The Time to Take Your Kids to Church

Sorry it's been a while. In the meantime, we have bought a house and moved into it. That kind of cuts down on time I'm able to spend blogging, though not as much as you'd think; I usually do this while I'm at work. But at work we had a project to do so I actually had to spend the time I was on the clock working,of all things! But that was only a week. All of this is really a bunch of excuses. I think I just got lazy for a while. Sorry. But I do have a story for you at last:

I’m skipping the story of Jacob’s reunion with his twin brother, except for the very last part of it. I debated doing it, and finally asked my husband what he thought, telling him I was concentrating on obscure Bible stories. He said that one isn’t obscure. I think that he and I don’t have a clear image of what is obscure in our culture anymore as far as Bible stories are concerned. We grew up in pastors homes and cut our teeth on the narratives of Genesis. But I’m skipping it. If you don’t know the story, read Genesis 33.

While Jacob was in Paddan Aram in Syria, Esau also had left his parents and settled in a place called Seir. He assumed, when he let Jacob know he had forgiven him, that Jacob would come there with him. One of the commentaries I looked in said that Jacob and his family did visit Esau’s home. But others said he didn’t. Jacob did tell Esau he was coming, but he may have been lying. Sure, he’s one of the Bible’s heroes, but that doesn’t mean he never did anything wrong, like lie to his brother as soon as he was relieved of his fear of him. He certainly did not intend to settle in Seir. He had been promised Canaan, and he was going there.

The next thing Jacob did was at least as wrong as it was for him to tell his brother, “go ahead, and I’ll come along behind you at the pace of my children, and I’ll be there soon,” when he had no intention at all of ever going to Seir. But that wasn’t obvious right away. It was more a sin of omission than anything else.
On his way out of Canaan twenty years before, Jacob had had a vision of angels in a certain place, and had heard God speak to him. He had named this place Bethel, which means “House of God.” He had promised that if God ever brought him back safely to Canaan, his father’s God would be the God he worshipped, and Bethel would be the house of God. In other words, that would be where he would worship. And now he was back. He was free of danger both from his father-in-law and from his twin brother. God had been faithful to him. One would think he would have headed straight for Bethel. But if one did, one would have been wrong.

Instead, he went to a place he called “Succoth,” which meant “booths.” He built booths for himself and his entourage there. And from there he went to Shechem, an established Canaanite city. And there he did something that sounds ordinary on first reading, but really it was anything but. He bought land, and set up camp. For the first time, a descendant of the blessed branch of Abraham’s family owned property in Canaan, other than the Cave of Macpelah, which Abraham had bought for a tomb. And he got what appears to be an incredible bargain, too, paying only a quarter for an area of earth large enough to house his entire family, his animals, and any and all of his servants, as Abraham had paid for his tomb.

He set up an altar there and worshipped God, but no mention is made of him going to the place he had declared would be the “house of God.” And there in Shechem he settled down to raise his family. Years began ticking by. By the way, I had said in an earlier story that Rachel may have been pregnant by the time they left Paddan Aram. I was wrong. If Jacob’s story is told in chronological order—and the rest of it has been up to now—then there is no way she could have been pregnant at that time. Her son Benjamin was not born until after these events.

Ten years must have transpired, because his daughter Dinah, who must have been a little girl when they made the trip, was now a teenager. And she decided that it would be a good idea to go out and see what the girls in town were up to. While she did that, someone else had his eye on her.

It was none other than Shechem himself, the prince of the city of Shechem, the son of the ruler Hamor. Shechem, I suppose, was used to getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was Dinah.

He got her.

Most sources I have seen say that he raped her. I have always questioned this, because at least the English translations with which I am most familiar say nothing about force. It says he defiled her, and she would have been defiled even if she consented, and even more so, because she would have committed fornication. I wonder if the idea of rape comes in because Biblical scholars have wanted to justify what happened next, as if what happened next could ever have any justification. Perhaps people don’t want to believe that Dinah herself would have been guilty of wrongdoing. But it’s certainly possible that he actually did rape her. After all, think of the story of Isaac and Abimelech, the ruler of Gerar in Canaan (you can read it in Genesis, or I did this story in an earlier blog post). Abimelech told Isaac that because he had been saying that Rebekah was his sister and not his wife, any of the men of that town, Gerar, might have raped her and thought nothing of it. It is clear that Shechem thought nothing of what he had done.

Shechem brought Dinah to his father and asked his father to get Dinah for him as his wife. Hamor had no objection to this, and he and Shechem went right away to see Jacob about the matter of marriage.

But news had preceded them, and Jacob had already heard that Shechem had taken his daughter’s virginity. Nevertheless, he did not feel equal to dealing with the situation himself. He had, by this time, several grown sons, full brothers of Dinah. Just as two generations before Laban had participated with the marriage negotiations of his sister Rebekah, so Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulon needed to participate in this, but they were busy. Jacob was now old, and his sons did the shepherding. Jacob waited for them to come in, surely expecting them to give Hamor and Shechem a resounding no.

He didn’t have to wait long. They came in as soon as they heard, their emotions turbulent, to say the least.

Hamor was blissfully unaware of Jacob’s family’s objection to what he must have thought was normal treatment of young men toward girls they liked. He started in on his spiel: “My son loves your daughter and would like to marry her. We would love to have you settling down here among us. Your sons would be welcome to marry our daughters, and we would love to welcome your daughters into our families as our sons’ wives. You can live among us and trade with us and you’ll get rich!”

Shechem got right to the point. “I’ll pay you anything you want for the bride price. Just name it, and you’ve got it. All I want is to marry Dinah!”

Simeon and Levi took the lead in giving an answer. And for some reason, no one else objected to what they had to say. My guess is they had earlier told the others to follow their lead, and they would take care of it. “Okay,” they replied, “we’ll give her to you, and you don’t have to pay us anything. But here’s what we want you to do. We have a custom among us that every male must be circumcised. It would be a disgrace for any girl of our family to marry an uncircumcised man. If you and the entire town will do this, we will not only consent to this marriage, but future marriages as well. If you don’t, you’ll never see Dinah again.” In reality, they had no intention of letting any such marriage occur, nor did they mention that there were no other girls in their family for the men of the town of Shechem to marry.

Jacob could not have known what the two were up to. He would never have consented to having them use the sign of the covenant God had made with Abraham in such a deceitful way, had he understood it. But he didn’t, and therefore made no move to stop whatever plot Simeon and Levi were cooking up.

Shechem and his father Hamor left happy, especially Shechem. He was going to get what he wanted, and it wasn’t going to cost him anything but some discomfort. His next move, however, had to be to convince the men of the town to go along with it.
Hamor and Shechem went to the city gate right away and gathered the men together and explained the proposal to them. “If we go along with it, they’ll be one people with us, and we’ll be able to take everything they have.” This father and son pair were rulers for a reason. They were nothing if not politicians, promising other people’s money to all and sundry. Shechem got what he wanted. All the men were circumcised.

Now circumcision was probably pretty much unknown among the Canaanites, so the people of Shechem wouldn’t have had any idea what was going to happen medically. But Jacob’s family knew all about it. Any new servant that came into their household had to be circumcised, and so the brothers knew well that when anyone is circumcised outside of infancy, he was, three days later, so sore that he could barely move.
All during that third day after all the men and boys in Shechem were circumcised, they were lying in their beds. Sometime during the day each one of them heard an intruder come into their home and looked up to see looming over them the cold-blooded face of either Simeon or Levi. And it was the last sight any of them ever saw.

Simeon and Levi must have taken servants with them to help them manage their captives—all the women and girls—and their plunder. And when they got to Shechem’s house, Hamor and Shechem were introduced to Simeon’s and Levi’s swords just as the rest of the townsmen had been. Dinah was there, and her brothers took her home.
She is never mentioned in the narrative of the Bible again. Whatever happened to her, whether or not she had a child, whether or not she was ever able to marry, whether or not she ever found a way to be happy again after all she’d been through, we’re never told.

We’re also not told what Jacob did with captives and all the wealth of Shechem his sons brought home. One of the commentaries I looked at said that surely he let the captives go and restored their wealth to them, but I wonder about this. There was no one left but women and children, and in those days widows would have trouble living on their own, especially with no sons. I think Jacob may have felt obligated to provide a home for them.

We are told, however, that Jacob was not happy with his sons’ revenge, and that he pointed out to them the natural result of what they had done. The rest of the Canaanite people would see them as barbaric raiders and would gather together to wipe them out.

Simeon and Levi defended themselves. “They treated our sister like a prostitute. Should we have just let them get by with it?” Of course, only Shechem had done that, but as far as Simeon and Levi were concerned, the whole town shared his guilt.
Jacob was probably legitimately afraid. God had made promises to him, but his sons had not just gotten into mischief—they had literally annihilated an entire town. How could God continue to bless him now?

But God did speak to him. He told him to go to Bethel.

Before he went, he told his household to get rid of their foreign gods, purify themselves and put on clean clothes.

As they went, God intervened for them by making the Canaanites all around them afraid of them so that they did not attack them. This is something really amazing to me that God would do such a thing. Simeon and Levi had just committed mass murder. Justice would demand that they be punished, even that their lives be forfeit. Many, many generations before, God had given Noah a principle that said that if anyone shed man’s blood, their blood would be shed by man. But God did not allow anyone to touch them. In this instance, God reserved justice for Himself, and Simeon and Levi appeared, at that time, to get away with it. They didn’t. I don’t know what God did with them personally, but when the descendants of Jacob became a nation and came into the Promised Land of Canaan in the book of Judges, the tribes of Simeon and Levi were scattered within other tribes. Jacob predicted that this would happen as a result of what they had done.

I consider, too, another possible consequence. God did not, at least as recorded in Scripture, specifically tell Jacob which of his sons was to be the one on whom the blessing of Abraham would rest. This had happened in every generation since Abraham, but because all of Jacob’s sons were to form the new nation of Israel, no one son had been singled out. Custom dictated that the oldest son receive a double inheritance, so that would suggest that Reuben should have been the one to inherit the blessing. He was not involved in the slaughter of the Schechemites, but he had his own problems that I’ll get to in another story. Jacob wanted his firstborn son of his preferred wife to be the one, but, though Joseph’s descendants did become two tribes in Israel (thus the double inheritance), he was not the son of blessing. Since it wasn’t Reuben, Simeon was next, and after him, Levi. But the two of them lost it by becoming barbaric raiders. That brought it to the fourth one down: Judah. I’m going to talk more about Judah later, but for now I’ll say just this. One of his descendants was David. Another one was Jesus. Had Simeon and Levi just said no to Shechem, instead of killing him and a whole bunch of innocent people besides, perhaps this could have been Simeon’s legacy instead.

Jacob and company arrived in Bethel and made their sacrifice. They settled there and finally made Bethel the house of God that Jacob had said that it would be.
After I did my research for this story, I told my husband, “You know what I learned Jacob’s response was when Simeon and Levi killed the Shechemites? He took his family and offered a sacrifice to God.”

His reply put the story into perspective and gave me my title: “The time to take your kids to church is before they get into trouble!”


I'm thinking that I'm going to do something different for my next story, and come back to Genesis afterward. It's December, and, seeing how long it's taking me to put up blog posts that I thought were going to be weekly, I think I'll force myself to research and write this month by promising a Christmas story. Of course, I know you're familiar with the Christmas Story, but there is a part of it that doesn't always get talked about--and it's not the part where Herod goes after the baby boys in Bethlehem. This one is much nicer. I'll leave you with this hint, which will be a dead giveaway to anyone who knows this part of the story: There were more than shepherds and wise men who recognized the Baby Jesus for Who He was.