The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (12 page)

Levi laughed bitterly. “So your son defiles our sister,” he demanded, “and now he wants to
marry
her?”

Hamor deigned a glance at Levi, and the slightest smirk crossed his face. And then he spoke to Levi’s father.

“You are strangers in our land, and you live among us on a plot of ground that was once mine,” Hamor said with a delicacy that did not conceal the unspoken barb. “But if your daughter marries my son—if you give your daughters to our men, and you take our daughters for your men—then you will no longer be strangers. You will be one with us.”

Jacob did not mistake the meaning of Hamor’s invitation, but Levi persisted in taunting the chieftain.

“Perhaps there is something else we can do to your daughters beside marrying them,” the young man hissed. “Perhaps your son will have an idea of what I mean.”

Hamor once again replied to Levi by addressing himself to Jacob.

“If you marry with us, you can live among us as if you were native-born and not merely strangers,” Hamor said. “The land shall be open to you, and you can move freely from place to place, you can sell your crops and your wares, you can buy land wherever you like.”

Now Shechem himself spoke up, and Jacob’s sons seemed to tense at the very sound of the young man’s voice, anxious and urgent.

“Just do me the favor of letting me have your daughter, and I will pay any dowry that you ask,” Shechem said to Jacob and his sons. “No matter how great the price, I will pay it—if you will only give her to me to be my wife!”

Simeon stepped forward, face to face with Shechem, who seemed to flinch at the fury in the young man’s face.

“So you are willing to pay for what you did to our sister,” Simeon shouted, “as if she were a whore?”

But Levi put himself between Simeon and Shechem, a hand on each man’s shoulder, and he began to speak slowly, even sweetly.

“What my brother means to say is that we cannot do what you ask, as much as we might want to,” said Levi. “We cannot give our sister in marriage to one who is not circumcised—it is the law of our people, and to do otherwise would be unthinkable.”

Shechem seemed confused by Levi’s words, and he glanced at his father. Simeon, too, was incredulous at what his brother was saying, as if he wondered if his brother had gone suddenly mad.

“Among these people,” Hamor explained, “it is the custom of the men to cut off the foreskin.”

“Cut off the foreskin?” asked Shechem, incredulous and a bit frightened. “How do you do such a thing?”

“Why, I suppose with a knife,” said Hamor with a slight smile. “A sharp one, I hope.”

Father and son looked at Jacob, who only nodded solemnly in assent.

“So we will give you our sister for your wife,” Levi continued in per-feet seriousness, “but only if you are circumcised when you take her to the marriage bed.”

Shechem looked dubious and slightly ill, which seemed to amuse Jacob and only encouraged Levi.

“I’ll do it,” Shechem said grimly.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” Levi continued. “Not only you but every man among your people must be circumcised, too. Only then will we give our women to be your wives, and only then will we take your women to be our wives. Only then will we dwell with you throughout the land, and become one people.”

If Shechem heard the sniggers among the other sons of Jacob, he did not show any sign of it, but Hamor could not suppress a grin.

Simeon grinned, too, as if he had suddenly understood what game his brother was playing. Now it was Simeon’s turn to join in the game.

“But if you refuse to do what we ask,” he lectured Shechem, “then we will take our lovely sister—such a pretty one!—and we will be gone.”

“Done!” said Shechem in a voice that seemed to quaver, as if fear and longing were struggling within his throat as he spoke.

Simeon laughed out loud as Dinah’s handmaiden recounted the scene she had witnessed the day before when Hamor and the court physician appeared in the marketplace and addressed the crowd.

“ ‘You all know of the stranger called Jacob and his people, they are our
friends,’
” the young woman recited, reciting Hamor’s words and mimicking his gravelly voice. “ ‘Let them live with us and move freely around the country—the land is big enough for all of us.’”

“Yes,” Simeon urged, “and then what?”

“Well, the prince saw that the crowd was not ready to riot—so far, so good!—and so he said: ‘Let us marry their daughters, and let them marry our daughters.’ Some of the men in the crowd began to hoot a bit—I suppose they fancy our women, too. And then the prince gave them the bad news: ‘But these people will agree to live with us and become one people with us on one condition only: Every man among us must be circumcised like them.’”

“And what happened when they heard?” demanded Levi.

“Oh, they did not like the sound of it at all! They began to grumble, and Hamor’s voice was not quite so deep now.”

The girl raised her voice to a shrill squeak and mocked the way Hamor pleaded with his people: “ ‘If we marry with these strangers, their livestock will be ours! Their goods will be ours! All we have to do is consent to be circumcised, here and now.’”

Now all of the brothers were laughing out loud as the young woman brazenly imitated the shocked expressions that she had seen on the faces of Hamor’s people, and demonstrated how some of the men in the crowd had covered their private parts with their hands as if to protect themselves from the circumciser’s knife. And she pointed out how the prince had taken the precaution of stationing his guards around the crowded marketplace so the menfolk might better understand that they had no real choice in the matter.

“And so,” the handmaiden continued, “all of the strong and able-bodied men ended up in perfect agreement with the good prince, and every single one of them was circumcised right then and there.”

“Every one?” Simeon asked, betraying a touch of anxiety because, as he knew but did not say, everything depended on it. “Every able-bodied man went under the knife?”

The handmaiden nodded solemnly and then broke into bawdy laughter along with Simeon and Levi and the rest of the brothers.

On the second day after the mass circumcision at the city gate, Simeon and Levi walked with the handmaiden to a distant hilltop where they would not be interrupted or overheard. They listened carefully as she described the lay of the land, the path to take if one wanted to pay a visit to Hamor’s big house and the other houses where the menfolk were resting from
their
encounters with the surgeon’s knife.

On the third day, Simeon and Levi rose before dawn, strapped on their short swords, and slipped out of the compound in silence. Only
the handmaiden saw them go, and then she went back to sleep for an hour or so before her long day of work would begin.

Simeon and Levi knew that every last man in Hamor’s town—including Hamor himself, and his son, Shechem—was in his bed, still wrapped tightly with bandages in the place where the surgeon’s knife had cut him. A grown man who had just been circumcised is in no condition to be up and out of bed and walking about the town—every step would be another moment of pain. On that, the two brothers were counting.

At the first house they encountered, Simeon and Levi unsheathed their swords and shouldered open the door with a loud crack that awakened only a pair of servant girls who were bedded down on the floor near the stove. The girls looked up, bleary and confused, as Simeon and Levi stalked past them in search of the room where the master of the house slept. As soon as the kitchen girls noticed the swords Simeon and Levi were carrying, they began to wail. And so, when Levi finally found a man with a black beard on a pile of bedding in a back room, the poor soul was already awake and alert as Levi dispatched Him with one short blow to the neck.

The same brutal operation was repeated in dwelling after dwelling, tent and shack and house, as Simeon and Levi stalked through the streets of Hamor’s town and methodically did their work. They were shepherds, and they knew how to dispatch a living creature swiftly and efficiently. Now they put their expertise to a new use, although they held their victims in somewhat less regard than they would a beast being slaughtered for their table.

Now and then, one of the men of Hamor rose from his bed and seized a staff or a sword in a desperate attempt at self-defense, but two armed men on their feet were always more than a match for some
bedridden soul whose private parts were bloody and bandaged. By sunrise, they had slain all but two of the newly circumcised men in the town, and the last house they visited belonged to Hamor and Shechem, who were awake and astir but unsuspecting, still lingering in their beds and waiting to be called to breakfast by one of the servants.

Hamor half-rose in his bed when he saw Simeon and Levi at the threshold, but they reached him before he could cry out, and a single blow with the cutting edge of a sword across the neck silenced him forever. Shechem appeared behind them, bellowing like a bull, but no one but the servants was left to hear the sound. With another strike of the blade, Shechem, too, was dead.

Blood-spattered and breathing heavily, Simeon and Levi searched the house from room to room until they found Dinah in the richly decorated bedchamber that had been set aside for her until her wedding day. Their sister stared at them with an expression of horror that they had never seen before, not even on the faces of their victims and the bystanders who had witnessed the slaughter.

“Come, sister,” said Simeon, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the door of the house, “we are here to take you home.”

Jacob fretted and sputtered as he watched the grim parade that headed toward the compound. What would become of them now, he wondered? What vengeance would be visited upon him because of the massacre of Hamor and his people? Hamor and his menfolk might be dead, their wives and children taken captive, but there were still many more Canaanites than Israelites across the land. Surely they would not overlook what had happened.

Simeon and Levi had returned only hours before, leading their weeping sister between them, and their brothers had greeted them with shouts and laughter. But they celebrated only briefly before the bloodied
heroes sent their brothers back to the town with orders to wreak a further vengeance on Hamor’s people.