Dina

In this week’s Parsha or Torah portion, Vayishlach, we read one of the Torah’s most difficult narratives—the rape of Dina, the only daughter born to Jacob and Leah by the Prince of Shechem, the son of Hamor. We know very little of Dina’s life aside from this heart wrenching account. In the Midrash, our rabbis and sages grapple with Dina’s rape and its larger ramifications for her family. Today, Dina and her story have been unpacked from varying perspectives, including through a feminist lens.

Dina was the only daughter of Jacob and Leah and the only daughter born to Jacob. There are two extant Midrashic traditions regarding her birth. One states that when Rachel saw that Leah was about to bear her seventh child, she prayed that the child not be another son and thus Dina’s gender was changed on account of her plea. According to a second Midrash, Leah prayed not to have a seventh son, seeing that both Bilha and Zilpa had born two sons and she six, she did not want Rachel not to have a son of her own.

Notably, Dina does not utter a single word in the Torah. After her birth, the next we hear of her is in the context of preparations Jacob was making to go meet his brother Esau who he had not seen in twenty-two years. The text states that he took his eleven sons and two wives. Dina, according to the Midrash, had been locked away so that she would not marry Esau.

The narrative of Dina’s rape by Shechem is detailed in the thirty-fourth chapter of Genesis. Dina had gone out to meet the women of the land when Shechem, the son of Hamor attacked her. Shechem then falls in love with Dina and asks to marry her. Learning of what had happened to their sister; Simon and Levi are incensed and agree to the marriage only if all of the males in Shechem undergo circumcision. This is accepted and on the third day after their circumcision, Simon and Levi attack the city and kill the inhabitants. Dina is then extricated from the city and we do not hear of her further. Many questions remain concerning the remainder of her life which the Midrash attempts to answer.

According to one tradition, Simon and Levi had to forcibly remove Dina from the city owing to her feeling ashamed. Another tradition holds that she marries Simon, and still another tradition holds that she marries the prophet Job. One Midrash maintains that she gives birth to Asenath, Joseph’s future wife. The Midrash also counts her as being amongst the seventy people that go down to Egypt with Jacob later in Genesis.

In recent years, people have begun to take a renewed interest in Dina’s story. In Anita Diamant’s wildly successful novel, “The Red Tent”, she retells Dina’s story as well as that of the other women in Jacob’s family which seeks to give Dina more of a voice and a story all her own. There have been musical interpretations of Dina, including by the Jewish singer-songwriter, Galeet Dardashti. Other commentators on this week’s Parsha seek to shed light on Dina’s story from a feminist perspective, imagining how Dina felt after her rape and her brother's subsequent reaction. Still others pick up on her silence. Although the Torah tells us little about Dina, there is much we can learn from her.