Dinah

Dinah was a daughter of Jacob and Leah whose story appears in Genesis. The violence at Shechem following her encounter with the local prince becomes a narrative about family honour, intermarriage and retaliatory massacre.

Genesis 34 describes Dinah’s encounter with Shechem and the subsequent killing of the men of the city by her brothers Simeon and Levi. The text gives little access to Dinah’s own perspective, and later Jewish and Christian interpreters have disagreed sharply over how to understand both the encounter and the violence carried out in her name. Her story has consequently become an important case in discussions of gender, honour and narrative silence in biblical tradition.

In Gilbert Morris’ The Gate of Heaven, Meanwhile, Jacob's only daughter, Dinah, buys a slave who is actually an aristocrat from Crete. In Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, The Red Tent retells the story of Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, from the perspective of the women around her.