Jacob's Sons Lied the Way Jacob Once Lied to Isaac (Genesis 34:1–17)

He spoke to her heart

Shechem spoke to Dinah with the Hebrew idiom dibber al-lev, to speak to the heart, the phrase God later used for speaking to His own people. It joins dabar (H1696), to speak, and lev (H3820), heart. English versions render it tenderly, kindly or comfortingly, so a reader moving between verses can miss that it is one phrase.

Genesis 50:21 uses it of Joseph, who "reassured his brothers and spoke kindly to them" (Genesis 50:21), and Ruth used it of Boaz: "you have comforted and spoken kindly to your maidservant" (Ruth 2:13). God used the same phrase of Himself in Hosea, and He sent the prophets with it: "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem" (Isaiah 40:2).

In Hosea the One who had been wronged spoke to the heart of the people who had wronged Him. At Shechem the man who had done the wrong spoke tenderly to the young woman he had harmed, and he kept her in his house (Genesis 34:26). Her brothers heard what he had done, and they had their own word for it.

Israel's word for an outrage

Jacob's sons called Shechem's act nebalah (H5039), an outrage, a senseless wrong that tears the life of a community, and Genesis 34:7 is the first place Scripture uses that word with the name Israel. Moses later wrote the same phrase into Israel's law, "she has committed an outrage in Israel" (Deuteronomy 22:21), and Achan was judged by it because he "transgressed the covenant of the LORD and committed an outrage in Israel" (Joshua 7:15).

Later Israel, reading Genesis beside 2 Samuel, heard the phrase again from a king's daughter. When Amnon, David's son, seized his half-sister Tamar, she cried, "Do not violate me, for such a thing should never be done in Israel" (2 Samuel 13:12), and nebalah followed in her next sentence. "When King David heard all this, he was furious" (2 Samuel 13:21), and Scripture records no action from him, while "Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad" (2 Samuel 13:22) until he had him killed two years later. In the house of Jacob and again in the house of David, a father kept silent and a brother made a quiet plan. At Shechem the father's silence left the talking to Hamor, who came with an offer.

A bride price and a forbidden bargain

Shechem offered Jacob's family a mohar (H4119), the bride price a man paid to a young woman's family, and a mattan (H4976), a gift on top of it. In the ancient Near East a marriage was a contract between households, and the bride price sealed it. Israel's law later made the bride price a duty for a man who had taken an unpledged virgin, and it gave the decision to her father: "If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, the man still must pay an amount comparable to the bridal price of a virgin" (Exodus 22:17). At Shechem the decision belonged to Jacob, and he said nothing.

Hamor offered more. "Intermarry with us," he said (Genesis 34:9), and the verb is chathan (H2859), to become related by marriage. The first readers of Genesis heard this chapter as the people Moses had taught God's command about the nations of Canaan: "Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons" (Deuteronomy 7:3). The verb is the same, and the daughters and sons are the same. Hamor proposed the very bargain God later told Israel to refuse, in the place where He had promised Abraham the land (Genesis 12:7). That offer put a question before Jacob's house that only God could answer, and the brothers answered it themselves.

Their father's deceit

Jacob's sons answered bemirmah, deceitfully, from mirmah (H4820), deceit or treachery, the same form Isaac had used of Jacob himself: "Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing" (Genesis 27:35). Jacob had won his blessing with a disguise and a lie, and more than twenty years later his sons answered a prince the same way.

The Greek translation of Genesis that the first Christians read rendered Isaac's word with dolos (G1388), a trick. When Jesus first saw Nathanael He said, "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit" (John 1:47), and the word is dolos. Isaiah had written of the Servant God would send, "nor was any deceit in His mouth" (Isaiah 53:9), with mirmah again, and Peter quoted it of Jesus: "no deceit was found in His mouth" (1 Peter 2:22).

The God who speaks to the heart

To know God is to bring Him what has happened and let Him speak to the heart, and in Genesis 34 Jacob's house never asked Him. The God they never asked is the God who said, "Comfort, comfort My people" (Isaiah 40:1), and who went after a people who had wronged Him to speak tenderly to them in the wilderness.

We are the people who remember what God has said. When He speaks to your heart, through Scripture or an encouragement weighed with others, write it down with the date in the Doxa app, and read it back when anger or silence would answer for you. The God who spoke tenderly to Jerusalem still speaks to the hearts of His people.

This goes with today's Doxa Daily Lift: Dinah's Brothers Used God's Covenant Sign as Bait (Genesis 34:1–17)