tined union. Though it is her father who is portrayed as the villain, Leah is not blameless and she receives retribution. She is forever unloved by her husband, and her children are denied the divine blessing. Her role may only be of passive conspirator but she is still the faulty link in this ordained history. And, like Eve, Sara, Rebecca, and Rachel, Leah has the potential to ruin the human universe that God, in Genesis, is painstakingly trying to build.Leah's trickery might be overlooked as a daughter's compliance to a cunning father if it did not indirectly produce one of the most controversial episodes in the book of Genesis: the rape of Dina. Of all the mothers of Jacob's children, it is Leah who gives birth to Dina. The text suggests that complications arise when divinely ordained roles are tampered with. Leah, the usurper of her sister's nuptials, is not only weak eyed (20:17) and unloved (29:31) in the text, but also the mother of Jacob's only daughter, the one that turns out to be a source of family shame and provocation for tribal warfare. These uncomplimentary attributes and associations negatively characterize Leah and allude to her illegal manipulation of God's blueprint for the course of human history's development.While Leah subtly triggers a course of events that threatens the goals and values in Genesis, Dina, in contrast, directly challenges her society by her unconventional behavior and troublesome predicament. Firstly, as it has been noted, a woman's worth in Genesis is measured by her subservience to her husband and her fertility. "Dina acts contrary to the role expected of her" (Graetz 306). She is neither a wife nor a mother, only a daughter and sister. In patriarchal societies, like the society of Abraham and his descendants, "daughters have value primarily on the marriage market and in their potential to bear children" (Graetz 306). Therefore, Dina, a defiled and unmarried daughter, is not only an ...
