Parshat Vayishlach--old and new thoughts
Sorry I'm late, but Iwas so loaded up with assignments at the office last week that I didn't have time to read the parsha 'til after Kabbalat Shabbat/Maariv.
Here's a link to the basics.
Old thoughts
Here's a link to the basics.
Old thoughts
- Here's an oldie but goodie of mine, Vayishlach: A family of con artists benefits from a rape. Note especially the comment speculating that Dinah's rape may have been "statutory"--we don't really know how old she was, and the commenter speculates that she may actually have been a little girl going out to play.
- I don't blame Esau/Esav for coming with 400 men to meet his brother Jacob/Yaakov--see my Midrash Madness.
- Much has been made of the fact that Dinah went out alone, but much of the blame has been placed on Dinah herself. I'd flip that blame on its head: If it was dangerous for a female to go anywhere unescorted, why the heck could none of Dinah's 10 older brothers--or any of Yaakov's servants, if the boys were too young--find a free minute to accompany her? As my husband speculated, did Yaakov and/or his sons expect this poor girl/woman with no sisters to be content never to have any contact with other girls/women of her own age?
- In the commentary to the Hertz Chumash, Rabbi Joseph Hertz notes that B'reishit/Genesis chapter 34, verse 7 , " . . . he had wrought a vile deed in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter. . ." is problematic: " in Israel" . . . is strictly an anachronism," because Israel, referring here to the Jewish People, did not exist until after the Exodus from Egypt. Until then, we can talk about B'nei (the Children of) or Bet/Beit/Beth/pick-your-transliteration (the House of) Yisrael (Israel, meaning Jacob), but not about Yisrael/Israel as a people. Hertz fudges over the issue by describing "a vile deed in Israel" as " . . . the reflection of Scripture on the incident . . . " Huh? I call Documentary Hypothesis on this phrase, which, in my opinion, was clearly written later.
posted by Shira Salamone at 9:16 PM
17 Comments:
>>I call Documentary Hypothesis on this phrase, which, in my opinion, was clearly written later.
Of course it was written later on! Everyone will agree on that, because even traditional belief is only that Moses wrote it, not that it was written at the time of the story.
True, everyone will agree, Dov, but not necessarily for the same reason--with due respect, I don't accept the traditional belief that Moses/Moshe received the entire Torah, as we currently know it, on Sinai.
Could have been a transcription error, somewhere over the generations that "House of" got dropped...
That said, re: Dinah, look at Saudi Arabia today, that was life in the ancient near east, only without cars.
Shira,
Noted. I am merely pointing out that I don't see therefore why DH is a better explanation than Hertz's.
Thanks for the suggestion, Miami Al--I think a transcript error would, indeed, be quite possible.
Saudi Arabia is not alone in treating women as chattel, or even cattle--there was a story recently about a woman from a Muslim country--Afghanistan, if I remember correctly--who was jailed for the crime of adultery because she'd been raped by a married man, and told that she would be released only if she agreed to marry her rapist. She agreed, for the sake of the child born as a result of the rape, because she needed someone to help support the child.
This approach is similar to one that appears later in the Torah, in which a man who rapes (?has sex with?) an unmarried woman is required to marry her and is never permitted to divorce her. My guess is that Dinah, given the choice, might very well have chosen to stay with Shechem, since her chances of marrying anyone else were fairly poor after her rape. But of course, nobody bothered to ask Dinah, who was just another part of the family's property.
Dov, my main problem with Hertz's suggestion is that a book is an inanimate object, and therefore, cannot write a comment on itself--only a writer can write a comment on and/or in a book. Therefore, I don't think the idea of there being a " . . . reflection of Scripture on the incident . . . " makes any sense. Scripture can't write a comment--it's not a living being. If you wish to take a traditional approach, you could say, as you suggested, that HaShem and/or Moshe, rather than "The Redactor," wrote that reflection, but Hertz seems to think that a book can write about itself.
Shira,
I may be wrong, but I understand "a reflection of Scripture on the incident" just another way of saying "a reflection of Moses/God on the incident."
>>a man who rapes (?has sex with?) an unmarried woman is required to marry her and is never permitted to divorce her.
It is the woman's choice; that is what Scripture means over there. She has the right to demand that he marry her and never divorce her. Yes, that rule is actually there to protect women. Of course one could ask, which woman would ever want to live with the man who raped her? But one has to consider culture differences, and that not everyone always felt or feels the same way about everything.
Parenthetically, I doubt you would ever be able to come up with an argument that in a culture vacuum rape would be truly as bad a deed as it is today. Personally I think that the West's abhorrence to many of the ideals of these Islamic communities is borne out of ignorance, and a foolish pride in that the sentiments of our culture somehow define "true" morality.
Ok, Dov, maybe I should cut Rabbi Hertz some slack. :)
" . . . that rule is actually there to protect women." Certainly, in any culture in which any non-virgin female is considered "damaged goods" and not a fit partner for marriage, that would be true. That's why I suspect that Dinah would have chosen to stay with Shechem--who else would have been willing to marry her?
"I doubt you would ever be able to come up with an argument that in a culture vacuum rape would be truly as bad a deed as it is today."
A culture vaccuum would not make rape any less vile. The issue is whether we women are full-fledged and independent human beings who have a right to control what we do with, and what's done to, our own bodies, or whether women are just the property of men, to do with as they please. Rape has less to do with sex and more to do with power. Why else would a man rape a woman who's old enough to be his grandmother, if not just to prove that he's in control?
Shira,
Yes, but people don't just rape grandmothers, do they? That would be like saying that stealing is a crime of control because some people steal their kids' phones.
Shira, you are definitely applying modern cultural views to this, especially with the rape as control angle.
Rape as control works from an assumption that a woman owns her sexuality to use as she sees fit, that is a modern view.
The ANE view of a woman's virtue was that it belonged to her father (his to protect) until sold off to her husband who would thereafter own her sexuality. Rape wasn't a sex crime, it was a property crime, seen as damaging her father's property, and rendering her unfit for anyone else.
Yes rape was control, because by taking her virginity, she was not available to other men, just her assailant, but that control/crime was against her father, who was now unable to extract fair value for her. Forcing the assailant to marry her without the possibility of divorce meant that the rapist could no longer profit from his crime, since he now had to "pay in full." That removes the incentive to rape as conquest.
From a modern view of the woman has an independent entity, this is seen as backwards and primitive, but makes perfect sense from the values of the ANE (and modern Day middle east), and the story needs to be seen from that perspective.
Miami Al, you're right, but that doesn't help--I'm too much of a 21st-century western woman to ignore the offensiveness of the Ancient Near East and modern-day Middle Eastern perspective.
"Forcing the assailant to marry her without the possibility of divorce meant that the rapist could no longer profit from his crime, since he now had to "pay in full." That removes the incentive to rape as conquest."
In the context of the ANE and contemporary Asian Muslim perspective, that makes sense, but, as stated, I find the context insulting.
I find it difficult to understand why you would think that rape is even primarily a crime of control. A brief Google search reveals this article (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201104/is-rape-about-control-or-sex) which makes it clear that this isn’t a simple fact as you assert.
As an aside, a woman, in the Talmud, is not viewed as property of the father or the husband. This is explicit (kinyan issur v. kinyan haguf). The father does collect simple damages + 50 sheqel fine (a significant amount of money – cost of living for a year) because he does have rights in his daughter until she becomes an adult. Perhaps this offends your Western sensibilities, but it is certainly not the same as saying he owns her. At any rate, tza’ar (pain damages) and boshet (shame damages) are paid to her, because she owns her own body.
Maybe I'm being a bit simplistic, Dov.
As for the Talmud, our ancient sages deserve a lot of credit for trying to improve the status of women. The Torah sheh-BiCh'Tav, which is what I've been discussing in this post, seems to treat women primarily as property, in my opinion, which is why no one bothers to ask Dinah's (or her mother Leah's) opinion, but the Talmud/Torah sheh B'Al Peh does try to mitigate that approach.
Shira,
The status of women was DRASTICALLY higher by the age of the Talmud, in both Judea and Babylon, both composed in a more cosmopolitan age.
The status of women in the age of the Torah was much lower, in the tribal deserts of Egypt/Arabia.
But being shocked that bronze age women were not treated like late 20th Century women is extremely unreasonable. The Torah, read literally, was a VAST improvement in EVERYONE's status compared to the status in ancient Egypt.
Jewish law, from the receiving of Torah until the mid-20th century was an ever increasingly sensitive and egalitarian world. Fundamentalism on both sides (yours included) strips people of those rights and dignity.
I'm not shocked--I know that's the way it was. It just saddens me we have no record of Dinah's side of the story. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
I'm a bit surprised that the status of humans in general was even lower in ancient Egypt than among the ancestors of the Jewish People, but perhaps I shouldn't be.
I'm certainly happy that the Jewish world and (much of?) the world in general is a more egalitarian place today.
Dinah's position, per Torah law, was vastly superior to the position of the Afghanistan woman that made the news for being in prison until she agreed to marry the rapist, or the rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to lashes for being in the car with one of the many men that violently raped her that night.
The Torah wasn't given in a vacuum. We aren't given the concept of marriage, we're given the rules governing it, presumably the Israelites had marriages in Egypt, and this modified those arrangements.
"Dinah's position, per Torah law, was vastly superior . . . "
Thank HaShem for large favors!
"The Torah wasn't given in a vacuum. We aren't given the concept of marriage, we're given the rules governing it, . . ."
True. It's always important to consider the cultural context.
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