Dinah's Twelve Brothers

A story that we really don’t hear much of very often is that of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, and Sheckem, the son of Hamar. He basically ‘defiles’ her, as the Bible puts it, and then his dad has the nerve to come over and ask Jacob if Sheckem can marry her! This scene slightly amuses me, because it is such a ‘brothers and father getting out the shotgun’ scene. All 12 of the brothers come home just indignant as soon as they hear, and have quite a heated discussion with Hamar. (They hammered their opinions into Hamar.)

Well, they end up tricking Hamar, giving a few conditions that say they’ll let Dinah marry Sheckem, but then later, the brothers go in and kill every male in that town. But here’s the lesson I learned from this story: “They slew Hamar and Sheckem…and took Dinah out of Sheckem’s house, AND WENT OUT” (Genesis 34:26). As soon as they did what was necessary, they got out of there. Those people had been a sinful group, and if the brothers had remained in the city any longer, they could have gotten caught up in some of that sin. There are many situations where we would do well to get out as soon as we can as well. One that comes to my mind is the watching of movies—occasionally, when we’re watching a really cool movie, a bad scene will come on, or God’s name will be used in vain, and we need to make the decision to either keep watching or to get away. Here’s another one: If we are friends with a non-Christian and trying to witness, we have to be careful to no get involved in any wrong things they may do.

This lesson is even further cemented later on in the story when Dinah’s brothers come home, and their father finds out what they did. He pretty much asks, “Was all that quite necessary??” After all, killing all the males does seem a little extreme! But the brothers just reply with, “We can’t let people deal with our sister that way, and allow them get away with it!” They had such a hatred for evil. They were willing to do whatever it took to be rid of evil and sin. Am I? Or am I willing to compromise because getting rid of sin is hard or inconvenient? That’s something I’ve been asking myself, and I’ve found that some of the things I watch/do have sin in them and I need to get away from those things as fast as I possibly can.


(p.s. The only problem with those brothers is that they kind of picked and chose what sin to hate. They had no problem with lying or murdering! Just a little sidenote….)

A Lesson from the Tower of Babel

Have you ever considered how vitally imperative is the ability to talk to people? There is NO means of communication that is as effective as language. Sure, there’s sign language, hand gestures, writing on chalk boards, but really the best and most feasible means of speech is through speech itself. Genesis 11 is a chapter which demonstrates this. But sign language, writing, and hand gestures are no solution in this story! It is the story of the Tower of Babel.

The whole world used to be a sort of community. People lived in really the same general area, everyone spoke the same language, and they even worked together to accomplish certain things...which is why they decided to build this huge tower reaching all the way to heaven. However, their motives were indubitably of questionable acceptability—they were saying that they wanted to be just as high as God. Well of course, God wasn’t going to tolerate this kind of behavior, so this is how He completely foibled the project they were working on: He said, “Let us go down, and there confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Then it was a mass of confusion! All of a sudden, people who used to be friends with each other, could no longer understand what one another said. After things calmed down a little though, they started realizing that there was a whole group of people that could understand them, so they gathered together that body of people, and moved away to be in a place where they could start a new community and a new life.

But the whole tower they were building was forgotten! Why? Because they couldn’t speak to each other! Their language was confounded, they couldn’t understand what one another was saying, and they had to give up the whole thing.

Now, isn’t that true with Christians too? We are supposed to be of one body and of one mind (that’s in Acts), working towards a common “project,” so to speak. That project is serving God and bringing glory to Him. Yet sometimes, Christians can’t communicate properly. I don’t mean speaking the same language—I’m talking about the fact that in every church there is going to be someone who ‘steps on our toes’ (to borrow the common phraseology) with a spiritual matter, OR somebody who just plain offends us by something they say just in normal conversation. And it’s always a natural response to allow our feelings to get hurt, or to get angry, and to not want to be around them, to make things more difficult and to turn it into a bad relationship altogether. But if I get mad at somebody for something they’ve said or done to me, then my chances of, say, working together with them in a ministry, or evangelizing or something else important, are very slim. So then what really suffers? OUR GOAL! Our effectiveness in furthering God’s glory is lessened greatly. And that’s very sad.

Hence, WHAT TO WATCH FOR: Beware if you begin to feel yourself taking offense or getting bitter. When this happens, remember the Tower builders, and what happened to their project when they couldn’t talk to each other, and just……forgive!