Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 34:2
And defiled her. The verb anah is used elsewhere explicitly for rape, and elsewhere more broadly for affliction.
Genesis 34:2, in every translation this tool compares.
English has separate words, afflicted and raped, that name very different things. Hebrew anah, in this intensive form, spans both, used in some places for general oppression and, in others, including two other biblical assault narratives, explicitly for sexual violation. Context, not the word alone, tells you which is meant here.
Because the verb describing what happened to Dinah is the same verb Hebrew uses elsewhere explicitly for rape, and also, in other contexts, for affliction or humiliation more broadly, so the precise English word chosen here carries real weight for how the assault, and Simeon and Levi's violent response to it, are read.
Most versions read violated, humbled, or defiled, all reasonable attempts at a verb whose full weight, forced sexual violation, some English words soften more than others.
וַיְעַנֶּהָ vaye'aneha (עָנָה anah, piel) · H6031
Innah, the piel of anah, is used explicitly for rape at Deuteronomy 22:24, 29 and for Amnon's assault on Tamar at 2 Samuel 13:12, 14, establishing a clear pattern of usage for sexual violation elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The same root can also mean afflict, oppress, or humble in non-sexual contexts, which has occasionally allowed softer readings here, but the verb's use in the two other explicit assault narratives strongly supports reading it the same way in Dinah's case.
English translators must choose a specific word, violated, defiled, humbled, raped, that commits to a level of explicitness the single Hebrew verb does not by itself require, since anah's precise force depends on comparing its use across several passages rather than on the word in isolation.
When a Hebrew verb has both a broad, non-sexual sense and a narrower, explicitly sexual one attested elsewhere, check its use in comparable narratives before assuming a translation has softened or sharpened the original beyond what the evidence supports.
Defiled or humbled, the older, softer English glosses, can obscure the verb's explicit force in comparable assault narratives. Violated or raped more directly conveys what the parallel uses of the same verb at Deuteronomy 22 and 2 Samuel 13 indicate the word is doing here as well.
- The same verb explicitly for rape: Deuteronomy 22:24, 29; 2 Samuel 13:12, 14
- Broader, non-sexual senses of anah elsewhere: Exodus 1:11-12; Genesis 15:13
