Genesis34chapter 34

Genesis 34:1-2

Verse 1 calls her the daughter of Leah before it calls her the daughter of Jacob, and the label is doing work, because the two brothers who avenge her are Leah's sons. Shechem is the son of the chief of the country, and he takes her by force. The text says it in one verse and does not linger over it, and everything after this is about the men.

Genesis 34:3-4

What follows the violence is affection, and the chapter records both without smoothing either. Clarke reads spake kindly as speaking to her heart, an attempt to reconcile her to what had been done, and he takes verses 2 and 3 together as evidence she was held in Shechem's house rather than staying by consent. Dinah does not speak once in this chapter, and Genesis never tells the reader what she wanted.

Genesis 34:5-7

Jacob says nothing and waits for his sons, and in a house of four mothers it is the full brothers who act for a sister. Verse 7 calls the thing folly in Israel, the first time that phrase stands in Scripture, and it hardens afterwards into the fixed expression for this kind of crime. Tamar uses it almost word for word to Amnon in 2 Samuel 13, in another account of a violated sister whose brother answers with the sword.

Genesis 34:8-10

Hamor asks for the girl and then widens it to marriage between the two peoples, land to live in, trade, and possessions to hold. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown mark the failure in the offer, that no regret is expressed and Dinah is not sent home, and they read that as what turned the talks into a disaster. The ground being offered is Shechem, where Abram had built his first altar in the land and heard that his seed would be given the country, and where Jacob had just bought a parcel of it for a hundred pieces of money.

Genesis 34:11-12

Shechem speaks for himself and offers to pay whatever they name, any dowry and any gift. Money is his answer to what he has done, and his own city will be answered in that same currency at the end of the chapter when its cattle and wealth are carried off. Both sides are now bargaining over a woman neither has asked.

Genesis 34:13-14

The narrator names the deceit before the reader can be taken in by the speech. The word he uses is the word Isaac used of Jacob when he told Esau that his brother had come with subtilty and carried off the blessing, and Jacob had thrown the same root at Laban when he asked why he had been beguiled. The sons answer in their father's own vocabulary. Clarke allows that the provocation was real while saying nothing could excuse the answer.

Genesis 34:15-17

The condition they set is the sign of the covenant given to Abraham in chapter 17, and here it is laid as a trap. Henry holds that the principle stated in verse 14 was sound and the use made of it was not, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that nothing in the proposal sought to bring these men to the God of Jacob. Becoming one people, offered in verse 16 and repeated by Hamor in verse 22, is the merger the covenant line could not survive, and the brothers refuse it while appearing to accept it.

Genesis 34:18-19

The terms please both men, and the young man does not delay, because he has delight in Jacob's daughter. Verse 19 then says he was more honourable than all the house of his father, which is the narrator's own assessment and which sits hard against verse 2. Genesis states it and leaves it standing without resolving the strain.

Genesis 34:20-23

The gate is where a city's public business was done, and the argument Hamor and Shechem make there never mentions Dinah. They sell the plan on profit, that Jacob's cattle and substance and every beast of theirs would become the city's, and Wesley reads it as men promising their neighbours a good return on the alliance. The word they use of Jacob's household, rendered peaceable, runs back to the root Jerome had already discussed at Salem in the chapter before, where Jacob came to Shechem whole and unharmed.

Genesis 34:24-25

A whole city takes the covenant sign on the word of its chief, which Clarke reads as either strong attachment to the ruling house or the obedience an eastern prince could simply expect. On the third day, when the pain was at its height, Simeon and Levi go in with swords and kill every male. Jacob's answer to this day comes only at the end of his life, where he curses their anger and says he will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel. Levi draws the sword a second time at Sinai, at Moses' word, and that day the tribe is set apart for the sanctuary.

Genesis 34:26-29

took Dinah out of Shechem's house: Dinah has to be fetched out, which tells the reader where she had been since verse 2. The rest of the brothers then plunder the town, and Gill marks the turn in it, that men who accepted circumcision hoping to gain Jacob's cattle lost their own instead. Little ones and wives are carried off as well, so the cost of one man's crime falls on a whole city that had no part in it.

Genesis 34:30

Jacob finally speaks, and what he raises is the danger to himself among the Canaanites and the Perizzites rather than the killing. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown suggest he pressed the consequences because that was the only argument likely to reach sons in this state, while Henry reads his fear as a father seeing the ruin his children cannot. God answers that exact fear in the next chapter, where the terror of God falls on the cities round about and no one pursues them.

Genesis 34:31

The brothers get the last word of the chapter, and no reply from Jacob is recorded. Clarke notes that the word for harlot stands here for the first time in Scripture, and its next appearance is over Judah in chapter 38, where a daughter in law is taken for one. This day sets aside Jacob's second and third sons, the next chapter sets aside his firstborn, and the ruling blessing of chapter 49 falls to Judah, the fourth.