Topics: Bible Controversies, Music, Ohio Jokes.
Bible Controversies
Rabbi Michael Barclay undoubtedly knows, but his readers may not, that this is a one-sided view of the Scripture portion studied.
What happened to Shechem had mixed results. It's one of those stories that teach us that even God makes fine moral judgments among shades of gray, rather than black-and-white.
Was Dina violently raped, perhaps as an innocent child who went to a new friend's house for a dolls' tea party? Or was she a teenager who, according to the custom of those days, befriended girls who had attractive brothers, went to the home of Hamor in order to get to know Shechem, didn't really intend for things to go as far as they went but, on the whole, wanted to marry him so that they could happen again? From the fact that Jacob, who was a prophet, consented to let Dina marry Shechem rather than ordering his men to put Shechem to a horrible death, on the spot, many have inferred that Dina may have wanted to marry Shechem.
We are not told. That's the main takeaway Miriam's Well draws from this story. We're never clearly told what became of Dina. Did she have a child? Did she sell her child to a rich Egyptian so that, when Joseph was a slave in Egypt, he could still find a nice Jewish girl to marry? Did she die from wounds incurred by trying to resist rape? Did she wander out into the wilderness and die of thirst because nobody was asking her what she wanted? The motive of not mentioning what became of her may hae been to respect her privacy, but it takes away the solid basis we want for a judgment on what Simeon and Levi did.
We are told that the Hittites did not take violent reprisals against the Israelites. Maybe they agreed that Shechem had done a horrible thing and deserved to die. Maybe they were just afraid of the Israelites.
We are told that the Israelites were spared from any immediate punishment for what Simeon and Levi had done. On the other hand, there are other records of mass conversions, and this might have been the occasion for a mass conversion that Simeon and Levi prevented.
We are told that Jacob's final blessings on his children and grandchildren included a rebuke to Simeon and Levi. The kings and eventually the Messiah would be descendants of Judah because Reuben, Simeon, and Levi had behaved too badly to have that honor. Reuben had committed a different sin, though he'd also done some good things. Simeon and Levi had disgraced themselves by staying angry and violent when Jacob, and possibly Dina, had forgiven Shechem.
The whole story is unsettling. What we can learn from it has long been a matter of debate. So its message for international relations today is actually mixed.
My personal belief is that there need to be good reasons for any civilized society to allow itself the luxury of keeping rapists or murderers alive. Neither rapists nor murderers have any right to live. Whether they can be kept alive in prison and given opportunities to repent depends on whether decent human beings feel able to spare the expense of feeding them.
Anything beyond that basic police action against specific criminals seems to me to need a direct command from God, and if the Scripture reading tells anyone anything, it may be best understood as a message that God is leaving it up to the people to decide what Israel should do.
There were people so vile that God wanted every man, woman, child, and animal in their territory to be slaughtered, every building flattened. The people who perpetrated the Simchat Torah terrorist attack as a fifty-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack have clearly demonstrated more than the usual human capacity for Living And Not Learning. The question is to what extent they represented the whole people of Gaza.
There was a biblical precedent, also, for making an enemy tribe who surrendered and begged for mercy into a servant class in ancient Israel. The ninth chapter of Joshua tells the story of the Gibeonites, who were not able to agree to form a solid alliance with the Israelites, but knew they weren't going to win an open war with them either. The leaders of Israel physically marked those Gibeonites as slaves, but later passages in the Bible show that those Gibeonites' descendants were converted to faith in the One God and became citizens of ancient Israel.
We are also told that some people in ancient Persia "became Jews, for the fear of the Jews fell on them," when the Israelites defended themselves from a brief violent attack by Haman's partisans, and there are records of tribes in Europe, Africa, and Asia having done the same thing in postbiblical times. People whose ancestors include some of the kings of ancient Israel also have ancestors who "became Jews" from fear. That's why the other Semitic ethnic groups are almost always basic-human-color, but as the saying goes, "Jews can look like anything."
I'll stop there. This web site does Bible scholarship, not foreign affairs.
Music
A whole classroom of students learning to play a simple folk tune on a simple folk instrument...
Ohio Jokes
Fair disclosure: I am aware of people who were not from Ohio having thought about this kind of thing.
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