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….)