Genesis 34

The episode begins with a short, brutal sequence: Dinah goes out, Shechem sees her, Shechem takes her, Shechem violates her. The verbs are stark. The chapter then pivots to politics: Shechem loves her and speaks to her heart, and his father Hamor opens negotiations with Jacob for a formal marriage. Jacob's sons, learning what has happened, are deeply grieved and angry, but they listen. They name their condition: every male in Shechem must be circumcised. Shechem and Hamor agree immediately and return to their city to persuade the men of the place, arguing that Jacob's people and property will eventually become theirs through the merger. The city complies. The narrative spends considerable space on the negotiation and the persuasion, slowing the reader before the catastrophe.

On the third day after the circumcisions, when the men of the city are most incapacitated, Simeon and Levi attack with swords and kill every male. They take Dinah from Shechem's house. The other sons of Jacob plunder the city — livestock, women, children, everything in the houses and fields. Jacob's response is not grief for the dead but fear for his household: you have made me a stench, and I have few men, and if the Canaanites and Perizzites gather against me I will be destroyed. Simeon and Levi's closing question — should he treat our sister as a harlot? — ends the chapter without resolution. Jacob does not answer it in chapter 34; he answers it indirectly when he blesses his sons in chapter 49 and withholds the primary blessing from both of them.