Love in the Time of Nationalism: Dinah, Shechem, and Love Laws
By Sharon Jacob.
“When a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, it is always portrayed as romance and love by Hindu organizations, while when the reverse happens it is depicted as coercion.”
Charu Gupta, Historian at University of Delhi
Genesis 34 is the story of Dinah and the Shechemites. The most common interpretations of Genesis 34 contend that Shechem assaulted, abducted, and/or coerced Dinah into a sexual relationship. In response, Dinah’s brothers kill all of the men in Shechem’s community. While such interpretations are pertinent and highlight important factors around sexual violence, consent, and the silence of victims, they also press readers to view characters through a singular lens. Thus, interpreting Genesis 34 alongside the real-life experiences of Love-Jihad/Honor killing in India, a more nuanced interpretation of this passage emerges.
Reading into the silences of the text, dominant interpretations of Genesis 34 can unconsciously perpetuate stereotypes about male “Others” belonging to different religious, ethnic/racial communities as sexually violent and coercive. Furthermore, Dinah’s silence in the text erases her agency and limits other possibilities when it comes to our interpretations of her character. Finally, recognizing that Genesis 34 could be read as a narrative on miscegenation and controlling the “sexual purity” of a community through marriage could be helpful to our discussions.
The anxiety around mixed-marriages, miscegenation, and the need to control and maintain purity around origins remains a core issue in this text. Drawing on the real life events of Love-Jihad/Honor Killings, could this text gesture to the ways in which violence towards marginalized communities is justified under false pretexts of rape, seduction, and coercion? While Love-Jihad and Honor Killing are used to distinguish between inter-faith and inter-caste marriage, the common denominator between them is the deep anxiety around mixed marriages and sexual purity.
Love-Jihad has gained currency in recent times in India and finds a strong-hold in other conspiracies such as antisemitic tropes and white nationalism. Love-Jihad/Romeo Jihad contends that Muslim men target Hindu women for the purposes of conversion through means such as seduction and manipulation. Given the term “Jihad,” one would be inclined to think that this conspiracy may have emerged from the right-wing Hindu nationalists, however, this term was first introduced by a group of Catholic Bishops in Kerala who alleged that Christian women were being targeted by Muslim men and being forcefully converted through marriage.
“It’s the unholy trinity of patriarchy, caste and dominant religion that has always wanted to control women’s sexuality and freedom.”
Vrinda Grover, Lawyer and Rights Activist
When Genesis 34 is placed alongside and interpreted through real life experiences of Love-Jihad/Honor killing in India, a nuanced interpretation of this passage, I contend, emerges. The character of Dinah is often understood as a woman raped by Shechem. Such readings point to the use of the Hebrew word (‘ānâ), often translated in English to mean rape. Hebrew Bible scholar Alison L. Joseph writes, “Traditionally, and frequently this verb has been translated as “rape,” but many scholars, myself included insist that עָנָה does not mean rape.”
Genesis 34:1-2 “Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land. When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and violated her.”
Translations such as oppress, humble, and afflict are all possible contenders for the word עָנָה. The active/passive binary constructed in this text promotes a stereotype of the “Other” man, i.e. Shechem, as sexually aggressive and dangerous. Women like Dinah are turned into passive objects; her silence permits readers to read coercion and lack of consent into the text, even though the text is never explicit about these issues. Joseph writes, “The interpretation that perhaps Dinah was ‘not raped’ spans the spectrum from a teenage love affair between Dinah and Shechem, to a case of statutory rape, to a marriage by abduction. Is there even a controversy here? Why is there a conversation about not rape’?” Thus, leading me to ask: must we read Dinah’s lack of consent only through the lens of rape/coercion? Are other interpretations a possibility?
The rhetoric around creating the male “Other” that belongs to a different community, religion, and race as a sexually aggressive and dangerous perpetrator continues to be used in contemporary contexts. Turning our attention to the context of Love-Jihad, one of the VHP members (Vishwa Hindu Parishad is an Hindu right wing organization promoting Hindu nationalism), Suresh Sharma, says that “Hindu boys are under pressure to study and are concerned about their careers. So, they hardly get into affairs… But a Muslim man’s first step is to engage in a sexual relationship. They are sexual predators.” Like the Muslim man in Sharma’s imagination, in the biblical text Shechem is limited to the caricature of a sexual aggressor and predator. Meanwhile, women belonging to the dominant religion (read: Hindu) and/or upper caste/Savarna become helpless victims coerced into relationships by men from other faiths and lower castes. Their sexual purity is directly connected to and reflective of the purity and health of the nation.
Genesis 34:24 “Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male.”
Pinki, a 22-year-old woman from Moradabad, was a victim of this love jihad law. She was forcefully separated from her Muslim husband and injected with a substance that led to her miscarriage while she was locked up in Nari Niketan.
Although Love-Jihad/Honor-Killings and the text of Genesis 34 are separated by time and contexts, they still speak to the risks of inter-marriage and the obsession around maintaining religious and communal purity. One cannot help but wonder if Dinah’s silence in this narrative should only be subjected to a singular interpretation. In other words, could her silence in the text be a gesture of her fear? The fear for the life of her partner Shechem and his family. Many Indian women in the context of Love-Jihad are forced into silence by their own volition because the risk of speaking up is far greater and impacts not just their lives, but the lives of their family.
Genesis 34:26 “They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left.”
The text does not explicitly state where Dinah was taken by her brothers, but one could assume that Dinah was returned to her house. Often in cases of Love-Jihad, the Hindu/Savarna women are rehabilitated, rescued, and returned to their homes. This movement termed ghar wapsi (aka. Return to home) promotes the idea of bringing the woman back to their rightful homes/communities/religious identities.
The silences following the lives of Dinah and upper caste Hindu women after they are returned to their homes is palpable. In the context of Love-Jihad, women “returned” back to their homes are forcibly married off as a form of their restoration into the community. However, such overt gestures are extremely rare. A large number of them in real life, like Dinah in the text, disappear. The price of “mixing” with the Other is a costly one, often leading women to be ostracized physically and socially from their family, their community, and ultimately their nation.
The Bajrang Dal (Hindu Nationalist party in India), chief Ramesh Tiwari, explains Love-Jihad as “… a well-thought-out strategy deployed by Muslim boys to lure Hindu girls.” He believes Muslims, are “‘hellbent’ on one day outnumbering Hindus – [though Hindus] currently outnumber Muslims by almost six to one – in India by ‘trapping and brainwashing our girls.’” Although none of these fears are backed by facts, they nevertheless continue to circulate in the Hindu national consciousness with the help of false news and propaganda.
“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”
Arundati Roy, The God of Small Things
Mainstream narratives of mixed marriages continue to justify the ideology that women with dominant religious identities have no agency. Dinah and Indian women in inter-faith and inter-caste marriages are often depicted as easily brainwashed, seduced, manipulated, coerced, and even raped by men belonging to other religious/caste/ethnic communities. Sadly, dominant interpretations of Genesis 34 continue to strengthen ideologies around miscegenation and circumscribe our readings.
Most marriages in Indian communities are about maintaining “purity” by reinforcing caste and religious conformity. Although never spoken out loud, the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking is built around finding partners that belong to the same caste, community, and most importantly religion. The families featured in Indian Matchmaking are not alone. A recent Pew research study in India noted that 84% of Indians continue to oppose inter-faith marriages. Shameem, a Muslim man married to a Hindu woman, points to the realities of inter-faith marriages noting, “People look at us with hatred, like, ‘Why is that good Hindu girl dating a Muslim?’”
Placing Genesis 34 alongside the contextual realities of inter-faith/inter-caste marriages, we realize that as readers we have all along been asking ourselves the question, “Why would a good girl like Dinah be with a man like Shechem?” Such questions, although asked implicitly and internally, color our interpretation and hinder us from taking other perspectives into consideration. Inadvertently, our bias against Shechem reinforces harmful and problematic stereotypes that continue to detrimentally impact male bodies from marginalized communities.
To be clear, my interpretation of Genesis 34 is not attempting to make the argument that Dinah was not raped in this narrative. Rather, my hope is that by placing contextual narratives of miscegenation alongside this text, we can consider another interpretation. My hope is to shed light on fact that women continue to be caught in the crosshairs of ideological battles. Their voices continue to be silenced and/or ignored.
The real violence in both narratives — Genesis 34 and propaganda about miscegenation and inter-faith marriage in India — is men deciding on behalf of women that they were raped, manipulated, brainwashed, seduced, and/or coerced. The male gaze intently trained on women’s bodies is continually used as a tool to distract from, discredit, and disavow women’s voices. There is violence in this text, and that violence occurs in the ways the men in Dinah’s life — like the men in the lives of Indian women — are the ones deciding who we love, how we love, and how much we love. And yet, we must take hope in the actions of women who continue to say through their bodies, their words, their actions, and even in their silences that we will continue to love unabashedly, shamelessly, and recklessly…Love Laws be damned!
Sharon Jacob is currently the Visiting Professor of New Testament and Postcolonial Studies at Claremont School of Theology. Sharon earned her Master of Divinity from Lancaster Theological Seminary and Masters of Sacred Theology from Yale University. She earned her Ph.D from Drew University in Biblical Studies and Early Christianity. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, race and whiteness theory, and postcolonial theory. She is currently working on a project on the rise of Religious Nationalism in global contexts.
Her publications include a monograph entitled Reading Mary alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation, and Infancy Narratives. She has also co-authored an essay entitled, “Flowing from breast to breast: An Examination of Dis/placed Motherhood in Black and Indian Wet Nurses,” in Womanist Biblical Interpretations: Expanding the Discourses published by Society of Biblical Literature Press. Her essay entitled “Imagined Nations, Real Women: Politics of Culture and Women’s Bodies. A Postcolonial, Feminist, and Indo-Western Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:8-15,” in Handbook to Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics was published by T&T Clark in 2019. More recently her essay entitled “Jezebel and Indo-Western Women: Nation, Nationalism, and the Ecologies of Sexual Violence in Revelation 2: 20-25” was published in Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World by Penn State University Press, 2019.
Sharon is also a regular contributor to the Feminist Studies of Religion Blog. Some of her latest blogs are, “Can We Speak? When Speech Has Color: Aphonic Speech and Respectability Politics;” “Jauhar, Mass-Suicide, and the Spectacle of Death: A Reading of Mark 5:1-20;” and “When the Subaltern Speaks! Why Caste Must Matter in the Case of Hathras.” In addition, she has also authored blogs on topics of whiteness and white supremacy, and caste supremacy in the Indian context. Some of her latest works include: “The Cost of Infinite Gratitude on Immigrant Workers in the Workplace and Beyond;” “White Incredulity and Why it Matters? Distrust, Disbelief, and the Immigrant Experience;” and “Not Loved Back! George Floyd and Rohith Vemula: Race, Caste, and their Intersections.”