Was Dinah Raped?

Abstract

The story of Dinah and Shechem is found in Bereishit 34. The reader learns of a sexual relationship between Dinah and Shechem, Shechem’s desire to marry Dinah, the anger of Dinah’s family, and the slaughtering of the entire city of Shechem performed by Dinah’s brothers. The question this paper will explore is whether Dinah engaged in consensual sex with Shechem, or whether she was raped and forced to have sexual relations with him. Rather than trying to prove confidently whether Dinah was raped or not, the goal of this paper is to prove that the issue is ambiguous by exploring various possibilities in the pesukim.