It All Belongs to God

Some time ago, on his Tuesday program, Fr. Paul observed how Western scholars, whom I now refer to with little affection as “Western Universalists,” often misread Genesis 34 (see Tarazi Tuesdays, Episode 274) emphasizing the rape of Dinah as the parable’s main point.  Why wouldn’t they? Trapped, as Edward Said wrote, by a “vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’),” such scholars are bound, not to submit, but to abuse the very Bible they claim to revere. It must be strange, trying to read a Semitic text from within the prison of an institutional structure in which, borrowing, again, from Said, “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony,” corrupts everything Western scholarship has written and continues to say about the Middle East, let alone God’s holy text. Again, it is God’s text. It belongs to him, and he alone is our Shepherd. Dinah, from the Hebrew root Din, means judgment or law. The same root in Arabic means faith or religion. Hence the famous name, Saleh Al-Din, which means, “righteousness of the faith.”In Genesis 34, Dinah is God’s judgment, not against “Shechem the son of Hamor,” but against the sons Jacob, who used Dinah’s rape as a pretext to break the covenant of circumcision—the covenant of brotherhood—in order to commit mass murder. One can almost hear Simeon and Levi running through the camp behind their father’s back, angrily cajoling their brothers, “Do you condemn the rape of Dinah?”Yes, Dinah is the Lord’s judgment, but not in the way that Western moralists imagine. In a recent article in the Guardian, an American woman expressed her curiosity about a people in travail:“I wanted,” she said, “to talk about the faith of Palestinian people, how it’s so strong, and they still find room to make it a priority to thank God, even when they have everything taken away from them.”  It’s the question, not the silly comments of a Western newspaper, that caught my attention. The answer comes out of the text itself, which is all they have left. The God of Abraham is not mocked, and they know it with all their heart. All they have to do is wait for him. Richard and I discuss Luke 5:10-11. (Episode 510)

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