The eighth week we read Parshah Vayishlach (Gen 32:4-36:43), which contains two major events and one minor but memorable one: the meeting of Esau and Jacob, Jacob’s vision of wrestling with an angel, and the rape of Dinah and subsequent vengeance.
By the way, I’ve just noticed that the Blue Letter Bible has different chapter breaks than the Hertz. Anyway, the Parshah starts with what BLB calls 32:3; BLB has 55 verses in chapter 31, taking the first verse from 32 and putting it back in 31. That’s confusing.
Anyway, the first obvious what-if is the first of the major events: what if Esau had not forgiven Jacob, and instead of embracing him, beat the crap out of him? Esau by this time led an army of four hundred (by the sword shalt thou live, said his father), and Jacob was traveling with a sizeable retinue himself. Jacob pays a ton of tribute, but then also manages to get out of having Esau appoint a few, um, security advisors. Of course, it doesn’t seem like a real reconciliation, rather a negotiated truce. Had the two tribes been skirmishing? Was there something bigger at stake? Wouldn’t a merger have made each more powerful?
The second what-if that comes to mind is from the angel-wrestling vision; what if Jacob had given up? One of Jacob’s attributes is tremendous perseverance; he doesn’t give anything up easily. The man who worked seven years for Rachel and another seven is the man who wrestled the angel all night and made him cry uncle at dawn. Is this the attribute that makes him (and us) worthy of the name Israel?
The third, of course, is from the troubling story of Dinah (34). This is one of those awful stories where nobody behaves well; Dinah’s rapist, Dinah, Dinah’s brothers, the townsfolk, even Jacob/Israel is scarcely admirable here. What if Shechem had not raped Dinah, but had asked to marry her first? The Dinah story may be the moment that tips Jews’ distaste for intermarriage into psychotic paranoia; if instead Jacob’s family had married with the Hivites happily and productively, could Judaism have spread less exclusively, and thus less violently?
Or what if Dinah had defended herself in some way? What if Dinah had taken a sword or dagger (or tent peg) went she went out to see the daughters of the land? Would Shechem have stepped more warily? Or, Hivite culture being what it seems to have been, would they have slaughtered each other?
Is there any way the Dinah story could have ended well? I don’t just mean for Dinah and Shechem and Simeon and Levi and all the Hivites and Israelites, but for us? For our learning about cultural clash, and sex, and vengeance?
By the way, the word harlot (zanah) is used here for the first time in the Scriptures; the second and third are in the Tamar stories. So in all of Genesis, the word is only used negatively, that is, to describe what you might think from circumstances, a woman is, but actually is not. Neither Dinah or Tamar are actually harlots. The next few times it is used are general, referring to activities rather than indivuals. Then there’s Rahab, another good girl (Joshua 6). The next individual is Jephthah’s mother (Judges 11). After that, it goes rather downhill: Samson’s whore-trap (Judges 16:1), the un-named woman who is raped and killed and then her pieces dispersed among the tribes (Judges 19), then the two women whose baby Solomon offers to cut in two (1Kings 3). Still, the harlots in the Bible seem to be far more sinned against than sinning.
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-Vardibidian.