Sex and the Singular Girl: Dinah,Tamar,and the Corrective Art of Biblical Narrative

Abstract

Twice in the Jacob cycle in Genesis, we find a one-chapter long, self-contained story about a woman: Dinah and Tamar. The stories are almost never read together, despite their textual proximity and the clear thematic and idiomatic connections between them. Like Dinah, Tamar is a woman who finds herself in a vulnerable position outside her father's home. Like Dinah, she has unsanctioned sex. And yet, Tamar is the subject of much of her story. Dinah's is a story of rape and massacre, a story of a woman silenced even as she is ostensibly redeemed. Dinah does not act; she is acted upon or acted on behalf of. By contrast, Tamar speaks, she acts, she thinks, she conspires, she challenges. Reading intertextually, we see Genesis 38 inverts key elements of Genesis 34 in a number of ways, thereby possibly serving as a narrative correction of the earlier story.