18 August 2022 draft-bible
2. violated. ASV, WEB “humbled”. The verb does indeed often communication the idea of humbling or humiliation, but it is also used often but not exclusively to describe sexual assaults.
6. talk. Hebrew dbr, a simple and common verb for speaking. ASV reads “commune.”
7. grieved. Or, “indignant”.
7. done a vile deed in Israel. The Hebrew phrase ʿaśah nᵉbalah bᵉyiśraʾel, and its variants, is a repeated phrase in the Hebrew Bible for committing some morally repugnant act. According to Driver, “The addition ‘in Israel’ betrays here the author’s date: he transfers unconsciously the relations of his own time to the patriarchal age.”
7. vile deed. I have borrowed this translation from the 1917 JPS translation.
7. The Contemporary English Version carries out an astoninshing act of translational malpractice in this verse. Where the Hebrew says, he had done a vile deed in lying with Jacob’s daughter, a thing which ought not be done, the CEV reads “because nothing is more disgraceful than rape, and it must not be tolerated”. While there is certainly reason to believe that this story describes a rape, there is simply nothing in the Hebrew text about how rape is the worst of all offences. If anything, this particular verse avoids speaking directly about rape – if this verse was all that was left of the story, there would be nothing to alert the reader to the fact that a rape occurred at all.
8. talked. As in verse 6.
9. intermarry. According to BDB, the Hebrew verb I am reading as “intermarry” more precisely means “to make oneself a daughters husband” – in a reciprocal sense, “intermarry seems” a fairly close fit, but the second half of verse 9 provides perhaps even a more precise definition.
12. Ask me ever so much. Literally, “increase upon me greatly”.
17. daughter. Hebrew bat. WEB reads here “sister”.
24. all who went out of the gate. In the Ancient Near East, a typical settlement pattern was people, mostly farmers, living inside a walled city, where their houses would be protected from attack. However, the people would on any ordinary day leave the city to work in the surrounding fields.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.