ive action, Dina defies God's intentions, circumvents societal demands, and throws her family, the family chosen by God to be a blessed nation, into precarious flight. The text of Genesis is s relentless struggle to establish a world in which God's ideals are realized and fulfilled through his blessed nation. And women, time and again, are a threat to the essential and interwoven values that are always at stake, those that concern God and his plan, and those that are meant to produce an ordained human destiny.Potiphar's wife is the last woman in Genesis to cast an ominous shadow over the concerns at stake in the text. With her licentious intentions (albeit, failed intentions) and dishonesty, she defies the primary function the text has set out for her as a female. When she attempts to seduce Joseph, she contradicts patriarchal standards by taking morally, illicit, overt, and decisive action. After her attempts fail, she proves herself even more untrustworthy when she slanders the innocent Joseph and causes his imprisonment. Furthermore, Joseph is the last of Abraham's descendents to directly receive the divine blessing. So, her attack on him is also an attack on God's select people, the people that is supposed to be the origin of a great, prosperous, and abundant nation.Instead of being a helpmate to her husband, or to Joseph, Potiphar's wife brings both men strife. AS a result of her actions, her husband has Joseph, his most trusted and valued servant, imprisoned and wrongly declared a criminal. Rather than acting as an aid or, or facilitator of, God's will, or of the patriarchal society that will fosters, she is an obstacle that God has to overcome in order for the divine will to prevail.In Genesis, there is a consistent evolution of what is at stake. In the beginning, God invests in an idyllic world governed by a patriarchal hierarchy. It is a world destined to be a model of harmony and a perfect domestic domain for human ...
