Part 5 (1/2)

In any case, Dinah's twelve brothers had a nasty trick up their sleeves. While the Hivite men's newly unsheathed swords were healing up-or as the Bible puts it, ”on the third day, when they were still in pain”-two of the brothers, Simeon and Levi, came around to settle a score.1 The Hivite men, stumbling around cupping their codpieces, were unable to wield their swords literally or metaphorically. Simeon and Levi slaughtered all the men of the city. The other brothers did not partic.i.p.ate directly in the ma.s.sacre but were happy to plunder the victims, seizing all their property, including their wives and children.

Back home, Pa.s.sive Jake heard the news and was horrified. He complained to Simeon and Levi that their actions would bring trouble to him from the other Canaanite peoples. But the boys replied that they could not allow Shechem to get away with treating their sister like a wh.o.r.e. With brothers like that, no wonder Dinah wasn't married yet.

Bed 'Em and Wed 'Em Careful reading of this story raises a lot of questions, many of which are addressed in a literary way in Anita Diamant's Hebrew-chick-lit novel The Red Tent. Did Shechem actually rape Dinah? If so, why did he fall in love with her and want to marry her? Usually rapists view their victims as objects rather than long-term partners. If he was in love with her, why didn't he try to marry her through regular channels? Was he really that impulsive and/or h.o.r.n.y?

What about Dinah? What were her feelings? Was she also in love with Shechem? And what about Jacob? Why so laid back? Didn't he care about his only daughter? Why would he even consider allowing her to marry a man who raped her, if that's what Shechem did?

We think there's more than the usual Genesis bizarreness going on here, which is why we were gratified to find a theory from Joseph Fleishman, a Bible scholar who teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Fleishman thinks the wedding disaster was due to a clash of cultures between the Canaanites and Jacob's family.2 He argues that the Canaanites, among whom were included the Hivites, practiced ”marriage by abduction.” According to this custom, a groom did not ask the bride's father for consent beforehand, but rather kidnapped her with the intent of marriage and then consummated the marriage by having s.e.x with her. (This is still quite common in Arkansas.) Any negotiations between the groom's family and the bride's family took place after the marriage was consummated. And such negotiations were conducted not for the purpose of changing the marriage but to establish a proper relations.h.i.+p between the two families, so as to decide who got the mules and the back forty.

Interpreting the story of Dinah in this light, Fleishman holds that Shechem did not rape Dinah. The verb ”took,” he says, has a dual function.3 It means that he physically kidnapped her. But it also refers to marriage. Therefore, when he ”lay with her,” Shechem's purpose was not to rape her but to make her his wife. Shechem's looking a lot better in this light. The third verb in this verse, which states that he ”humiliated” her (the NRSV translates the second and third verbs together as ”he lay with her by force”), refers to Dinah's sense of shame at having been bedded before being wedded, which seriously damaged her reputation in the local True Love Waits Club. Shechem was truly in love with Dinah, and to soothe her feelings of humiliation he ”spoke tenderly” to her (literally, ”spoke to the heart”).4 He did not view her as a temporary s.e.x object but as his future wife. This is also why Dinah stayed in Shechem's house after their s.e.xual tryst.5 According to Fleishman, Shechem's actions were an acceptable way of marrying outside of one's own clan or tribe in Canaanite culture. That is why Shechem's father, Hamor, treated the situation matter-of-factly and went to negotiate with Jacob in a businesslike manner. The problem was that Jacob and his sons weren't real keen on marriage by abduction. Jacob's silence suggests that he felt he had no choice but to accept the marriage post facto, as long as the Hivites were willing to undergo circ.u.mcision. As a stranger living in the midst of Canaanite society, what else could he do? But his sons felt differently. They saw Shechem's treatment of their sister as a serious violation of their family's honor, and they took revenge like a riled-up bunch of McCoys.

Family Feud Fleishman's interpretation gracefully answers the questions raised about this story. It accounts for Shechem's desire to marry Dinah after having s.e.x with her. It also explains why Jacob may have been willing to allow the marriage. It even hints at what Dinah might have been feeling. These explanations make Fleishman's idea very attractive.

Furthermore, the idea of marriage by abduction has historical precedent, not least of which is the rich textual evidence found in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, MGM's 1954 musical. The musical, loosely based on Stephen Vincent Benet's story ”Sobbin' Women,” tells of brothers who kidnapped women and took them back to their cabin in the Oregon mountains. If you like acrobatic dance and a lot of politically incorrect gender dialogue, this is your kind of movie.

But the sobbin' women story actually goes back further to another politically incorrect bunch, the ancient Greeks. Plutarch, the leading playwright of his day, wrote a story called ”The Rape of the Sabine Women.”6 It tells how the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, got wives for the stinky, uncouth group of men who inhabited his city. Romulus proclaimed a celebration and invited many of Rome's neighbors, including the Sabines. As the celebration was about to begin, he signaled the young Roman men to come into the crowd and carry away women of their choice, kind of like spring break in Daytona Beach.

There are other stories of this nature from ancient Greece, including the well-known myth of Persephone's capture by Hades. There is even a story about marriage by abduction elsewhere in the Bible.7 But is there any evidence outside of this story that marriage by abduction was a custom in Canaanite society? Not really. The ancient stories on which the idea of marriage by abduction are based, such as the one about the Sabine women and the one in Judges about the women at s.h.i.+loh, describe the practice as a last resort at a time of emergency. There is in fact no clear evidence of a regular practice like this in antiquity, including among the Canaanites. It is a conjecture on Fleishman's part. His interpretation is plausible, but by no means certain.

So, one has to ask whether Fleishman's theory is any more likely than the more traditional understanding of this story. The answer is, probably not. What happened in the story can be explained by human nature alone. Shechem's rape of Dinah may have been a kind of ancient ”date rape.” When he got her alone (the story doesn't explain how), he went too far. But he still had feelings for her. Maybe she had feelings for him as well. So he kept her with him, planning to marry her. Shechem got his father to negotiate with Jacob for Dinah's hand. It was not the usual custom, but Shechem was a spoiled prince and accustomed to having his way. Hamor was willing to offer great riches to Jacob to make his son happy. He also had designs on the property of Jacob and his sons. But Jacob's sons refused to be appeased and concocted a plan of revenge. The offense they took was only partly to do with the treatment of their sister. They saw Shechem's behavior also as a personal affront.

Fleishman's postulation of an unproven Canaanite custom isn't really necessary to explain any of this. This story probably doesn't depict a clash of cultures but rather a young couple's relations.h.i.+p that got off on the very wrong foot.

18.

Was Lot a s.e.xually Abusive Father?

WE COME NOW to another Bible story that, were it made into a movie, would shock and repulse even today's jaded audiences. The main character, Lot, is one of those antiheroes. It's painful to watch as he makes one bad decision after another, his life literally crumbling around him.

One of the most repugnant scenes involves Lot's daughters and the disgraceful thing they did with their drunken father in a remote cave. But the question we take up here is, who did what to whom exactly? And what might Lot's story be telling us about the sordid desires of men who lived back then? Proceed with caution. This one gets ugly.

There Goes the Neighborhood Lot was Abraham's nephew, which is perhaps the only reason he got any ink in the Good Book to begin with. The main part of his story pops up in Genesis 19, which tells of Lot's family's skin-of-their-teeth escape from wicked Sodom and Gomorrah. Those cities, as fundamentalists love to remind us, then took a flaming sulfur bath courtesy of G.o.d's heavenly spigot.

But back up a few hours to when Sodom and Gomorrah were your typical anything-goes kind of towns. In walked two visitors, but these were not your typical wandering wayfarers. They were angels on a mission from G.o.d, not unlike the Blues Brothers several millennia later. The angels had come from heaven to see firsthand just how depraved things had gotten in these towns, whose stinky reputations had caused an outcry in heaven itself.

Lot knew (that's a pun) the town well enough to know (there it is again) that the two strangers might as well have hung FRESH MEAT signs around their necks. After inviting the angels-in-disguise to his home, he ”urged them strongly” not to spend the night in the town square.1 The angels complied, and sure enough, the other men of the city began buzzing around Lot's house like flies on a dung heap, demanding that he bring out his visitors so they could rape (literally ”know”) them.

Ever the dutiful host, Lot begged his neighbors to back off and then offered them his daughters instead of his guests. Why he did this, we don't know. Perhaps he had skipped a few parenting cla.s.ses. But it's possible that ancient readers would not have viewed this with the same horror as we do. They might have thought Lot was simply being a good host. In any case, the men of Sodom didn't want Lot's daughters. They wanted the new guys.

As it turned out, the angels didn't need Lot to protect them because, of course, they had angel powers. They struck the h.o.r.n.y gang blind and urged Lot and his family to escape. When Lot dallied, perhaps grabbing the silverware and photo alb.u.ms, they literally pushed him out of the city, telling him to flee. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters set course for a small town nearby named Zoar. Lot's sons-in-law stayed behind in Sodom, thinking that Lot was joking about heading for safety. When G.o.d rained down fire and brimstone, they perished. Then, as Lot and the women in his life were fleeing against this backdrop of smoke and flames, Lot's wife looked back at Sodom, against the orders of the angels, and turned into a pillar of salt. That's three down.

Now we come to the part of the story that is the focus of this chapter. Lot and his daughters became afraid to stay in Zoar and moved to the nearby hills, settling in a cave. His daughters apparently became convinced that there were no other men on earth who would have s.e.x with them, so they decided to seduce their father and bear children by him. On successive nights, they got him drunk and had s.e.x with him, first the older, then the younger. They each became pregnant and in time gave birth to sons they named Moab and Ben-ammi. The two boys were the ancestors of the peoples known as the Moabites and Ammonites.

Low-Down Dirty Insult The somewhat sickening story of Lot is usually interpreted by scholars as a series of etiologies about the region around the Dead Sea. To refresh your memory, an etiology is a story that explains the origins of something-a name, a geological phenomenon, or a social custom, for example. The Lot story explains how the area went from being lush and fertile (according to Genesis 13:1011) to being hot and barren-because G.o.d rained fire upon it. It also explains why the Dead Sea is lifeless and has a sulfurlike odor and mineral formations along the sh.o.r.e. The odor comes from the burning brimstone or sulfur that G.o.d rained down, and Lot's wife is a salt or mineral formation. Even the name Zoar is explained etiologically. ”Zoar” means ”small,” and Lot calls it a small city.

The episode between Lot and his daughters is also often seen as an etiology and a rude jab at Moab and Ammon. These countries sat on the other side of the Dead Sea from Israel. (The present-day Jordanian capital, Amman, gets its name from ancient Ammon.) But the names Moab and Ammon are loaded with meaning. Moab looks and sounds like Hebrew me ab, which means ”from father.” Ammon is similar to Hebrew amm, meaning ”people,” and Ben-ammi means ”son of my people.” Both words can be seen as implying incest, and that's how the Israelite writer meant for them to be understood. It was the world's first ”your mama” joke, if you will.

The story, then, was your typical knock on a despised rival. People do this today about neighboring states, countries, or even work colleagues. For instance, there's a joke going around our state of Tennessee that makes fun of Arkansas and Mississippi, both of which border it. The joke goes: Why did the Arkansan move from Tennessee to Mississippi? Answer: He wanted to raise the IQ of both states. We'll give you a moment to figure that one out.

Ammon, Moab, and Israel were neighboring states, so naturally, they made fun of each other. The point of the Lot story, as one biblical scholar put it, was to ”prove” that the Moabites and Ammonites were descended from incestuous b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Take that.

When Is a Cave Just a Cave?

But the scholar J. Cheryl Exum (remember her from chapter 6?) departs from this standard view and takes the story down a very different road.2 She wants to show that Lot's daughters weren't the perverts-Lot was, and most of the men of his era too. She starts by picking off the low-hanging fruit, pointing out that several features of the story don't make sense. For instance, if Lot was so drunk that he didn't know he was having s.e.x with his daughters, how was he able to-how shall we put this?-rise to the occasion? And how did his daughters seem to know after just one experience with him that they were pregnant? (Neither of them had s.e.x with their father again.) Scholars have long noticed these curious elements and have accounted for them by their etiological interpretation. That is, what's important in the story isn't all the details but the sordid explanation it offers for the Ammonites and Moabites.

But Exum digs deeper into the daughters' motivation and asks why they would hop on Pop if the town of Zoar, presumably home to at least a few men, was right around the corner. Did they really think no man would have them? Or were there no men nearby, and if so, why did Lot not discuss this problem with his daughters? Furthermore, if the human race was in danger of extinction, what did the daughters' two sons do for wives? How did they reproduce, and why were Lot's daughters not concerned about this matter? None of it pa.s.ses the smell test for Exum.

Exum suggests that the story is told all wrong. Lot, she says, was an abusive father who committed incest with his daughters, smoothing the way with alcohol to act out his repressed fantasies of desire. As is typical in abuse cases, he blamed the victims, and so the story implicates the daughters instead of dirty old Dad. These are not Exum's original ideas, but her slant is slightly different from that of other feminist interpreters. Her method, as we saw in the ”Abraham the Pimp” chapter, is to get the ”narrator” of this story on the couch for some serious psychoa.n.a.lysis. To understand this we offer this refresher course on how things work in ExumLand. By ”narrator” she does not mean the author of the story, because such an author would have died long ago. Besides, she believes that the story as we have it was produced by one or more editors combining several sources. Rather, she uses ”narrator” to mean ”the cultural or collective androcentric unconscious” that gave rise to the story.

We should have warned you to brace yourself for some highfalutin academic-speak. ”Androcentric,” for those of you who have successfully avoided studying Greek roots, means ”focused on men.” Exum treats Lot's story like a dream and psychoa.n.a.lyzes it as a fantasy that operates with different meanings on different levels and betrays the subconscious not just of one man but of an entire male culture. As with Abraham earlier, she considers all of the characters in the story as ”split-off parts of the narrator,” representing the ”fears, desires, wishes, and so on” that are parts of the ”cultural male psyche.” Her a.n.a.lysis is not designed to solve the problems presented by the story, such as the unusual features mentioned earlier, but to shed new light on them by showing how they operate on a subconscious level.

Through Exum's prism, Genesis 19 can be divided into three parts. The first part, where the angels save Lot, depicts the narrator's superego in full force. The superego always shows one's conscious control over situations, self, and others. In this case, the angels embodied the superego and inhibited the s.e.xual fantasies manufactured by Lot's id or libido. Exum then drags readers through a thicket of Freudian interpretation. She says that when Lot offered his daughters to the men of the city, it ill.u.s.trated the narrator's control over his daughters' s.e.xuality. To allow himself to indulge in the fantasy of having s.e.x with them, the narrator first imagined h.o.m.os.e.xual s.e.x, which was even more abhorrent to him than incest. The blindness with which the angels struck the men was the narrator's ”self-punishment” for his incestuous fantasy. Blindness symbolized castration, so the men groped unsuccessfully for the ”opening,” an allusion to intercourse with the daughters.

In the second part, the sons-in-law serve a similar function and also represent the superego. They stood in the way of the narrator's fantasy through Lot of an incestuous affair with the daughters. Therefore, they were quickly disposed of so that the fantasy could proceed. The same was true of Lot's wife, who was the final obstacle to the fantasy. Lot's reluctance to leave Sodom and his request to go to Zoar instead of the hills was another effort by the narrator's superego to prevent the exercise of the id's fantasy, which needed to take place in an isolated place where Lot was alone with his daughters.

In the third part, the narrator absolved himself of the fantasy by blaming the daughters and the alcohol. The repeated mentions of these matters (alcohol four times, s.e.x with daughters five times) betray the narrator's enjoyment at replaying the scene. Despite his claims to innocence, the narrator proudly rounded out his fantasy by imagining his s.e.xual potency in the daughters' birthing of two sons. Finally, Exum points out several terms used in the story that are s.e.xually suggestive. Not the least of these is the word ”cave,” where the s.e.xual fantasy is set. Exum echoes the suggestion of previous scholars that ”cave” is a euphemism for v.a.g.i.n.a. How original.

Exum on the Couch The problems Exum points out in the story have long been recognized by biblical scholars, and Exum doesn't imagine that her proposal resolves these problems. She only tries to explain why they are there and to give an intriguing alternative to the standard view. Fine. But the question is whether her interpretation improves on the more usual etiological one. We let Exum off the hook in chapter 6, but her treatment of the Lot story exposes the real weaknesses in her approach. First off, once you turn the story into a ”dream,” you put yourself into the realm of imagination where standard rules of biblical a.n.a.lysis go out the window. It's like falling down the rabbit hole with Alice. By entering into the narrator's fantasy life and insisting that therein lie the multileveled meanings and hidden desires, Exum clears the decks of any limits or controls on her own interpretations. The story suddenly means whatever she wishes.

Exum also plays fast and loose with Freudian theory, which, we should add, is outdated anyway according to our colleagues in the psychology department. For example, Freud posited the ”Oedipus complex,” according to which a man has a subconscious desire for an exclusive relations.h.i.+p with his mother. Freud thought the same could hold true for a daughter's desire for her father, and later psychologists ent.i.tled this the ”Electra complex.” But this is the opposite of what Exum believes takes place in the Lot story. She says Lot desired his daughters. She has flipped Freud's Electra complex on its head. To her credit, Exum admits her inconsistency and includes a rather lengthy disclaimer, but the bottom line is that she picks and chooses what she likes about Freud without remaining consistent or true to this approach. Perhaps she is right to do so, but her selectivity raises more red flags about her interpretation.

There is another, more disturbing aspect to Exum's reading, and if we weren't so secure in our manliness, we might take personal umbrage. By a.n.a.lyzing a collective unconscious, she seems to implicate all men, or at least all ancient Israelite men, as partic.i.p.ants in this ghastly fantasy. Surely this is an unfair stereotype. The days of making blanket inferences about all people of another race, gender, or culture are long gone. But Exum thinks it's fair to speak of an entire male culture having sick, repressed desires. Perhaps the Freudian a.n.a.lysis should be turned on Exum, since her interpretation seems to reveal more about her biases than it does about the nature of the story or the storytellers, authors, and editors who produced it.

We're tired of tangling with Exum. Let's tackle something less Freudian and more straightforward and gross.

19.

Did Ishmael Molest Isaac?