Defiled and Washed

Genesis 34-35

The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible

August 9, 2026

Rev. David Collins

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I want to start at the end today. At a funeral. 

Genesis 35:27-29 says, 

27 Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre, or Kiriath-arba, that is, Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac had resided as aliens. 28 Now the days of Isaac were one hundred eighty years. 29 And Isaac breathed his last; he died and was gathered to his people, old and full of days, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.

Notice how Esau is mentioned first here. It’s like it’s always been this way. But we know that it hasn’t. 

The last time we saw these two together, it had been twenty years since Jacob ran for his life because Esau had promised to kill him. But Jacob came home with wives and children and livestock and everything he owned, and Esau rode out to meet him with four hundred men. 

So Jacob split the family into two camps, figuring at least one of them might survive. Then Esau got there and ran at him and threw his arms around his neck and kissed him.

Esau said, come with me. Let’s travel together and be a family 

And Jacob said, you go on ahead. I'll catch up.

He never caught up though. Esau was going south so Jacob went north.

Up north, He finally settled down. Near Shechham, he bought the first land he ever owned. Right around his 80th birthday. 

Sometimes weariness only shows up after the danger passes. You can run a long time on fear. But the day you finally set your things down in a place that belongs to you, twenty years catches up with you all at once.

We humans don't age evenly, do we?  I was twenty for about twenty years, then suddenly I was forty. I hope to be forty for about 30 more years, and then, something will happen, and I’ll wake up 80. There's a version of you that existed the day before, and then there's the one that has to get up the next morning.

That's Jacob here. He bought a field and built an altar and became an old man.

And then the thing happened that Megan preached about last week. Dinah went out to see the women of the land, and Shechem, the son of the man who ran that city, took her.

And then he decided he loved her. He kept her at his house and told his father to go get her for him, make it official.

So Hamor came to Jacob to negotiate. And Hamor offered everything. Marry into us. Live here, trade here, buy property. Your people and our people, one people.

Jacob's sons came in from the fields while he was still talking. And they had an answer ready. We can't do that. Not with men who aren't circumcised. But if every male in your city gets circumcised, then yes. We'll intermarry. We'll settle here. One people.

Hamor took it back to the men of the city and sold it. Look at their livestock, he said. Look at everything they have. Won't all of it end up ours? And every man in that city agreed to it, and every man in that city did it.

Then on the third day, when they could all barely stand, Simeon and Levi, DInah’s full brothers, walked in with swords and killed every one of them.

Then the rest of the brothers came in behind them and took the city apart. Flocks, herds, donkeys. Everything in the houses and everything in the fields. The wives. The children. They didn't burn it. They loaded it up and drove it home.

And Jacob came out and said, look at what you've done …to me.

30 Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.”

But notice what he doesn’t mention. He doesn't say murder. He doesn't say treachery. He doesn't say a word about the wives and children his sons brought home like furniture, and they're standing right there in his camp while he's talking.

He says odious. He says he stinks now. That it’s a reputation problem.

And he never says Dinah's name. It's in this chapter six times, but never once in his mouth.

And then his sons answered him. It's the last verse of the chapter.

31 But they said, “Should our sister be treated like a prostitute?”

That's hard to argue with. 

But they don't say her name either. Not once. She’s the reason for all of it and she's not a person in it. She's the argument.

And that's where the chapter ends. On their question. Jacob doesn't answer it. He doesn't say anything else. The old man just stands there.

But there's a word that runs through this chapter that you don't find anywhere else in Genesis.

Defiled. 

Verse 5, when Jacob hears what happened: Shechem had defiled his daughter. Verse 13, when the sons set the trap: because he had defiled their sister. Verse 27, after the killing, when they're going through the houses: because their sister had been defiled.

The same word three times. It's a purity word. Not a moral one. 

There are two ways to name what was done to Dinah. You can say a crime was committed against her. Or you can say something has been made unclean.

The first one is more of a story. A crime has a perpetrator, and a punishment that fits. You can reason about it.

Uncleanness doesn't work like that, though. It’s a state of being. A status. There’s nothing you can do to a city that's too much, because the problem isn't what a man did. The problem is that the whole thing is contaminated now.

Defilement is a more dangerous idea than guilt. If you do wrong, then you can do better. But when you are seen as defiling, there’s no redeeming that. 

The word for a person you disagree with is opponent. The word for a person you've decided is contamination is nothing at all, because you don't negotiate with a stain. You remove it. And the people doing the removing have never in history thought of themselves as cruel. They think of themselves as clean. 

It just takes a moment to decide you’re above reproach because your enemy is beneath contempt. And then you can justify anything. 

Which is what the brothers do. 

28 They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. 29 All their wealth, all their little ones, and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and made their prey.

If this is a purity operation, you burn it all. That’s what you do with contaminated goods, and there are other places in the Bible where that's exactly what happens.

They didn't burn it though. They drove it home and kept it.

So maybe the disgust was real, or maybe it was just an excuse to do whatever they wanted. At least Simeon and Levi did the dirty work themselves for their ill-gotten gains. Today, the people doing the killing, or the detaining, or the capitol storming, are making others richer, but the only benefit they get is the feeling of moral superiority. 

Which is a terrible wage. They gave up their souls and got a feeling. They really should take a second look at the benefits of collective bargaining. 

But they’re not the only ones represented in this story. 

Let's look at Jacob for a minute, because I think some of us are him.

Old Man Jacob

He's not the villain here. He's tired. He's old. He finally has some land. His daughter is taken and he holds his peace. His sons make a deal he has to know is a trap and he says nothing. They kill a city, and they bring the city home in carts, and that's when the old man finally opens his mouth. My numbers are few. If they gather against me, I'm finished.

And he's right. If those people decide to come, he loses, and he knows it. He read the situation correctly.

And I get it. Sometimes I want the quiet more than I want to do what's right.

But somebody always pays for that quiet, and it's never the one who keeps it. Dinah paid. The men of Shechem paid, and their wives and their children, who are sitting in Jacob's camp now. He kept his peace and it cost everybody but him.

He gets there eventually.

Fourteen chapters later, Jacob is dying. He's got all twelve sons around the bed and he's going down the line, and he gets to these two.

49:5 Simeon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are their swords. 6 May I never come into their council; may I not be joined to their company, for in their anger they killed men, and at their whim they hobbled oxen. 7 Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel!

So he did have something to say. It only took him fifty years and a deathbed. That's what waiting costs. By the time he said it,  it couldn't do anybody any good.

You'd think God would settle this. Come down and tell us who was right.

35:1 God said to Jacob, “Arise, go up to Bethel, and settle there, and make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau.”

Not a word about chapter 34. Not a verdict. Get up. Go up. Live there. Build something.

So Jacob turns around and tells his household what to do, and it's the first thing he's said in two chapters that isn't about himself.

2 So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves, and change your clothes; 3 then come, let us go up to Bethel.”

Purify. That's the other word. It's the opposite of defiled and it only shows up here, this once, in the whole story of these families. The chapter that couldn't stop saying unclean is followed by the only bath in Genesis.

And look what it actually is. Hand over the gods. Wash. Put on different clothes.

4 So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that they had and the rings that were in their ears, and Jacob hid them under the oak that was near Shechem.

Some of those gods came out of the houses in Shechem. They plundered a city over religion and brought the city's religion home in the saddlebags. That's how it goes. You fight the thing and you carry it back with you.

So he buries it. Under a tree. In the ground. You could go stand on the spot.

Brueggemann says the reason this matters is that Israel has no good options. They can't leave the land. They can't kill everyone in it, though chapter 34 was a demonstration of what that looks like when you try. They have to live next to people who are not them, and stay themselves, and not become Simeon and Levi doing it.

So faithfulness becomes something you do with your hands. You hand something over. You take a bath. You put on clothes you weren't wearing.

Which is why we do it with water, out here, in front of everybody.

Baptism

Baptism vows didn't start with what you believe. They started with what you renounce. Do you renounce the devil and all his works. People said that out loud, standing in front of witnesses, sometimes facing west to say it and then turning east to make their profession. Some of them took their clothes off, went into the water, and came up and got dressed in something new. Same three things. Hand it over, wash, change your clothes.

We've made it gentler. But it's still a thing you do with your body, in front of people who will remember you did it.

And we didn't invent this. Israel figured it out standing in the wreckage of the worst thing this family ever did. They couldn't leave and they couldn't fix it and they couldn't undo Shechem, so God gave them something to do with their hands. That's what we're doing at that font.

Because you can't talk yourself out of what you're carrying. You have to hand it over, and it has to go somewhere, and somebody has to see you do it.

Watch what happens as soon as they get to Bethel.

A Bittersweet Interlude

8 And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel, so it was called Allon-bacuth.

That's the whole verse. And somebody kept it.

She's mentioned one other time in the entire Bible, back in chapter 24, and she doesn't get a name there. Just the nurse. She went with Rebekah when Rebekah left home to marry a man she'd never met, and she stayed. She would have held Jacob when he was born. She was there for all of it, the whole ugly business with Esau and the stew and the blessing, and she outlived Rebekah, and then she was in Jacob's camp for the rest of the way.

And when she died they stopped. They dug a grave under a tree and they cried hard enough that the tree got named for it. Allon-bacuth. The oak of weeping.

Nobody had to write that down. She's not in the promise. Her name doesn't lead anywhere. This is a family that has been keeping careful track of firstborns and blessings and who gets what, and right here in the middle of it they stop everything for the woman who raised somebody's mother.

I love that they kept her. Somebody in that camp said, we're not leaving her out of this.

They pull up and keep going, and they don't get far.

Rachel's Death

Rachel goes into labor on the road. Not at home, because there is no home. Somewhere between Bethel and Ephrath, with the whole camp stopped around her and nothing anybody can do. The text says the labor was hard. The midwife tells her not to be afraid, you have another son, which is what you say when there's nothing left to say.

18 As her soul was departing (for she died), she named him Ben-oni, but his father called him Benjamin.

Ben-oni means son of my sorrow. That's the last thing Rachel ever said. Her son's name, and it's what the day cost her.

And Jacob changes it. Benjamin. Son of my right hand.

I don't know what to do with that.

He overruled her dying word, and he also refused to let this boy walk around for the rest of his life carrying his mother's death. Both of those are true. Genesis puts them in the same verse and doesn't help us.

He buries her by the road. Not in the family tomb. Wherever they were standing when it happened.

Then they keep walking.

Back to Isaac's Funeral

And then they get to Hebron, and Isaac is a hundred and eighty years old, and it's time.

29 And Isaac breathed his last; he died and was gathered to his people, old and full of days, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.

Esau came.

Nobody sent for four hundred men. Nobody split the camp. Jacob had spent twenty years running from that man and one afternoon getting kissed by him and the rest of his life avoiding him, and when the day came, Esau was standing on the other side of the grave with his hands on the same body.

So what do we do with a story that's kind of a bummer?

Same thing we do when life is a bummer.

We look for the good points. Not in an accentuate-the-positive, everything bad is actually good kind of way. But we look for the genuine good that almost always comes out of the bad, or shows up alongside it, usually smaller than we wanted or later than we needed.

It's in here though. A woman who spent her life taking care of other people's children got a grave under a tree and a family that cried hard enough to name it. A baby was born on the worst day of two people’s lives. Two brothers who might have killed each other buried their father together instead.

None of that fixes chapter 34. That's the point. It sits right next to chapter 34 and it doesn't cancel it out but it doesn't get canceled out either.

And then we learn to live with the bad. Which is harder, because it comes in three pieces and you don't get to pick.

You have to see the part you played. That's Jacob. He didn't do anything, and that was the thing he did.

You have to see what was done to you that wasn't your fault. That's Dinah. With not just the big bad thing, but all the people who ignored it, and never asked her a single question…but I'd like to think God did.

And you have to see the ones who hurt you as human as you are. Which is the one nobody wants to do. That’s the big problem of chapter 34, the using of people as things…the decision that those people over there are not the same kind of thing you are. Once you make it, everything after it is simple, but it’s also a horror.

All of that draws us toward God. Not because God explains it. God didn't explain it here. God showed up after the worst thing this family ever did and said get up, go to Bethel, live there, build something.

God gave them something to do… with their hands.

That's what I keep coming back to. The God of this story does not hand out verdicts. God hands out water. Bury the false gods. Wash. Change your clothes. Walk to Bethel. It's not a solution but it wasn’t advertised as one. It's a way to put down what you're carrying so you can keep moving.

We still do it. There's a font right there. And whatever else you believe about it, at minimum it's the same three things Jacob's household did under that oak, and we do it out loud, not just in front of God, but in front of people.

So take what's good. It's real, even when it's small.

Tell the truth about the rest. Your part in it and their part in it and the part that was nobody's fault.

And when you can't do either one, remember that the water already came for you, and it didn't wait to see if you'd earned it.

Amen.