An Anachronism in the Text

In the process of recounting the circumstances under which a local Hivite lad raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah, the writer of Genesis comments to the effect that her brothers were indignant and angry because this Shechem “had done an outrageous thing in Israel”. Such a thing, they said, must never be.

It should not need saying that rape is always outrageous, in Israel or anywhere else. Yet strangely, the key words in this passage for some critics are “in Israel”. Let me explain.

Examining the Timeline

Assuming all the events described in Genesis concerning the family of Jacob are consecutive, conservative bible scholars believe Shechem raped Dinah anywhere from 1703 to 1692BC. Somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-three years later, Jacob and family went down to Egypt at the invitation of Joseph.

The book of Exodus numbers the descendants of Jacob who went down to Egypt at “seventy persons”, including the patriarch, his twelve sons and all their households. Genesis 46 confirms this and breaks down the members of the family by their mothers, but stipulates that this number includes Dinah but does not include the wives of Jacob’s sons.

So then, the children of Israel numbered sixty-nine men and a bare minimum of twelve women (almost surely more) in approximately 1670BC. (It’s also plausible Jacob had male great-grandchildren under twenty at the time of the migration who were not numbered in the seventy in accordance with the practice of later Israelite record-keepers, as the older sons of Jacob were well into their forties at that time and some of their children would have been old enough to marry. Female great-grandchildren, if any, certainly went undocumented. There were probably not many from this speculative third generation, but it’s not inconceivable.)

Anyway, it’s probably safe to say there were fewer than a hundred men, women and children in that little group of “Israelites” entering Egypt. It’s also highly unlikely they referred to themselves as Israelites or thought about themselves that way. They were just Jacob’s family.

Not a Nation, Not a Land

Given the number of Jacob’s descendants who migrated, how many descendants did Jacob have two to three decades earlier than that, when Simeon and Levi were reacting with understandable ire to their sister’s rape? Well, considerably fewer, obviously. All Jacob’s immediate descendants were in the world at that time, but some of the grandchildren were almost surely not. It was a big family, but nowhere near a nation. Deuteronomy says Israel “became a nation” during their years in Egypt. Therefore they did not enter Egypt as a nation.

So then, how may the writer of Genesis say that an outrageous thing had been done “in Israel” when the act to which he refers occurred in Canaan centuries before it was renamed after its conquerors, multiple decades before there was any nation of Israel to speak of, and centuries prior to any specifically Israelite law for Shechem to violate? Surely the author of Genesis was imposing a historical perspective from later centuries on an earlier time, treating Israel as a national entity decades before the family of Jacob ever attained such a status or would have thought of themselves as a nation.

On the surface, the reference seems like an anachronism, and more than a few critics have commented to that effect. That’s the sort of thing critics feast on.

Searching for Explanations

Efforts to explain the alleged problem away by consulting the original language are singularly unhelpful. In typical Hebrew fashion, the article “in” is absent from the original language and has to be assumed in English. Nevertheless, a Bible Hub survey of English translations shows “in Israel” is by far the most common rendering of the Hebrew. Twenty-four of the most popular thirty-four Bible versions opt to translate it that way. The outliers either appear to be commenting rather than translating (“against Jacob’s family” – NLT; “to Israel” – Amplified; “against Israel” – CSB, Holman), or else wildly paraphrasing (NET Bible, Good News). “In Israel” appears to be a perfectly acceptable English rendering, one that has stood for centuries.

What do the commentators say? Google favorite David Guzik takes a pass on the question, as do Matthew Henry and many others. Clarke says it’s poor translation, and that the more literal rendering would be “against Israel”, meaning an insult to the patriarch personally. (On two earlier occasions, God had renamed Jacob, calling him “Israel”, so that’s quite conceivable.) Calvin agrees.

Further, Clarke’s idea that injuring or defiling a man’s child was an attack on the father has not just natural law in its favor, but also the scripture. When Abimelech murdered Gideon’s seventy sons not long after Gideon’s death, the Holy Spirit comments that he “committed evil against his father”. Clarke and Calvin may well be correct that “against Israel” is not just an equally plausible translation, but also more theologically accurate.

The Seeds of Nationhood

Here’s an interesting tidbit. When God changed Jacob’s name to Israel a second time, the Lord said this to the renamed patriarch:

“I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body. The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you.”

It’s important to recognize that when God promised Jacob nationhood and the land of Canaan, all his children except Benjamin were already in the world. The seeds of Jacob’s personal fruitfulness had been sown, and already they were growing wildly. The command to “be fruitful and multiply”, then, was not really for him, but rather for his descendants, who needed God’s reminder to carry the torch of God’s unbreakable promises for the generations to come.

Surely Jacob would have told all this to his boys, don’t you think? I certainly would have. People who live together tend to talk. This was especially the case prior to modern entertainments. If Simeon and Levi believed in a future “Israel” prior to its actual existence, this conviction would have been an act of faith, the natural assumption of men raised in a culture where they were taught to live in the light of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (You will understand that I am not commenting on the morality of what they did to Shechem and his city, but considering what they may have believed about the dignity and destiny of their family in the plans and purposes of God.)

Scattered “in Israel”

We don’t hear about it anywhere near so often, but that phrase “in Israel” actually occurs once more later in Genesis, when Jacob is blessing his sons and predicting their futures by the Spirit of God. Concerning Simeon and Levi, who plotted together to take revenge on Shechem’s entire city for their sister’s rape, the dying Jacob declared, “I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.”

This time, the phrase is a direct quotation from the patriarch preserved for us in holy writ, not editorial commentary from a later writer or editor. If the Israel in which Jacob intended Simeon and Levi’s descendants to be scattered was that vivid and certain in the mind of the father of the nation in his dying days, who are we to say it wasn’t equally real to him, and to many of his family members, a few decades earlier?

Personally, I don’t find the phrase anachronistic at all. It’s just another reminder that the promises of God are unbreakable. For the believer today, that’s a wonderful subject to keep in mind.