There is something deeply uncomfortable about the story of Dinah in Genesis 34, and it is not simply what happens to her.

It is also what happens to her in the way we tell the story.

Genesis tells us that Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, went out to see the women of the land. Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite prince, saw her, took her, and violated her. The language of the passage has traditionally been understood as describing sexual violence or rape.

And then something strange happens.

Dinah almost disappears from her own story.

Her brothers become angry. Her father speaks with Shechem's family. Hamor negotiates. Simeon and Levi plot revenge. The men of the city are slaughtered.

Everyone seems to have a voice except Dinah.

Did Dinah Consent?

Sometimes people argue that Dinah consented to Shechem because Genesis says that she "went out" to meet the women of the land.

But going out to meet other women is not consent to sexual activity.

Genesis never says that Dinah agreed to what happened. The passage describes Shechem as taking her and violating her. Dinah's decision to leave the household does not change that.

She went to meet the women of the land. The text does not say that she went looking for Shechem.

That distinction matters.

How Old Was Dinah?

This is where things get interesting.

Genesis does not give Dinah's exact age. Anyone who gives us a precise number is making an inference rather than quoting the biblical text.

We do know that Dinah is presented as an unmarried daughter who is still part of Jacob's household.

We also have evidence from later Jewish tradition about the ages at which girls were considered marriageable.

Rabbinic literature uses twelve years and one day as an important legal threshold in discussions of a girl's status. This does not mean that every Jewish girl married at exactly twelve. Actual Jewish marriage practices varied according to time, place, family, and social circumstances. Girls could marry during their early or middle teenage years, with marriage ages varying considerably across Jewish communities and historical periods.

The important point is that the ancient Jewish world did not have the same concept of childhood and adulthood that modern Western societies have.

So when we read Dinah's story, we should not automatically imagine a modern adult woman living independently and making adult decisions.

Genesis presents Dinah as a young unmarried daughter within her father's household.

That does not allow us to prove that she was under twelve.

But it does mean that treating her as though she were obviously an adult woman requires assumptions that the text itself does not give us.

What About The Red Tent?

This brings us to Anita Diamant's novel The Red Tent.

One of the things The Red Tent does is give Dinah something that Genesis largely denies her: a voice.

In the novel, Dinah becomes the narrator of her own story. She has relationships, opinions, desires, memories, and an understanding of the world around her.

There is something powerful about that.

The biblical Dinah is largely silent, so giving her a voice allows a modern author to explore what her life might have been like.

But there is also a problem.

By giving Dinah a much more developed adult perspective, The Red Tent can remove something important from our understanding of the biblical character.

It can make us forget that Dinah is presented as a young unmarried daughter living within Jacob's household.

In other words, The Red Tent gives Dinah agency, but that agency can come at the cost of making her seem older and more socially independent than the biblical story actually establishes.

That matters because giving a character agency is not the same thing as accurately representing the character's age.

Agency Does Not Require Adulthood

We do not have to turn Dinah into an adult woman to give her dignity.

A young person can have agency, thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, friendships, and opinions.

The problem is not giving Dinah an inner life.

The problem is when giving her an inner life requires us to make her older, more independent, or more sexually autonomous than the biblical text establishes.

We can imagine Dinah as a person without pretending that Genesis tells us everything about her.

Dinah's Story Becomes Everyone Else's Story

This may be the most disturbing feature of Genesis 34.

Dinah is at the centre of the event, but she is not at the centre of the narrative.

Shechem wants Dinah.

Hamor negotiates for Dinah.

Jacob responds to what happened.

Dinah's brothers become enraged.

Simeon and Levi plan revenge.

The men of Shechem are killed.

And Dinah?

Silence.

Her body becomes the subject of negotiations between men.

Her brothers use what happened to her as part of their justification for attacking the city.

Her father is concerned about the consequences for the family.

The men of Shechem become part of the larger political and family conflict.

But Dinah herself never gets to tell us what she thinks.

She never explains what happened.

She never describes how she felt.

She never tells us what she wanted.

The text simply moves on.

Dinah Did Go to Egypt

There is another interesting detail that is sometimes overlooked.

Dinah does not simply vanish from the biblical record.

Genesis 46:15 names Dinah among the children of Jacob who went down to Egypt with his family.

So, according to Genesis, Dinah went to Egypt with Jacob's household.

That is significant because it reminds us that Dinah was not merely a character who existed for one chapter and then ceased to exist.

She continued as part of Jacob's family.

But the biblical text gives us almost nothing about her perspective.

We do not get a detailed account of her life after Genesis 34.

We do not hear her reflecting on Shechem.

We do not hear her discussing what her brothers did.

We do not hear her describing the journey to Egypt.

We simply find her name among Jacob's family as they go down to Egypt.

The silence continues.

The Silence Matters

This is where we need to be careful about the difference between giving Dinah a voice and claiming to know her voice.

There is nothing wrong with a modern writer giving Dinah a voice. There is nothing wrong with imagining what she might have thought or writing a fictional account in which she becomes the narrator.

But we should not confuse the imagined Dinah with the Dinah of Genesis.

Genesis does not give us her exact age. It does not tell us what she thought about what happened. It does not give Dinah a voice to explain herself.

What Genesis gives us is a young unmarried daughter who goes out to see the women of the land, followed by an encounter with Shechem that the text portrays as a violation, followed by a violent response from the men around her.

That is what the text gives us.

Later Jewish tradition gives us additional information about marriage, age, and the legal status of girls. Modern retellings such as The Red Tent give Dinah an extensive inner life and a voice of her own. Both can be interesting, but neither changes what Genesis actually says.

Dinah went out.

Shechem took her.

The men around her responded.

Dinah herself does not speak.

We can give Dinah agency without erasing her youth. We can recognise her humanity without rewriting the story. And we can let the silence of Genesis remain uncomfortable.

Because sometimes the most important question is not, "What did Dinah say?"

It is:

Why did the story never let Dinah speak in the first place?