CD Biblical Interpretation Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 ita briU.nl/bi BRILL Terrible Silence, Eternal Silence: A Feminist Re-Reading of Dinah's Voicelessness in Genesis 34 Caroline Blyth University ofEdinburgh Abstract This article explores the theme of Dinahs narrative silence in the text and interpretive traditions of Genesis 34. Although Dinahs rape is of central importance to the narrative development of this text, she remains throughout the story a marginal character. Her experience is contextualized by the author within a strictly patriarchal ideological framework, thereby denying her a voice with which to articulate and focalize her thoughts, feelings, and pain. Furthermore, there is a propensity within biblical interpretation simply to re-endorse the narrator s ideologies and value systems pertaining to sexual violence by accepting Dinahs voicelessness and absence as simply an invitation likewise to ignore her. I explore the ethical implications of Dinahs suppression within both this biblical text and its interpretive traditions, comparing her plight to that of contemporary rape survivors, and propose a means of utilising the testimonies of these survivors as a hermeneutical key in order to conceptualise Dinah s narrative elision as an intrinsic part of her rape experience. Using this feminist hermeneutical strategy, I hope to open the door to further readings of Genesis 34, which may endeavour to grant Dinah more sympathetic interpretive consideration, protest against her marginalization, and give her a voice with which to tell her story. Keywords Genesis 34, Dinah, feminist biblical interpretation, sexual violence Later I went through the ritual of talking to people. It always seemed as if I were talking through glass or underwater. I could never tell my mother; she couldn't bear the pain. Others, it seemed to me, drew away. I could not bear to be alone, but in company I felt abandoned, estranged. For months, I looked to my husband for comfort he could or would not give. A year later, we began a divorce.1 l) Deena Metzger, 'It Is Always the Woman Who Is Raped', American Journal ofPsychiatry 133 (1976), pp. 405-8 (405). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156851508X401150 484 C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 I had to keep this a secret... If I told, everything would fall apart. If I couldn't hold it together, everything would fall apart... I wasn't about to let the world that I knew fall apart.2 I had tried to talk to people close to me about [my rape], but I couldn't, because nobody would listen. I didn't even talk to my mother because she had made it very clear that she didn't want to deal with it... When I tried to talk to other people about it, I felt like I was talking about something I wasn't supposed to be talking about.3 Reading the personal testimonies of rape survivors provides a powerful witness to just how terrifying and traumatic the experience of sexual violence is for all those who endure it. 'Seeing' the event through a survivor s eyes and hearing, in her own words, the nature of her experience, facilitates a deeper appreciation that she is the one who can vocalize the pain, the terror and the wrongfulness of rape because she and she alone lived through it, experiencing at a visceral and emotional level every moment of its horror. Bearing this in mind, the narrative of any rape event then surely belongs in the first place to this woman; it is her story to tell, her voice that ought to be heard. While such a statement may seem somewhat axiomatic, it would appear to bear repeating when one takes stock of the issues raised so clearly by the testimonies quoted above. As is all too obvious, victims of sexual violence may frequently find themselves deprived of a voice with which to tell their stories either because they are too afraid to do so, for fear of social stigma or retribution, or, when they do try to speak out, they are silenced, sometimes by those very people who are meant to be a source of support and healing.4 As writer Nancy Venable Raine notes, 'Rape has long been considered a crime so unspeakable, so 2) Cited in Kristen J. Leslie, When Violence is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Survivors of Acquaintance Rape (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), p. 66. 3) Cited in Diana E.H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victims Perspective (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), p. 194. 4) See for example Ruth Schmidt, 'After the Fact: To Speak of Rape', Christian Century 110 (1993), pp.14-17; Russell, The Politics ofRape, pp. 20, 23, 194, 226-7; Daniel C. Silverman, 'Sharing the Crisis of Rape: Counselling the Mates and Families of Victims', in Mary D. Pellauer, Barbara Chester and Jane A. Boyajian (eds.), Sexual Assault and Abuse: A Handbookfor Clergy and Religious ProfessionaL· (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 140-56. C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 485 shameful to its victims that they are rendered mute and cloaked in anonymity'.5 Or, in the words of Deena Metzger, the author of the first testimony, 'After rape, there is a terrible silence'.6 Thinking about these very contemporary problems faced by rape survivors leads me in turn to contemplate Dinah's representation as a rape victim in Genesis 34. Most readers will agree that, although the biblical author grants but one succinct verse to her sexual assault, this narrative episode is of central importance, casting a bitter pall over the entire story, as it triggers and shapes all subsequent events. However, to call Genesis 34 a story about a woman's rape is to say something about the text that the author himself takes measures to exclude from representation. While without the rape event, there would be no story, the tale that is told is not Dinah's story; it is her father's story, her brothers' story, even her rapist's story.7 There is a pervasive narrative silence about this young woman's personal experience of her ordeal and a denial of, or at least a contextual disinterest in, the fact that Shechem's act of sexual assault was a forcible violation of her bodily integrity and that it would have been a source of immense physical, emotional and spiritual distress for her. Instead, the rape event is focalized and given meaning solely through these androcentric voices of the narrator and his multiple male characters, while any representation of Dinah's experience as a victim of sexual violence effectively remains little more than a narrative periphrasis.8 She is thus denied the power to enter into the 5) Nancy Venable Raine, After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998), p. 6. 6) Metzger, 'It Is Always the Woman', p. 405. 7) Ita Sheres, Dinahs Rebellion: A Biblical Parablefor Our Time (New York: Crossroad, 1990), p. 94; Nehama Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window: Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), p. 47. 8) Sheres, Dinahs Rebellion, p. 109; Nehama Aschkenasy, Eves Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1986), p. 128; and Woman at the Window, pp. 47, 56-57; Eryl W. Davies, The Dissenting Reader: Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 57; Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 202,219; and 'Contemporary Biblical Literary Criticism: The Objective Phallacy, in Vincent L. Tollers and John Maier (eds.), Mapping of the Biblical Terrain: The Bible as Text (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), pp. 134-42 (136-8); Marie Marshall Fortune, Sexual Violence: 486 C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 patriarchal discourse and to challenge its narrow androcentric conception of sexual violence and its perpetual elision of women's experiences of that violence.9 Her silence becomes nothing less than a form of oppression, the mark of her exclusion from honest representation within the text. With the above discussion in mind, one is then left with the question: is there anything the reader of Gen. 34 can do to redress the patriarchal imbalance within the text, in order to grant Dinah an audience and refocalize the rape event through her eyes? In other words, can Dinahs silence at last be broken? Some biblical scholars, alas, have answered this question with an emphatic 'no'. Thus, for example, Meir Sternberg appears to cast doubt on the veracity of any interpretive approach to Genesis 34 that attempts to read the narrative from a perspective other than that of the narrator himself. While recognising that the ancient author silences Dinah within the text, he argues that interpretive readings must simply accept this silence, even if it comes at the expense of perpetuating a patriarchal ideology that conceptualizes sexual violence only through male eyes.10 If interpreters find such an ideology 'unpalatable', argues Sternberg, then they 'nevertheless must swallow it as a sociohistorical premise for the nonce, a reading directive on a par with all others, and take comfort The Unmentionable Sin (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1983), p. 51; Ulrike Bail, 'The Breath after the Comma: Psalm 55 and Violence Against Women', Journal ofReligion and Abuse 1 (1999), pp. 5-18 (7); Frank Yamada, 'Dealing with Rape (in) Narrative (Genesis 34): Ethics of the Other and a Text in Conflict', in Charles H. Cosgrove (ed.), The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict ofInterpretation (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 149-63 (157, 164); Susan Niditch, 'Genesis', in Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (eds.), The Women's Bible Commentary (London: SPCK, 1992), pp. 10-25 (24); Susanne Scholz, Rape Plots: A Feminist Cultural Study ofGenesis 34 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 168; and 'Was It Really Rape in Genesis 34? Biblical Scholarship as a Reflection of Cultural Assumptions', in Harold C. Washington, Susan Lochrie Graham and Pamela Thimmes (eds.), Escaping Eden: New Feminist Perspectives on the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 182-98 (195-7). 9) Bail, 'The Breath after the Comma', p. 7; Fuchs, Sexual Politics, p. 219; Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window, p. 56. 10) Meir Sternberg, 'Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics: From Reading to Counterreading', Journal ofBiblical Literature 111 (1992), pp. 463-88 (480). C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 487 from the progress made since'.11 If, however, readers are still unwilling to do this and insist upon searching for Dinahs voice, their only option, he suggests, is to abandon biblical interpretation and re-write the text 'fiction-maker style'.12 Paul Noble concurs, suggesting that any attempts to fill in the narrative gaps left by Dinah's silence are simply an exercise in 'feminist fictions'.13 While he has no inherent objection to scholars 'authoring the secret diaries of Dinah', he does not believe that such an exercise ought to be recognised as making any worthwhile contribu­ tion to the hermeneutical debate.14 Sharing a similar, though slightly more sympathetic, perspective as Sternberg and Noble, John Van Seters likewise voices doubts as to whether the reader is able to break Dinah's silence and thus participate in an interpretive dialogue with her. Although he admits to being 'uncomfortable' with her narrative silencing, he admits, Ί cannot invent a voice for Dinah, which the social history suggests she does not have'.15 Thus, appealing to an empiricist positivist epistemology, which insists upon searching for the historical or 'original' meaning of the text by using a literal and disinterested hermeneutic of interpretation,16 schol­ ars such as Noble, Sternberg, and Van Seters, maintain that any inter­ pretive approach to Genesis 34 has to remain constrained within the limitations of the historical and ideological framework of the narrative itself. It has nothing to do with the woman-shaped' blanks and silences within that narrative—blanks and silences, which, according to this argument, are of no hermeneutical value and thereby ought to remain unfilled. n) Sternberg, 'Biblical Poetics', p. 480. Sternberg, 'Biblical Poetics', p. 481. 13) Paul Noble, Ά "Balanced" Reading of the Rape of Dinah: Some Exegetical and Methodological Observations', Biblical Interpretation 4 (1996), pp. 173-203 (199). 14) Noble, Ά Balanced Reading', pp. 199-203. 15) John Van Seters, "The Silence of Dinah (Genesis 34)', in Jean-Daniel Macchi and Thomas Römer (eds.), Jacob: Commentaire à Plusieures Voix de Gen. 25-36: Mélanges Offerts à Albert de Pury (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2001), pp. 239-47 (247). 16) Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), pp. 24, 41-42; Susanne Scholz, '"Back Then It Was Legal": The Epistemological Imbalance in Readings of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Rape Legislation, Journal of Religion and Abuse 7, (2005), pp. 5-35. 12) 488 C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 Yet, to quote the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me'.17 I am referring, of course, not to the heavens, as Pascal was, but to the 'infinite spaces' within the text and traditions of Genesis 34, where, instead of hearing Dinah's voice, we are confronted by a silence that is all too often absolute. Adhering to the methodological constraints endorsed by Sternberg, Noble, and Van Seters only serves to ensure that this silence remains unchallenged, simply accepted as an inevitable socio-historical feature of the culture in which this ancient text was written.18 I strongly believe however that, in spite of their protestations, the patriarchal discourse of this narrative can and should be taken to task for this perpetual silencing of Dinah. I will now explain why I believe that this is so important. In the first place, and contrary to Sternberg's assertions, there really is nothing to stop a biblical interpreter from 'spitting out', rather than 'swallowing' any 'unpalatable' ideology that they encounter within the biblical material. As literary theorist Wayne Booth argues, no text, however ancient or esteemed, ought to be elevated into, what he terms, 'a purified and hence invulnerable kingdom' that is immune from the rigors of ethical criticism.19 The literary word is, after all, never merely a static mirror image of the historical, social, political, and religious context in which it was written, nor does it ever leave the reader either untouched or unchanged by the reading process.20 Rather, all texts speak to their readers through the values and ideologies that shaped them, the author using words as a medium by which to encourage her/his 17) 'Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie'. Biaise Pascal, Pensées: Edition de Ch.-Mdes Granges (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1964), section 2, no. 206, p. 131. 18) Rosemary Radford Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation: A Method of Correlation', in Letty M. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation ofthe Bible (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 111-24(112-13). 19) Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics ofFiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 152-53. 20) Booth, The Company We Keep, pp. 91, 153; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics ofReading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Troüope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 8; Catharine Belsey and Jane Moore, 'Introduction, in Catharine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), p. 2. C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 489 audience to endorse and perpetuate the rhetoric of his writing within their own cultural milieu.21 In this sense, one could argue that literary texts are prescriptive; they form a dialectical relationship with the communities in which they are both written and read, being at once influenced by the cultural values and ideologies of the authors society and, furthermore, perpetuating and validating these values and ideologies within the reader s own social setting through the author s careful use of rhetoric. As Patrocinio Schweickart notes, 'Literature acts on the world by acting on its readers'.22 However, there is no imperative on the reader simply to accept such rhetoric, or to use it as the only source of reference from which to uncover meaning. Indeed, according to Booth, there is instead an ethical demand for the responsible reader to criticise and challenge 'unpalatable' texts, revealing their inherent articulation of injustices, and recognising their potential to perpetuate these injustices within the reader's own contemporary context.23 Keen to follow Booth's call to read responsibly has therefore led me to adopt a feminist hermeneutical approach to the Genesis 34 narrative.24 Such a methodology recognises that the biblical narratives are by 21) Miller, Ethics ofReading, p. 8; Belsey and Moore, 'Introduction', p. 2; Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp.28, 114; Gayle Greene and Coppèlla Kahn, 'Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman', in Gayle Greene and Coppèlla Kahn (eds.), Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 1-36 (4-5, 26). 22) Patrocinio P. Schweickart, 'Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading', in Robyn R. Warhol, and Diane Price Herndl (eds.), Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 609-634 (609-3, 615). Similar sentiments are expressed by Greene and Kahn, 'Feminist Scholarship', p. 2; Belsey and Moore, 'Introduction, pp. 1-2. 23) Booth, The Company We Keep, pp. 152-53,489. See also Annette Kolodny, 'Dancing in the Minefields: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism', in Warhol and Herndl (eds.), Feminisms, pp. 171-90 (184-85); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), p. 157. 24) I am keenly aware that feminist criticism is not a unified epistemology; however, I adopt Kolodny's definition of feminist criticism as a useful 'umbrella' term for what I believe is the essence of feminist biblical interpretation: 'All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all, asking new and different questions of 490 G Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 no means impartial with regard to their representation of the sexes; rather, they are the product of patriarchal ideologies and gender stereotypes that contribute in no small way to the perpetuation of women's silencing and marginalisation.25 Feminist criticism therefore encourages readers not to acquiesce to the authority of the text s unpalatable androcentric and at times misogynist literary representations, but rather makes a moral claim on them to subvert this authority, and to hold up these representations for scrutiny and critical evaluation. As Davies contends: To accept the value statements of the text in utter passivity, without allowing oneself the freedom to reflect critically upon its claims and to question its assumptions is merely to foster a sense of complacency ... The task of the reader, therefore, is to engage in a vigorous dialogue and debate with the Hebrew Bible, resisting statements that appear to be morally objectionable, and taking a critical stance against what he or she may regard as the excesses of the biblical text.26 it. In the process, she claims neither definitiveness nor structural completeness for her different readings and reading systems, but only their usefulness' (p. 183). For further discussion of feminist criticism, see Davies, especially pp. 17-54; David Rutledge, Reading Marginally: Feminism, Deconstruction and the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. xx, xxii; Mary Ann Tolbert, 'Defining the Problem: The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics', Semeia 28 (1983), pp. 113-26; Schweickart, 'Reading Ourselves', pp. 609-34; J. Cheryl Exum, 'Feminist Criticism: Whose Interests are Being Served?', in Gale A. Yee {ta.), Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 65-90 (67); Fuchs, 'Objective Phallacy, pp. 136-38; and Sexual Politics, pp. 11-43; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 'Feminist Hermeneutics', in David Noel Freedman (ed.), Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 783-91; Marie-Theres Wacker, 'Feminist Criticism and Related Aspects', in J.W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 634-54; Ann Loades, 'Feminist Interpretation', in John Barton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 81-94. 25) Luise Schottroff, Silvia Schroer, and Marie-Theres Wacker, Feminütische Exegese: Forschungserträge zur Bibel aus der Perspektive von Frauen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), p. 49; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, p. 53. 26) Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 46-47. C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 491 By approaching the text with such a 'hermeneutics of suspicion',27 the reader therefore becomes, in the words of Judith Fetterley, a 'resisting reader', who can unpick the strands of androcentric rhetoric and expose its inherent injustices towards women.28 For, as Mary Jacobus has pointed out, women's voices within literary traditions are all too often 'located in the gaps, the absences, the unsayable or unrepresentable of discourse and representation'.29 Feminist biblical criticism therefore attempts to redress this injustice by searching within these 'womenshaped' gaps and absences and reclaiming both women's subjectivity and their narrative space so that their lost and stifled voices can at last be heard. In the words of Judith Fetterley, 'Feminist criticism represents the discovery/recovery of a voice, a unique and uniquely powerful voice'.30 Thus, with regards Genesis 34, a feminist critical reading of the text insists that Dinah's rape, her objectification and silence within the text, demands an ethical response from the reader, for such silence does not merely signify an absence from textual consideration, but is, in its own 27) Reading with a hermeneutics of suspicion attempts to uncover the implicit and often impalpable patriarchal agenda of the text and thus to offer a corrective to the androcentric perspective evident within the text, by refusing to accept the misogynist and phallocentric value systems, which the author presents as 'normative' or 'universal', thereby laying bare its partialities and value systems and recovering women's voices from the marginal positions that they inhabit. For further discussion on reading with a hermeneutics of suspicion, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 57; and 'Feminist Hermeneutics', p. 785; and Bread Not Stone: The Challenge ofFeminist Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1984), pp. 14, 112; Fuchs, Sexual Politics, p. 17; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 52-53; Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation, p. 114; Bible and Culture Collective, The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 248-49; Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 23. 28) Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xxii. Eryl Davies likewise defines such a reader as a 'dissenting reader' (pp. 42-45, 52). 29) Mary Jacobus, 'Is There a Woman in this Text?' New Literary History 14 (1982), pp. 117-41 (122). In a similar vein, Adrienne Munich has noted that, 'in the background of patriarchal texts are women trying to escape into readability'. See 'Notorious Signs, Feminist Criticism and Literary Tradition, in Green and Kahn (eds.), Making a Difference, pp. 238-59 (257). 30) Fetterley, The Resuting Reader, p. xxiii. 492 C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 31 right, a violating act of female repression. Simply reiterating the patri­ archal ideologies of the author, as the methodology endorsed by Stern­ berg and Van Seters would necessitate, cannot be sustained for unless we begin to listen for the woman's story, which is hidden and suppressed within the blanks and silences of the androcentric biblical text we become nothing less than a Voyeur', complicit with the narrator's patri­ archal indifference to women's experience of sexual violence and con­ tent to adopt, and therefore tacitly endorse, his stifling of the female voice.32 As John Winkler, a literary critic, asserts, 'if our critical facul­ ties are placed solely in the service of elucidating an author's meaning, then we have already committed ourselves to the premises and the pro­ tocols of the past ... This above all we will not do'.33 Or, in the words of feminist poet Adrienne Rich, ' We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us'.34 This is not to say however, that attempts to fill in the gaps left by Dinah's silence within this narrative is merely an exercise in 'feminist fiction-making', as Noble and Sternberg would suggest. Nor does such a reading offer a contribution that is of any less value to the hermeneu­ tical debate surrounding this narrative. For centuries the dominant approach to biblical interpretation has, under the guise of 'studied neutrality',35 simply served to reiterate and perpetuate the deeply 31) Yamada,'Dealing with Rape', p. 157; also Scholz,'Was It Really Rape', pp. 195-98; Christine Froula, 'The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety11 (1986), pp. 216-44 (226). 32) Alice Bach, 'Re-Reading the Body Politic: Women and Violence in Judges 2Γ, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2ndsenes) (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 143-59 (147); Fuchs, 'Objective Phallacy, p. 138; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, p. 43; Schottroff, Schroer and Wacker, Feministische Exegese, p. 156; J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Subversions ofBiblical Narratives (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 9. 33) John J. Winkler, 'The Education of Chloe: Erotic Protocols and Prior Violence', in Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (eds.), Rape and Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 15-34 (30). 34) Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (London: Virago, 1980), p. 35. 35) Davies, The Dissenting Reader,^. 101. C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 493 patriarchal ideologies present within the biblical traditions.36 As a result, women's experiences within the biblical traditions have been consistently overlooked or underrepresented, their voices drowned out by the prioritising of the biblical authors own ideological perspective, which simply regards women's absence and silence as the norm.37 Such an essentialist and empiricist epistemology, furthermore, has long been accorded greater authority and higher hermeneutical value than any other reading, claiming to offer definitive, authoritative, and disinterested readings of the biblical traditions, which are neither clouded nor distorted by the interpreter s personal or theological beliefs.38 However, within today's postmodern milieu of biblical interpretation, such a monopoly on the ctrue meaning' of a text has been increasingly challenged, while the idealization of interpretive objectivity likewise appears to be ever more illusory. Rather, there is increased recognition that the meaning of a particular text for an individual or community is not only bound up within the words of that text or even within its socio-historical context, but is intricately related to and shaped by the values and ideologies, which fashion the reader's own psychological and cultural worldview. Thus, according to David Rutledge, 'Meaning becomes situated in the contentious realm of conflicting discourses of reading communities, and the authority of any reading of any text becomes no more than a function of the persuasive ideological ^ Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 50-51,101; Fiorenza, But She Said, p. 53; Scholz, 'Was It Really Rape', p. 195; Harold C. Washington, 'Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach', Biblical Interpretation 5 (1997), pp. 324-63 (359); Morris, Literature and Feminism, pp. 37-38; Fuchs, 'Objective Phallacy', p. 134; Dana Nolan Fewell, 'Feminist Reading of the Hebrew Bible: Affirmation, Resistance and Transformation, Journal for the Study ofthe Old Testamento*) (1987), pp. 77-87 (77); T. Drorah Setel, 'Feminist Insights and the Question of Method', in Adela Yarbro Collins (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 35-42 (35); Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 238. 37) Exum, Fragmented Women, p. 9; Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation, pp. 112-14, 116; Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings ofBiblical Love Stories (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 2. 38) Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 40-41; Rutledge, Reading Marginally, pp. 5963. 494 C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 force with which it is held in place by the readers who produce it' [original italics].39 Or, as Mieke Bal has noted, Interpretation is never objective, never reliable, never free of biases and subjectivity".40 Thus, a feminist hermeneutic of interpretation cannot simply be rejected as a subjective, and therefore unworthy, attempt to produce 'fictitious' misreadings of the biblical texts; rather, such a method of reading embraces the contextualized nature of all biblical interpretation, while emphasising the central role of the reader in the meaningmaking process.41 It does not distort texts; rather, it offers innovative ways of looking at these texts, entering them from new critical directions, and thus raising up fresh possibilities of meaning that are no less valuable a contribution to the hermeneutical debate than any other reading.42 The ancient authors' intentions, their didactic goals, and the ideologies that motivated them to record these remarkable and thoughtprovoking traditions are, after all, forever lost to us in the proverbial mists of time. As biblical scholars and interested readers, we are left 39) Rutledge, Reading Marginally, p. 93. Also Schottroff, Schroer, and Wacker, Feminütische Exegese, p. 51. 40) Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, p. 238; and Lethal Love, p. 131; also Booth, The Company We Keep, p. 92; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 41, 111; Fewell, feminist Reading of the Hebrew Bible', p. 77; Setel, 'Feminist Insights', p. 35; Carolyn Osiek, 'The Feminist and the Bible: Hermeneutical Alternatives', in Collins, Feminist Perspectives, pp. 93-105 (97); Gillian Beer, 'Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past', in Belsey and Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader, pp. 77-90 (80). 41) As Lilian S. Robinson argues, "The application of a feminist perspective will not mean adding ideology to a value-free discipline'. From 'Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective', in Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson (eds.), Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose (Metuchen, NY: Scarecrow Press, 1978), pp. 21-36 (33). See also Scholz, 'Back Then It Was Legal', p. 7; Rutledge, Reading Marginally, p. 93; Fiorenza, 'Feminist Hermeneutics', p. 785; Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation', p. 31; Kolodny, 'Dancing in the Minefields', pp. 183-85; K.K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Study: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 35; Bible and Culture Collective, The Post Modern Bible, p. 270; Loades, 'Feminist Interpretation', p. 84; Katharine Doob Sakenfield, 'Old Testament Perspectives: Methodological Issues', Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 22 (1982), pp. 13-20 (16). 42) Fiorenza, 'Feminist Hermeneutics', p. 786; Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xxii; Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, p. 35; Kolodny, 'Dancing in the Minefields', p. 185. C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 495 only to conjecture upon the underlying sense of these texts, to read them and to find a significance within them that is meaningful to us. As Bal further notes, 'Texts trigger readings; that is what they are: the occasion of a reaction'.43 And what triggers a reaction in us can be, not only what is said within the text, but what is omitted; silence, after all, is sometimes as voluminous and as evocative as speech, creating within the narrative a subversive subtext, which stands in fascinating tension to the main authorial concerns.44 Feminist readings of Genesis 34, which attempt to give new value and meaning to Dinahs silence, are therefore no more 'fictitious' than those proposed by Sternberg and Noble. Indeed, Sternberg's and Noble's claim that only certain methodological strategies can make a worthy contribution to the hermeneutical debate speaks only of the narrow exclusivism inherent within their argument and, furthermore, belies the androcentric subjectivity of their own discourse.45 By refusing to address the gaps and silences left by Dinah within the narrative of Genesis 34, and by insisting upon giving a platform only to the androcentric attitudes of its ancient author, they are effectively nailing their ideological colours to the mast, creating their own fictional world, where rape victims make no ethical demands upon our conscience and where these women's voices are not worthy even of our consideration. Second, in response to Sternberg's claim that biblical interpreters can nevertheless 'take comfort' from the fact that there has been progress made since the biblical period with regards to attitudes towards sexual 43) Bal, Lethal Love, p. 131. Similar remarks are made by Kolodny, dancing in the Minefields', p. 177. 44) Greene and Khan, 'Feminist Scholarship', p. 12. 45) As J. Cheryl Exum has rightly noted, T o suggest that there is one proper way to read the text results in an authoritarianism characteristic of phallocentric criticism— a position that feminist criticism rejects in its recognition (and celebration) of contradiction and multiplicity'; See 'Murder They Wrote: Ideology and the Manipulation of Female Presence in Biblical Narrative', in Alice Bach (ed.), The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp. 45-67 (46). For further discussion on the androcentric nature of socalled 'objective' biblical scholarship, see Morris, Literature and Feminism, pp. 37-38; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, pp. 50-51; Tolbert, 'Defining the Problem', p. 117; Fuchs, 'Objective Phallacy, p. 134; Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone, p. 107; Bal, Lethal Love, pp. 131-32. 496 C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 violence, I would contend that there is still too much progress yet to be made to excuse the level of complacency endorsed by this remark. As amply demonstrated in the testimonies cited earlier, the stifling of women's rape experiences and the denial of their suffering are far from 'ancient history'. Dinah has many silent sisters who, throughout history and up to the present day, experience rape but are subsequently denied the opportunity to express their pain, grief, and anger and whose status as casualties of sexual violence is either reinterpreted or suppressed by the dominant patriarchal discourse. One need only think, for example, of the mass rape of untold numbers of women during the bloody civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia, and currently in Darfiir, whose testimonies have all too often been lost within the more dominant discourse of interethnic conflict and political terrorism.46 Alternatively, one may point to the outrageous scandal of the Korean and Chinese comfort women, imprisoned and used as objects of sexual abuse by Japanese troops during World War II. These women were systematically violated, tortured, and broken by their experiences, yet even up to the present day, their experiences have been consistently denied or silenced, both within their own patriarchal cultures and within the collective memory of Japanese history.47 Such testimonies of suffering must therefore place an even greater imperative upon 46) See, for example, Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in BosniaHerzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Vesna Nicolic-Ristanovic, 'Living Without Democracy and Peace: Violence Against Women in the Former Yugoslavia, Violence Against Women 5 (1999), pp. 63-80; Seada Vranic, Breaking the Wall ofSilence: The Voices ofRaped Bosnia (Zagreb: Izdanja Antibarbarus, 1996), p. 191; Slavenka Draculic, 'Women Hide Behind a Wall of Silence', in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz (eds.), Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War (Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1993), pp. 116-21; African Rights, Rwanda: Broken Bodies, Torn Spirits. Living with Genocide, Rape and HIV/AIDS (Kigali: African Rights, 2004); Astrid Aafjes, Gender Violence: The Hidden War Crime (Washington, DC: Women, Law and Development International, 1998); Tracy Hampton, 'Agencies Speak Out on Rape in Darfur', Journal ofthe American Medical Association 294 (2005), pp. 542-4. 47) See, for example, Chin Sung Chung, 'The Origin and Development of the Military Sexual Slavery Problem in Imperial Japan', Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5 (1997), pp. 219-53; Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust ofWorld War II (London: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 52-53, 209. C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 497 biblical scholars to challenge the interpretive strategies proposed by Sternberg, among others, which would have us ignore the silencing of rape victims within the biblical texts. For, as discussed above, any literary work that articulates the unjust treatment of women has the potential to act as an instrument of female subjugation, by perpetuating, validating, and legitimising patriarchal gender inequality and female oppression within the reader's own contemporary milieu.48 The patriarchal myths and attitudes given voice within the biblical scriptures still resonate today within a diversity of contemporary cultures, bearing witness to the pervasive and insidious influence that such ideologies have had and continue to have on cultural values and belief systems within patriarchal societies over time and space.49 Sternberg s call to objective empiricism therefore ignores the fact that, as biblical interpreters, reading and interpreting these ancient traditions in a 'global rape culture',50 we surely have a moral obligation to highlight and confront such textual injustices, to raise an awareness of the insidious power that these texts may have within whichever community they are read, and to ensure that the narratives of literary rape survivors, such as Dinah, are recognised and remembered.51 48) Booth, The Company We Keep, p. 393; Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways, p. 136; and Bread Not Stone, p. ix; Loades, feminist Interpretation', pp. 85-87; Bal, ^hal Love, p. 1; and Death and Dissymmetry, p. 243; Exum, 'Feminist Criticism', p. 69; Fuchs, Objective Phallacy', pp. 139, 141; Carol R. Fontaine, 'The Abusive Bible: On the Use of Feminist Method in Pastoral Contexts', in Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine (eds.), A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bibk: Approaches, Methods and Strategies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 84-113 (94-95); Belsey and Moore, The Feminist Reader, p. 2. 49) Mieke Bal describes the Hebrew Bible as 'one of the most influential mythical and literary documents of our culture' (JLethal Love, p. 1). For similar comments, see also Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, p. 243; Exum, Fragmented Women, p. 12; Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways, p. 136; Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation, pp. 116-17; Davies, Literature and Feminism, pp. 47-48; Loades, 'Feminist Interpretation, pp. 85-87. 50) Scholz, 'Back Then It Was Legal', p. 7; also Schweickart, pp. 615-18,623-24. 51) Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 'The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship', Journal ofBiblical Literature 107 (1988), pp. 3-17 (15); Scholz, 'Back Then It Was Legal', pp. 7-9, 15, 28-29; Davies, The Dissenting Reader, p. 9-10; Fuchs, Sexual Politics, p. 24; Fortune, Sexual Violence, p. 44; Bal, introduction to Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Womens Lives in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1989) p. 13; Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self 498 C. Blyth / Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 How then, does one begin the task of giving Dinah back her voice, of respecting her right to an honest and gynocentric representation within the interpretive traditions of this biblical text? At first glance, such a task may seem nearly impossible, given the totality of her silencing within this narrative. However, one may perhaps take heart from the tale of Philomena, the young woman raped by her brother-in-law Tereus in Ovid's poetic work The Metamorphoses.52 Philomena threatens to proclaim to heaven and earth the outrage Tereus has committed against her, but before she can do so, he cuts out her tongue, and imprisons her, silenced and alone, to ensure that no one will ever hear of his crime. Nevertheless, Philomena refuses either to be silent, passive, or forgotten; so, taking up a loom and shuttle, she weaves a tapestry depicting Tereus s crime, which eventually others will see and know exactly what she has suffered. Can we as readers empower Dinah to weave a tapestry for us? Thankfully, a number of biblical interpreters, including myself, believe that this question can be answered in the affirmative. In order to begin the weaving, however, we have to start focalizing Dinah s rape through the medium of her own silence, recognising her voicelessness, not as an inevitable rhetorical feature of a patriarchal narrative but as a feature within that narrative, which contributes to and is intrinsic to her suffering, and which therefore may be a source of insight into her ordeal.53 Recognising this will allow the reader to grant a deeper significance to Dinahs narrative elision, understanding it, not simply as a signal for the reader to likewise ignore her, but as an added source of her abuse. As Patricia Laurence explains: If reality is perceived according to the established patriarchal values, then women's silence, viewed from the outside, is a mark of absence and powerlessness ... If, however, the same silence is viewed from the inside, and women's experiences and (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 6; Exum, 'Feminist Criticism', p. 66; Ruether, 'Feminist Interpretation', pp. 116-17; Booth, The Company We Keep, pp. 390, 489, 501-2; Kolodny, 'Dancing in the Minefields', pp. 184-85. 52) Horace Gregory (ed.), Ovid, The Metamorphoses (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), Book VI, pp. 175-83. 53) Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window, p. 52. C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 499 disposition of mind inform the standard of what is real, then women's silence can be viewed as a presence, and as a text waiting to be read.54 By appealing to the witnesses and testimonies of contemporary rape survivors, by listening to the voices of women who, like the character of Dinah, have their own narratives of suffering suppressed and ignored, we may be granted insight into the significance of Dinah's own silence and the terrible suffering that lies hidden behind her voicelessness. Through the creation of such a rhetoric of silence, we as readers of Genesis 34 can generate a space in which we can, by the power of our own imaginings, stand in solidarity and empathy with Dinah, reflecting upon her fear, pain, and suffering.55 We may thereby begin to ask and suggest answers to questions that have heretofore so rarely been addressed in the interpretive traditions of this narrative. For example, we might ask, how would Dinah have felt about her imposed silence, about having no opportunity to share her story? How would the fact that her brothers appeared more concerned about family honour than about her well-being have affected her? What emotions would have enveloped her when, in the aftermath of her brutal assault, her rapist showered her with endearments, insisting that she was to become his wife? By focalizing the rape through Dinahs eyes, we enable her to transcend the patriarchal ideologies of the text to become the subject of her own discourse. Her suffering can thus be articulated despite, or to be more accurate, precisely because of her suppression within the text, as it is her very suppression that speaks out so clearly about the full horror of her experience.56 As Nehama Aschkenasy so powerfully puts it, Only if we reread Dinah's wordless absence as a scream can we do her justice'.57 54) Patricia Laurence, ' Women's Silence as a Ritual of Truth: A Study of Literary Expression in Austen, Brontë, and Woolf, in Elaine Hedges and Shelly Fisher Fishkin (eds.), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 156-67 (157-58). 55) Bail, 'The Breath after the Comma', p. 8; Yamada, 'Dealing with Rape', p. 165; Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window, p. 52. 56) Patricia Klindienst Joplin, 'The Voice of the Shutde is Ours', in Higgins and Silver (eds.), pp. 35-64 (39-40). 57) Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window, p. 52. 500 C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 In light of the above discussion, let us now turn our attention to the text of Genesis 34, in an attempt to search for Dinah's hidden voice. A full exploration of Dinah's experience of sexual violence within this narrative is, alas, beyond the word limit of this article, so, allow me to focus on just one feature of the rape event that would most certainly have affected her, yet which is precluded from any discussion within both the text and, invariably, within the interpretive traditions sur­ rounding this text: that is, Dinah's defilement. One of the most damaging and destructive effects of rape experi­ enced by the victim is that this crime may often leave her with an overwhelming sense of having been 'defiled' or 'dirtied'.58 As Leslie Lebowitz and Susan Roth observe, rape is 'a powerful interpersonal communication', which speaks volubly to the victim about her own insignificance; she is treated by the rapist, not as an equal moral agent worthy of respect, but merely as an object of contempt, to be damaged, mistreated, and then discarded as worthless.59 In the words of one rape survivor, 'To feel that you have no other function other than as an object to be used and thrown away completely destroys your confidence and makes you feel powerless, worthless, ashamed and guilty'.60 However, while the act of rape may perpetuate the victim's belief in her own worthlessness and devaluation, the response she is shown by others may likewise confirm her own negative self-appraisal.61 Within contemporary patriarchal culture, there is a pervasive and insidious pre­ ponderance for the rape victim's community, and even, at times, her family, to regard her as in some sense 'damaged', defiled, and devalued 58) Colleen A. Ward, Attitudes toward Rape: Feminist and Social Psychological Perspec­ tives (London: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 28; Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 171; Sue Lees, Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial (London: The Women's Press, 2002), pp. 18-19. 59) Leslie Lebowitz and Susan Roth, "Ί Felt like a Slut": The Cultural Context and Women's Response to Being Raped'', Journal of Traumatic Stress 7 (1994), pp. 363-90 (366); also Vranic, Breaking the Wall, p. 191; Leslie, When Violence b No Stranger, pp. 111-16; Metzger, p. 407, Russell, 'Is It Always the Woman', p. 168. 60) Lees, Carnal Knowledge, p. 22 (see also pp. 18-19). 61) Lebowitz and Roth, "T Felt like a Slut'", p. 366. C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 501 by her rape experience.62 Nevertheless, although this cultural response to rape may echo in many ways the feelings experienced by the rape survivor herself, it is not shaped by an empathetic understanding of the woman's personal experience of physical and psychic degradation, but rather evaluates the rape event in terms of its repercussions for the wom­ an's Value' according to patriarchal social value systems. In a culture where female chastity and sexual purity is held in high value, the rape survivor's, albeit non-consensual, encounter with for­ bidden sexuality leads others to regard her as 'damaged' or 'used' goods, 'unchaste', polluted with the immorality of promiscuity, and, further­ more, as someone who can 'dirty' or defile those she comes into con­ tact with. 63 Thus, for example, the mother of a ten-year-old rape survivor recalled that some of her own family members spurned her daughter after the rape incident: 'Instead of understanding, they treated her as if she was a criminal, whose very presence could only taint them'.64 Similarly, another rape survivor reported that her mother told her, '"Now this has happened to you and you are going to have it the rest of your life" ... I was soiled ... I really think that she thinks I am whoring around. That I really am a no-good person ... that I really am unclean'.65 In a very real way then, the rape survivor is objectified and degraded, not only by her rapist but also by those around her. Her own sense of humiliation and defilement in the wake of her sexual assault is effec­ tively confirmed and thus reinforced by the responses she receives from her family and community, responses that render her a marginalised, ostracised source of distaste or even contempt. Turning now to Genesis 34, we read on three separate occasions (w.5, 13, 27) that, in the eyes of the narrator and the male characters, Dinah's sexual encounter with Shechem had rendered her 'defiled' (NDU). Within the context of this narrative, the employment of the verb 1&ΏΌ appears 62) Russell, The Politics of Rape, p. 62; Lees, Carnal Knowledge, pp. 1,4; Gerdi Weidner and William Griffitt, 'Rape: A Sexual Stigma?', Journal of Personality 51 (1983), pp. 151-66. 63) Lebowitz and Roth, " Ί Felt like a Slut'", p. 372. a) Ward, Attitudes toward Rape, p. 3. Ward also cites a rape survivor who reported that her husband 'doesn't want me around his family. He told his mother on Sunday and said he was ashamed of me' (p. 3). 65) Lebowitz and Roth, " Ί Felt like a Slut"', p. 374. 502 C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 to suggest that Dinah's (albeit unwilling) involvement in an act of premarital sexual intercourse, which robbed her of her virginity, effectively caused her to suffer a serious and permanent degradation of her social worth and sexual purity.66 As an unmarried non-virgin living within a culture where a woman's virginity was a highly prized sexual asset and most likely a prerequisite to finding a desirable husband, Dinah would have been deemed virtually unmarriageable, for very few if any potential suitors would wish to marry a woman whose hymen was no longer intact.67 That the offending sexual event was aggressive and utterly coerced may therefore have had little or no bearing on the family's evaluation of its wrongfulness.68 Rather, Dinah is presented less as a woman traumatised by the effects of a life-shattering and life-threatening physical violation of her body, than one who faces a social 'death', irreparably damaged and sullied by her (albeit unwilling) encounter with forbidden sexuality.69 Nevertheless, the question remains, how did Dinah feel after being raped? How did she respond to her family's perception of her defilement? Did she also consider herself defiled by her experience? On this subject, however, the narrator remains silent. Given such a silence, it therefore falls to us, the readers, to consider for ourselves some of the emotions that Dinah may have experienced following her ordeal and 66) Christine E. Hayes, Gentile impurities andJewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 24, 74, 232, n. 50; Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 29; Dana Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Tipping the Balance: Sternberg's Reader and the Rape of Dinah5', Journal oj*BiblicalLiterature 110 (1991), pp. 193-211(207). 67) Cheryl B. Anderson, Women, Ideology, and Violence: Critical Theory and the Construction of Gender in the Book of the Covenant and the Deuteronomic Law (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), p. 67. 68) L.E. Goodman, 'The Biblical Laws of Diet and Sex', in B.S. Jackson (ed.), Jewish Law Association Studies II(Adanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 17-57 (38). 69) Fuchs, Sexual Politics, pp. 214-15; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women ofthe Bible (New York: Schoken Books, 2002), pp. 183-84; Athalya Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 138; Anderson, Women, Ideology, and Violence, pp. 42-43; Carolyn Pressler, The View ofWomen Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 30-31, 42; Goodman, 'The Biblical Laws of Diet and Sex, p. 38. C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 503 thus to give her, in some sense, a voice with which to tell her story. Thus, in order to imagine, as sensitively and as honestly as possible, what she might say to us, we can look nowhere else but to the testimonies of rape survivors who have found the strength and courage to share their experiences with us. We can let their voices guide us, asking them to speak on Dinahs behalf, so that they may grant us a new awareness of the terrible and painful space, which Dinah, as a literary rape survivor, may have inhabited. Through these women's witness, we can suggest, for example, that, like so many rape survivors, Dinah may have felt sullied and defiled by her sexual assault: I wanted to die. I could not stop crying. I thought everybody was looking at me and could see what I was feeling inside. I felt dirty, bathing all the time as I needed to be clean ... I could smell [the rapist] all the time. I kept scratching myself to get him out of my body. I smashed all the mirrors in my bedroom and cut up the clothes I had been wearing.70 Perhaps, like this rape survivor, Dinah experienced a sense of feeling 'dirty'; she may have longed to wash away the stain of sexual violation, which permeated her entire body.71 She may also have suffered feelings of self-worthlessness and degradation, having been objectified by her rapist and treated as a person not worthy of respect or consideration. It is conceivable that her thoughts would have been much like those expressed within the following testimony: [When] it really hit me what had happened then I felt very, very dirty... and after that I didn't care what happened to my body ... Like what did it matter any more ... At that point, you know, it s like youVe been violated so so so bad that it didn't matter.72 These powerful and terrible words can only remind us of the insidious power of rape to destroy a woman's sense of self-worth; we therefore cannot ignore the fact that Dinah too may have experienced such a crippling sense of internal defilement and degradation. Like the rape 70) 71) 72) Lees, Carnal Knowledge, p. 19. Lees, Carnal Knowledge, p. 19. Lebowitz and Roth, "£I Felt like a Slut,,,) p. 374. 504 C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 survivor who reported a perpetual feeling of'carrying some kind of vis­ ible stamp, of being dirty, physically dirty, and guilty',73 Dinah may likewise have internalized this powerful message of insignificance and contempt, conveyed to her by her rapist through his abuse, until it soaked into her very soul and became, for her, a reality. Such feelings of worthlessness and personal defilement would also have been reinforced for Dinah by the seemingly unfeeling response of her family in the wake of the rape event. In their eyes, she was less a casualty of a violent crime than a woman tainted and defiled by illicit sexual intercourse. Facing attitudes such as these must have been dev­ astating for Dinah, reminding her of her objectification at the hands of her rapist and reinforcing her own sense of self-worthlessness and social degradation. Like the woman cited above, whose mother believed that she was permanently 'soiled' after her rape, or the young rape vic­ tim whose family shunned her as though her defilement was 'contagious',74 Dinah too may have felt that such a reaction from her family only served to confirm what she already believed; that, as an unmarried virgin, she was devalued, despoiled, and morally sullied. Perhaps, like the victims of wartime rape in Uganda, who are taunted by their communities because they are 'used products that have lost their taste',75 Dinah may have experienced terrible social stigma, shame, and humiliation, being treated as a piece of damaged property, which had been misused and devalued. Indeed, if she were able to recount to us her experiences, she may speak with the same terrible knowledge as the Rwandan rape sur­ vivor, who commented that 'after rape, you don't have value in the community'.76 Finally, when contemplating the effects that Dinah's rape may have had upon her, we must not forget that an intrinsic part of her ordeal would have been the very act of silencing that was imposed upon her 73) Draculic, Women Hide Behind a Wall', p. 119. Lebowitz and Roth, "Ί Felt like a Slut'", p. 374; Ward, Attitudes toward Rape, p. 3. 75) Meredith Turshen, 'The Political Economy of Violence Against Women During Armed Conflict in Uganda, Social Research 67 (2000), pp. 803-24 (815). 76) Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Geno­ cide and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), p. 25. 74) C. Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 505 by the narrator and his multiple male characters.77 Yet, such a silencing of the rape survivor only serves to deepen and prolong her wounds, extending the physical and psychological trauma inflicted upon her by her rapist, and delaying her beginning the journey along the long path towards healing. For, as many rape survivors note, the space and safety to speak about their ordeal, which is offered to them by their community, is an essential element of their recovery. Women who are not granted this space within which to tell their stories, but who instead are stigmatised, degraded, and silenced by those they live with, bear living testament to the continued suffering, loneliness, and pain of their existence as a rape survivor. As Deena Metzger explains, 'My experience [of rape] and that of the women I know tells me there is no treatment for rape other than community ... The social community is the appropriate centre for the restoration of spirit, but the rape victim is usually shamed into silence and or self-imposed isolation'.78 Dinah, we must admit, is a literary victim of sexual violence who has, for millennia, been 'shamed into silence' by both the author of the Genesis 34 narrative and by all those who read this narrative and likewise ignore her presence within it. By being denied the opportunity to share her experiences with her family and community, by being faced only with social disgrace, devaluation, and shame, Dinah suffers perpetually the fate of the silenced rape victim, isolated, stigmatised, and deprived of a supportive audience, who could at least invite her to embark upon the path to healing and restoration. Thus, to conclude, abused and violated women within both the biblical texts, such as Genesis 34, and contemporary culture have been consistently denied access to a means by which to make their voices heard. Instead, their experiences of sexual violence have been and continue to be eclipsed and stifled by the androcentric, sexist, and at times misogynistic cultural ideologies pertaining to this crime. As a result, they are frequently denied empathy, dignity, and the right to name their experience as a crime committed against them, and as a violation of their physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity. In the Genesis 34 narrative, Dinah is denied the chance to tell her story to her 77) 78) Aschkenasy, Woman at the Window, p. 52; and Eves Journey, p. 128. Metzger, It is Always the Woman', p. 406. 506 C Blyth I Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506 community; it is up to the community of those who read and hear this story then to give her space to speak, to listen to her pain, and, hopefully, to let her heal. Recognising the silencing of rape survivors, refusing to let it continue unchallenged, is a task that is as imperative within contemporary culture as it is within the field of Biblical Studies. ^ s Copyright and Use: As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. 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