he conclusion of Genesis, Dina, after losing all her potential worth as a bride, and therefore as a wife and mother, is completely neglected. However, the aftermath of her rape continues to reverberate. When Dina's brothers slaughter Shechem, the entire house of Jacob is forced to flee and relocate their encampment. Thus, by rejecting the role of passive female as it is construed in Genesis, and then suffering the results of her assertive 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. In the beginning, God invests in a peaceful world governed by a patriarchal hierarchy. It is a world destined to be a model of harmony and a perfect domestic domain for human existence. Then, when the Eden experiment fails and God is compelled to recreate the world through the flood episode, this investment expands into an effort to produce a populous world for extensive human habitation. In the remainder of genesis, god directs his efforts toward the development of Abraham's family; the representatives of God's select nation and an expression of the divine ideal of human existence. Building this blessed nation is the chief value in the post-Flood Genesis, and this nation, as the nation devoted to the God of Genesis, is the only value that remains relevant right through to the end of the text. At every juncture in Genesis, women primarily serve as hurdles to be negotiated so that the text's values may be actualized. They destroy paradise, delay the propagation of the human species, defy the patriarchal structure, and endanger the proliferation of God's blessed nation. Clearly, there are patterns to the forms of this female subversiveness, such as unreliability, infertility, and disobedience. But, since there is not one single paradigm for female insubordination, the problem of women in Genesis is a narrative device that is integrated...
