-or-less equal, that means these angels are about to be raped 750 times each.  And that's a low estimate.  You may poke out your eyes and commence screaming.

For those of you not blind and insane, let's continue.  Oh, you thought that was the end?  Hardly.  So every man in the city shows up at Lot's house demanding forced angelic buttsex.  What the hell do you do in this situation?  Hand them over?  Beg the angry mob to leave?  Point out that what they're trying to do is more cartoonishly evil than burning down a puppy orphanage?  Well, Lot is the only good man in Sodom, so surely he has some wise words to disperse the crowd:

"And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.  Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof." - Genesis 19:6-8

Oh, of course.  Lot offers up his two young daughters to the crowd, asking that they rape them instead of his house guests.  ... Wait ...

Yep, this city is fucked up.

Anyway, if any of you haven't yet left this post to mutilate yourselves and/or retire to live in the woods, the mob refuses Lot's offer and the angels have to step in and strike them all blind.  A lovely end to a lovely story.

So the moral of today's tale is this: don't believe everything you hear from right-wing conservative nutjobs about the Bible, and if you see an angel and your first thought is to rape it, you totally deserve to go down in a horrible apocalypse of fire and brimstone.