Gen 34:1-2 | KingComments | STEP | The place Jacob chose to live has a disastrous effect on his family. Dinah, the only girl among eleven brothers, wants to see and get to know some other girls. That cannot but be girls of the world. She seeks to socialize with “the daughters of the land”. But girls in the world are never without the attention of men. She attracts the attention of Shechem. He “saw her; he took her and lay with her by force”. The fact that a worldly man like Shechem wants to marry a girl like Dinah from a believing family also says a lot about the girl. She will have adapted herself to the world, so Shechem sees her as one of them. Nor do we get the impression that Dinah has resisted strongly. Dinah will not have agreed directly with what Shechem did to her. Shechem will have exerted a certain degree of coercion, but she did not have the resistance to say no. We must give our children room to develop, but that does not mean giving them the freedom to satisfy their curiosity in visiting a worldly surrounding. What do we allow them to view on the television and on the internet? Where do we take them? To what do we allow their eyes and ears to get used to? How do we teach them to deal with the satisfaction of their needs? If we let them go free, we should not be surprised that our children are ‘raped’. Their bodies and/or minds are taken possession of by someone to whom we would never want to entrust our child. Jacob is here again the absent father. He hears of the event, but there is no reaction from him to hear. For Shechem, rape is more than just an act. He loves Dinah and wants to marry her. That is in any case neat of him and in this he is an example for contemporary morality, which unfortunately is also found among Christians. Sexual intercourse gives an obligation (cf. ).

‏ Genesis 34:1-2

Dinah Raped

The place Jacob chose to live has a disastrous effect on his family. Dinah, the only girl among eleven brothers, wants to see and get to know some other girls. That cannot but be girls of the world. She seeks to socialize with “the daughters of the land”. But girls in the world are never without the attention of men. She attracts the attention of Shechem. He “saw her; he took her and lay with her by force”.

The fact that a worldly man like Shechem wants to marry a girl like Dinah from a believing family also says a lot about the girl. She will have adapted herself to the world, so Shechem sees her as one of them. Nor do we get the impression that Dinah has resisted strongly. Dinah will not have agreed directly with what Shechem did to her. Shechem will have exerted a certain degree of coercion, but she did not have the resistance to say no.

We must give our children room to develop, but that does not mean giving them the freedom to satisfy their curiosity in visiting a worldly surrounding. What do we allow them to view on the television and on the internet? Where do we take them? To what do we allow their eyes and ears to get used to? How do we teach them to deal with the satisfaction of their needs? If we let them go free, we should not be surprised that our children are ‘raped’. Their bodies and/or minds are taken possession of by someone to whom we would never want to entrust our child.

Jacob is here again the absent father. He hears of the event, but there is no reaction from him to hear. For Shechem, rape is more than just an act. He loves Dinah and wants to marry her. That is in any case neat of him and in this he is an example for contemporary morality, which unfortunately is also found among Christians. Sexual intercourse gives an obligation (cf. 2Sam 13:14-16).