Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

to pay the father a larger sum of money and then marry the girl without the possibility of ever divorcing her. Again, the happiness of the girl was immaterial. The pain of having been raped would be compounded by having to spend the rest of her life with the assailant, subject to his will as his wife.
    The laws of the Bible are less violent than those of Assyria—for example, there is no recourse to raping another man’s wife as retribution—but biblical mythology is just as savage. The book of Genesis tells the story of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob, who “went out” from her house and then was “taken” by a neighboring prince named Shechem. The text is not clear as to whether the “taking” was the result of rape, persuasion, or something in between, but there is no doubt that Shechem fell in love with Dinah and, after installing her in his house, decided to marry her. Yet he had made a terrible mistake by not going to Dinah’s family for permission before bedding her. The disgrace he brought to Jacob’s house would need to be wiped away before anything else could take place.
    Shechem and his father Hamor tried to make amends by offering Jacob any bride-price he demanded, no matter how much. This offer of money would normally have been enough to assuage a family’s hurt pride and lost investment in the girl’s virginity. It seemed to have been acceptable to Jacob, but not to Dinah’s brothers, whose rage could only be assuaged with violence. They told Shechem and Hamor they would accept the offer of money, and then, after their enemies were lulled into a state of vulnerability, they made their attack:
Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses. Jacob was angry when he heard what his sons had done, and also scared of reprisals, but Simon and Levi had one concern on their minds: “Should he [Shechem] have treated our sister like a prostitute?”
     
    To Dinah’s brothers, the destruction of Shechem’s city and the murder and enslavement of its inhabitants constituted appropriate payback for their sister’s lost virginity. Dinah’s fate was not spelled out because it did not matter. She was merely a prop in the story. The main issue at stake was the lost honor of her male family members, and what they did to regain it. Dinah’s intentions would only have entered the picture had she sneaked off with Shechem and willingly had sex with him. Luckily for her, that did not happen.
    Any Hebrew man who formally accused his bride of being impure at the time of the wedding set off a high-stakes legal process. The bride’s father would have been required to prove his daughter’s virtue, which he normally did by giving the soiled wedding bedclothes to the town elders to inspect. If the bloodstains on the fabric were deemed insufficient, the bride was stoned to death in front of her father’s house. Just as Shechem did wrong by taking what was not his, so did the sexually experienced bride commit a grave crime by deciding when, and with whom, she would have sex. (It is easy to imagine savvy fathers splattering animal blood on the bedclothes to make sure their daughters were exonerated.) If, on the other hand, the bedclothes passed inspection, then the accusing groom would be beaten by the elders, forced to pay the bride’s father one hundred silver shekels, and barred from ever seeking a divorce. Again, the bride’s well-being was of least concern. She would be condemned to living out her days with a husband who most likely