Full Contact Christianity

This week we’ll read Genesis 36. Go on and read it; I’ll wait.

What are we to do with this passage? Let’s be honest: if you finished Genesis 35 and skipped right to the beginning of 37, you would never miss the chapter you’d left out. It doesn’t seem to further the plot at all. What’s it even doing here?

Three things: faithfulness, blessing, and hope.

Faithfulness

God is faithful to His promises. He promised Abram that He would make his name great, and that nations would come from him. Part of that promise was fulfilled in Abram’s lifetime. God did indeed make him great, and Abraham got to see the fulfillment of that promise well before he died. But making him the father of nations, as his new name claimed? Isaac, Ishmael, and the sons of Keturah were well launched, but nations? Ishmael maybe — at least a starter nation, but the time Abraham died — but Isaac still had a long way to go.

God had made similar promises to Isaac and Rebekah: “Two nations are in your womb.” As with Isaac, Jacob is greatly blessed, but “nation” is a bit aspirational. With twelve sons, you can see where it could become a nation, at least. Outside the seed line, though, we get to see God delivering on His promises already. Ishmael’s sons were “twelve princes according to their nations” (Gen. 25:12-18). Here in Genesis 36, we again get to see God Delivering on his promises to Abraham and Isaac. Esau’s grandsons become chiefs, and their descendants grow to the point that they have kings well before Israel develops a monarchy.

As readers, we should take this as a downpayment on the promises to Isaac and Jacob. Be patient; the line of promised seed will also become a nation in due time.

Blessing

There’s a kind of Tale of Two Esaus in the story here: the Esau we encounter before Jacob goes up to Laban, and the Esau we encounter when he comes back. Jacob isn’t the only one that has matured some over that 20-year gap. The first Esau is a knucklehead. He’s not weak or soft; he’s not that kind of spoiled rich kid. He’s a man of the field. But all he cares about is being out in the field, hunting. He cares so little about legacy that he gives up his birthright for a bowl of soup.

Older Esau is a different guy entirely. He’s strategically intermarried with the Horites, settled in Seir, and building a kingdom. His grandsons are chieftains, and they in turn spawn kings. This Esau is no longer a hunting-camp bum; he’s a nation-builder. What happened?

There’s a lot we don’t know. The narrative follows Jacob for his 20 years with Laban, and doesn’t tell us much about what happened to Esau during that time. But the last thing we saw before Esau disappeared from the story for a while was Jacob blessing him to be sustained by the land, live by the sword, and become independent of his brother. All these things have happened by the time we meet older Esau.

What we are seeing here is the power of a father’s blessing. We can talk about the ethics of this particular blessing some other time–“blessing” your sons with civil war is maybe not the best idea ever–but the point for our purposes today is that Esau took Isaac’s blessing to heart. He has come to embody everything his father envisioned for him. Fathers, take a lesson from Isaac here: launch your children into the world with a blessing.

Hope

There’s a note inserted in the Septuagint text about the Edomite kings; it tells us that Bela, the first king, is Balaam, and that Jobab, the second king, is Job. We can’t establish either of these identities with absolute certainty, but we can establish that both Job and his friend Eliphaz are Edomites, and it’s likely that Balaam is Edomite as well. This should incline us to hope.

In the biblical Story, the Edomites are not the good guys. They are a thorn in Israel’s side, oppressing them periodically through the Old Testament and on into the New–Herod the Great, the man who had the infants of Bethlehem slaughtered, was an Idumean (Edomite). So when we find that even among the bad guys, there are people like Job, that should incline us to hope. God is at work even among the bad guys. And while, taking one thing with another, we have no right to be surprised that the bad guys act like bad guys, we shouldn’t be too surprised to find among them the occasional stinker who nonetheless knows God (Balaam), the occasional godly man who’s making an honest misjudgment (Eliphaz), and even the occasional righteous man where even God says “there is none like him in all the earth.” (How many Israelites did God ever say that about?)

It isn’t fair. Job’s not a member of the club. And anyway, if he’s so good, what’s he doing with them?

He’s where God put him. And don’t they need the witness more than you do? Just be thankful he’s there.

Application

Coming out of this chapter, be encouraged that God makes good on His promises–always has, always will, no matter what. Remember that “life and death are in the power of the tongue” and use your voice for blessing, especially with your kids. Look for people who know God in unexpected places, even among the bad guys. You may be surprised what you find.

This week, we read Genesis 34. Go and read it; I’ll wait.

There’s two things to talk about here: the set of lessons the text teaches, and our response to the text as God gave it to us.

The Hebrew description makes it seem likely that this is a rape rather than a seduction, but it’s not certain. This presents us with the first big problem in our response: we need to know! Was she raped, or wasn’t she? As moderns, we need to know the answer to that so we know how to feel about the story. For us, bit of mutually consensual fooling around is one thing; a rape is something else entirely, because to us her consent is the biggest factor. That the story seems not to see it that way feels to us like a devaluation of consent, a weak view of rape. Actually, it’s a robust view of the destructiveness of fornication; so robust a view that we’re deeply uncomfortable with it. From the point of view of the story, the issue is that either way, Shechem has humiliated and defiled Dinah. We viscerally reject the idea that she could be humiliated and defiled by exercising her bodily autonomy and sexual agency…but it’s true nonetheless. And that defilement creates a situation that’s very difficult to put right.

Remember where and when we are in this story. In preindustrial culture, nobody survived alone for long; we lived in groups because we had to. The group’s survival depended on a large amount of heavy manual labor, which men are far more capable of enduring than women. For both men and women, ability to perform the physical tasks necessary for survival diminishes severely with age, so they needed to have a lot of children, particularly sons, who could care for them as they got older. A young woman’s immediate survival depended on her father and brothers, and her long-term prospects depended on getting married and producing offspring who could care for her in her age.

This to say, Dinah needed to get married. Finding a husband for Dinah was undoubtedly already on Jacob’s to-do list. Given his own wealth and power, he would have been looking to marry her to someone powerful and well placed. However, in the culture of the time, a woman who is not a virgin for any reason, including rape, has greatly diminished prospects for marriage. Put simply, no one will want her. As a result, in this one act, Shechem has ruined her whole life–a terrible thing to do to a young woman even if, in the heat of the moment, she consents. “She agreed to it” is a poor excuse for destroying a teenage girl’s entire life.

Now, for some men in that time and place, that destruction would be the entire point of the act, whether a rape or a seduction. The act of taking her virginity, however accomplished, greatly reduces the competition for her as a wife. Other men will no longer be interested, and his bargaining power with her father and brothers goes up enormously. Jacob and his sons had to expect that Shechem would be up to something like that…if he was even interested in marrying her at all. But the story makes it very clear that Shechem is doing no such thing, and he is at pains to assure them of his honorable intentions. He isn’t haggling for a discount; he’s eager to step up to whatever they ask of him in order to marry Dinah.

Difficult as it is for us to grasp, the Bible presents Shechem as genuinely caring for Dinah. It may help us to remember Abimelech’s complaint about Rebekah: “One of the people might soon have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt on us.” (Gen. 26:10) Presumably Rebekah would have objected; Abimelech assumes that her objections wouldn’t have prevented one of his men from taking her anyway. In the custom of the land, rape is commonplace; appalling as it is, rape-for-marriage would be too. In a Romans 1, universal-law sense, it would not be entirely fair to say that people do not know better, but the worst we can say about Shechem is that he has followed the customs of his people, and the text itself says he is “more honorable than all his father’s house.”

This brings us to the second big problem we have with the story, which is the way in which they plan to put the situation right: turn it into a marriage. Now, I trust we’re all on the same page that it’s overkill to respond to a rape by murdering the entire city’s men and enslaving all the women and children. But let’s be honest, if Simeon and Levi had staked Shechem to an anthill, and then after a decent interval of 15 hours or so they cut off his head, we’d probably be ok with that, wouldn’t we?

…which is to say, we are more like Simeon and Levi than we think: we would rather see a satisfying revenge than see Dinah taken care of; we just lack the ruthlessness to take things as far as they did. If we focus on revenge and murder the only man now willing to marry Dinah, where does that leave her? We’d all be satisfied that justice was served, but what’s she going to do in her old age? Who’s going to take care of her?

Jacob disagrees with us; he takes the long view. Shechem is willing–eager, in fact–to marry her, and the truth is, he should be taking responsibility for her well-being now, since he’s the one who violated her. So Jacob says ok, and means it. Simeon and Levi say ok, and are planning to betray the city. Here’s a detail frequently missed in telling this story: the marriage actually happened. Shechem circumcised himself immediately, and apparently it took more time to convince everybody else. When the slaughter was over, Simeon and Levi took Dinah from Shechem’s house. They didn’t pretend they were going to marry her to Shechem; they actually went through with it, and then murdered their sister’s new husband and took her back–first defiled and humiliated, now a widow as well, and still with nobody to care for her in her age.

Before we go any further, let’s get clear on what circumcision means here. This isn’t just removing some flesh from the foreskin; it’s the sign of the covenant with Abraham. What they’re telling Shechem is “You all have to convert.” They all do; they join themselves to the God of Abraham. It’s a great evangelistic moment; an entire city comes to know God. The new covenant equivalent would be the whole city professing faith in Christ and getting baptized…right before we murder them all. After Simeon and Levi have accomplished the slaughter, their other brothers descend on the city and plunder it. They don’t just take all the stuff; they enslave all the women and children.

At this point, Jacob is right to be afraid. Nomads and sedentary societies always have a bit of a tense relationship, and his sons have just violated the most sacred treaty there is. These people literally joined their family, and the sons of Jacob still murdered them. If they’ll do that, what treaty would they not break? Jacob is now in a position where there’s no promise he can make, no guarantee he can offer, that anybody around him will believe. He’s entirely too dangerous to have as a neighbor; he may be a decent enough guy, but there’s no telling when his boys are going to murder you all. The most natural thing for the Caananites to do is exactly what Jacob says: band together and exterminate the threat.

Do Simeon and Levi have an answer for this problem? Nope. The strategically correct answer to Jacob’s objection would be something like “Yeah, we thought about that, but here’s our plan for dealing with it….” They don’t seem to have even thought about it. They were mad, they killed a bunch of people, end of story. This is why, later on, Jacob will pass over them for the ruling blessing. Treacherous, murderous, and impulsive in ways that are apt to get the whole family killed, they’re simply not fit to lead.