Good morning! Today’s scripture (Genesis 34-36) begins with a dreadful story in chapter 34, the rape of Dinah. To its original Hebrew audiences, this story was perhaps a warning about the misbehavior of non-Jews (“see what trouble is caused when Shechem has his way with one of our daughters?”), or a valorization of righteous violence (“look at the lengths to which our heroes go to defend the honor of our people!”). But to my ears now, the existence of this story itself is the cause for alarm (“see what barbarity is authorized when humans divide people into the righteous ‘Us’ and the unholy ‘Them’?”). Other passages of the Bible sound like this (the end of Esther, for example), and in order to see any of this as “Good News” I have to understand it as God’s cautionary tale—right here in the Bible—of how violence begets violence, and none is righteous in the end. I prefer the softer novelization of this incident in The Red Tent, but this is the gritty Bible we have (which more closely resembles the world we have). Another chance to be thankful this is not history but religious ideology, yet also to lament that something such as this might even be practiced at all in the name of God.
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Pastor Oby Ballinger 