“The Story That Tightened My Jaw: Sitting With Genesis 34”
This week’s Sex & Scripture Saturday was… whew.
A different kind of heavy.
I opened to Genesis 34 with my cat crawling across my lap and genuinely had no idea what was coming. And then within minutes I felt my jaw clench, my chest tighten, and that familiar heat of anger rising in my body.
The story centers on Dina, Jacob’s daughter — which I didn’t even realize he had. She goes out to visit the women of the land, and a local prince, Shechem, sees her, seizes her, rapes her, and then decides he “loves her” and wants to marry her.
And somehow the text uses the word:
“He defiled her.”
And that word hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting.
The Word That Makes My Whole Body React: “Defiled”
I had to stop and look up the actual definition, because something in me got so tense.
Defile: to make unclean, impure, to desecrate.
And the way Scripture frames this?
It connects “defilement” to her — the victim.
Not to him — the perpetrator.
And that’s exactly the ideology so many of us are still unlearning today.
My jaw tightened.
My shoulders tensed.
My breath got shallow.
Because historically, culturally, religiously — women carry the label.
Women become the “impure” ones.
Women lose value, safety, marriageability, community standing.
For something that was not their choice.
It makes me want to scream.
Then comes the part that made me actually exhale out of disbelief
Shechem — the man who assaulted her — has the audacity to say:
“Get me this girl for my wife.”
As if assault earns a reward.
As if violence equals romance.
As if what he did somehow makes her his.
And what shocks me more is that her father and brothers even enter the conversation.
Like… the fact that this is on the table at all.
I kept thinking:
If a man ever did this to me and asked my father if he could marry me?
He would not live long enough to finish the sentence.
But then again — purity and defilement weren’t ideas invented last century.
They have deep roots.
Even here.
And then the whole city gets circumcised. And then killed.
This part almost made me laugh because it’s so extreme and so unhinged and also so dark.
Jacob’s sons say:
“We’ll only give you Dina if every man in your city is circumcised.”
And every man… agrees.
They go through with it.
And while they’re still sore — Simeon and Levi come in and kill them all, take Dina back, and plunder the city.
And honestly?
There was a part of me — a small part, but a real one — that felt a flicker of satisfaction.
Not because the violence was good.
But because for once, in a biblical story involving a woman being assaulted, the consequences didn’t fall on her.
She wasn’t stoned.
She wasn’t “ruined.”
She wasn’t blamed.
Her brothers fought for her.
Even if they went way too far, even if innocent people died, even if the method was brutal — there was a visceral sense of someone saying:
“You can’t treat our sister like that.”
And part of me… needed that.
This chapter is a collision of violence, patriarchy, justice, and grief
I walked away with:
anger at how deeply purity culture still echoes this mindset
sadness for victims who were blamed instead of protected
questions about a system that valued women by their “purity”
curiosity about why circumcision became the bargaining chip
relief that Dina wasn’t abandoned
grief for all the women in Scripture whose stories end very differently
And once again, Scripture didn’t give me clarity.
It didn’t wrap up neatly.
It didn’t make sense.
But it did give me something to sit with:
God never calls Dina defiled.
People do.
And maybe that’s the thread I needed today.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ5-ldqeG_Y