Listening to the Women

The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible

The Rev. Megan Collins

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Genesis 30 & 34

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What we’re doing today is going to be hard work. 

We promised when we started this series of preaching through the Bible that we wouldn’t just skip over a passage because it was difficult (which was a promise that was far easier to make back in the creation narratives than now, as we get into the messy human stories of the Old Testament.) But, difficult or not, it’s a promise we intend to keep. So today we will be reading the stories of three women in Genesis: Zilpah, Bilhah and Dinah.

But before we begin, these are tough texts that can bring up painful experiences. All three of these women’s stories involve sexual assault. I’ll step as lightly as I can, but if their experience intersects with your own, please feel free to stop here. You don’t have to do this work with us. But those who do not share this story have to engage in it. Because as tempting as it might be, we can’t skip over Bible passages that get too complicated for polite conversation. When we ignore these texts, they can easily be misused or misinterpreted in such a way that can make them dangerous. We’ll see today that even some biblical scholars have done this. 

We tell the stories of Bilhah and Zilpah and Dinah because the trauma they name is a part of our real lived experience.

1 in 71 men. 

1 in 5 women. 

This impacts someone you know. Each of them have a story.

Ignoring a Bible text like these can all too easily lead us to ignore stories of people in our own lives.

We also read about Dinah and Bilhah and Zilpah because as Marie M. Fortune writes,

“In naming it [sexual violence], we reclaim the truth which we know, that the way things are is not the way they have to be.” 

Let’s start in Genesis 34, with a story about a woman named Dinah. 

34:1 Now Dinah the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the daughters of the region.

You might remember Leah from Dave’s message last week. She is one of the two wives of Jacob, she and her sister Rachel, who we will talk about a minute. Dinah is Leah’s daughter. 

 ² When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the region, saw her, he seized her and lay with her by force.

Dinah was assaulted. And before we rush to keep reading, let’s pause for a moment here. Because as we continue, the next verse is the reason this text has been misunderstood in ways that will feel terribly familiar to us. In just one verse, we move from the assault to what some have seen as the justification. 

³ And his soul was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. ⁴ So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor, saying, “Get me this girl to be my wife.”

After the assault, the text says her attacker's soul was drawn to her, he loved her, and he spoke tenderly to her. Some scholars and preachers have said that Dinah wasn’t really assaulted. They say that Shechem was just overcome with passion, that her silence in the story is consent, that his love and tender speaking doesn’t match, in the words of one commentator , the “scientifically documented behavior of a rapist and so Shechem shouldn’t be seen as one”. Some have even gone so far as to blame Dinah because she was out visiting other women alone in the region instead of staying home. 

But he loved her.

But he just had too much passion.

Maybe she shouldn’t have been where she was.

We’ve heard that before. Too many times. 

But let’s look at verse 3 again. Because that justification might be what we hear today, but it also might not be at all what Genesis is saying. 

³ And his soul was drawn to Dinah 

Wilhelm Gesenius, the renowned grammarian of biblical Hebrew, translates this “being drawn to” as keeping something as a possession, not allowing her to leave. 

“he loved the young woman” 

This word for love is translated by Susanne Scholz, another brilliant scholar, as lust, or desire. 

“and spoke tenderly to her”

This specific phrase is used in the Hebrew when something wrong has happened. It’s a sense of trying to change her mind, to quiet her down. 

So instead of: 

³ And his soul was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. 

We can read:

He wanted to possess Dinah; he lusted for the young woman and tried to quiet her down.

The lens of the one who translates a story, the lens of the one to hear a story, can make all the difference. 

We know that too.

Now let’s read just one more. This story comes just a few chapters earlier in Genesis. Dinah’s mom, Leah, is one of two sisters, Rachel and Leah, and they are both married to a man named Jacob. Leah is able to have children, but is hated by her husband, which is a constant source of pain for her. Rachel is loved by Jacob, but she is devastated by infertility. (We’ll talk more about the struggles of infertility and the pain it can cause when we get to Hannah in 1 Samuel). 

Both Leah and Rachel are in an awful situation. The relationship to your husband and your ability to provide a son was critical for women in this time. But even so, nothing can justify the thing they will do next. To alleviate their own pain and their precarious situations, they sacrifice two women, their maids. Their decision to have their maids give birth on their behalf will sound familiar to you if you’ve read or seen The Handmaid’s Tale, a very popular (and terrifying) book and show. This story in Genesis 30 is actually the passage they read before what the book calls “the ceremony.” Let’s read:

Gen 30:

30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister, and she said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!”

 ³ Then she said, “Here is my maid Bilhah; go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her.” ⁴ So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife, and Jacob went in to her. ⁵ And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. ⁷ Rachel’s maid Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son.

⁹ When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. ¹⁰ Then Leah’s maid Zilpah bore Jacob a son.  ¹² Leah’s maid Zilpah bore Jacob a second son.

Bilhah and Zilpah aren’t given a choice. They are given over to carry children they did not ask for and could not keep as their own. There is no way to make this story feel better to us. There is not even an interaction with God to hang on to, which we had with Hagar. What we see here is not only the assault of two women. We see how class and status disproportionately impact women with this type of violence. In this case, even other women enable these atrocities when it helps them hold onto the power they have in a system. 

Again, this is a story we know all too well today. Race and class still increase the risk for a woman to be a victim of assault. And all too often, other women deny their stories to protect their own power. 

So what do we do with these stories today?  What can we take with us to hold onto?

Let’s look at the one thing that connects the women to one another. 

Dinah, Bilhah and Zilpah, the one thing that they all have in common is that we don’t hear from them. They aren’t given a voice in the Biblical narrative. 

That’s familiar to us too. We know women are often still silent today. Stories of trauma and assault are swept under the rug out of an insistence for polite conversation or to protect powerful people at their expense.  And not just about assault. Women’s voices are ignored in businesses, in doctor’s offices, in the pulpit, in their own homes. How can we hear the stories of assault if we aren't listening to their stories in general?

We need to listen to women. 

This isn’t a social issue.  This is a faith issue. 

The church has often been the one who has justified the removal of women’s voices by misusing the scriptures, with texts like these, and so many others. (We’ll have a study on this in March to diffuse those other texts. And yes, we’ll deal with Paul’s letters. But if you want more information sooner, I am happy to talk with you sooner).

But for our purpose today, if we take a closer look at Genesis, the ancient writers in Genesis are doing better than we are. They don’t give the women a voice, but they do still record their names and their stories.  It’s those of us in pulpits and pews today that have ignored them. And that includes us. 

Bilhah is mentioned again in Genesis 35:22. She is assaulted, again, this time by Reuben, Leah’s son. The worst misinterpretations come from those who say he was defending his mother in doing so. Or that it was good of him to spare Rachel and choose Bilhah instead. Unbelievable.

Churches like ours don’t read it this way, of course. But that’s because we usually don’t read it at all. Genesis 35:22 is not in our lectionary. It’s not on our preaching schedules. In 20 years of ministry I’ve never preached on Bilhah, or Dinah for that matter. Our discomfort with it has led to a silencing of her story. We’re a part of the problem. And we have to be the ones to bring their voices back. 

So we can insist on the bare minimum of what we see in Genesis: that the stories of these women are told, that the stories of others with a story like theirs, is told. 

But then if we really want to live out our Scriptures, we have to look to Jesus.

And the bare minimum was never where Jesus stopped.

Jesus went looking for the women no one else was listening to.

These women speak. And Jesus listens to them.

There was a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years. Under levitical law, she was unclean, which meant she couldn’t touch anyone else. So she made herself invisible. One day Jesus is coming through her town, and she is so desperate for healing, she quietly comes up and touches the edge of his cloak. When he realizes what has happened, in the presence of everyone, she shares her story. And Jesus commends her faith. (Luke 8)

Another woman is a gentile, and she comes alone to approach Jesus (a Jewish rabbi) to petition for her daughter. The story includes the conversation between her and Jesus, and in the end, He does what she has asked. (Mark 7)

A Samaritan woman with a messy past of broken relationships has a long conversation with Jesus at a well.  She leaves this interaction changed, and becomes the first Christian evangelist in the gospel of John, and many came to believe because of her testimony. (John 4)

And then when Jesus rose from the dead? He appeared to the women, who were sent to tell the disciples. (Who, of course, did not believe them). (Matt 28)

If God didn’t want us to listen to women, why would God have entrusted the most important story in history to them? 

With Jesus, the women have a voice.

No story is too much.

There is nothing that can’t be shared. 

And they weren’t just listened to in their sphere at that time of women’s experience or trauma or childbearing. Women in the gospels are not just for childbearing, or pleasure. 

They are the first witnesses to the resurrection. They are the first evangelists. 

So what’s next then, for us?

We start by reclaiming our holy story.

We insist that it be read in the context of the whole Biblical narrative to understand who God is and what God is doing.  

Then, we make space for people to tell their own stories today, all people

Everyone whose story has been silenced, dismissed, or explained away. 

Anyone who's been told that their story wasn't worth the room it would take up.

That’s one thing we believe in here at Maitland Presbyterian. One of our core values as a church is we insist on real community. That means we want to know your whole story, all of it, from all of you, the good stuff and the bad stuff. We want to know where you’ve been and we’re you’d like to be, the times God has been really present to you and the time when you wondered if God was there at all. We believe this can be a place where we can be a real community that shares this stuff with each other. 

Some of you here have a story that you are ready to tell. For the women with Jesus, being honest about their lives led to healing and hope.  And it changed the lives of the people around them. When you share yours, that’s up to you, only when you’re ready. But when you are, know that telling your story might make it possible for someone else to tell theirs too. It might give permission to someone in your life to talk about the things that someone else told them weren’t mentionable. Dave and I would be honored to listen to you. There are a lot of others here in our church that would too. 

And for all of us, when someone does tell us their story, we have a responsibility to do what Jesus did: to slow down, to actually listen. To believe them, even if it costs us something to do it.

This was a hard one today.

I’m proud of you for staying with it. 

If you were here last week, Dave preached on the story of Jacob wrestling with God. Phyllis Trible, whose book Texts of Terror tells the story of four women in the Scripture who experienced the unimaginable, says this:

“to tell and hear tales of terror is to wrestle demons in the night . .. we struggle mightily, only to be wounded. But yet we hold on, seeking a blessing: the healing of wounds and the restoration of health.”

That’s the work we had for today: to hold onto these texts, to wrestle them as one would wrestle a demon in the night. We have struggled mightily, perhaps even finding ourselves wounded, but refusing to let go, until we get a blessing. Perhaps when we wrestle long enough we find that blessing can be the healing of wounds, the restoration of our wholeness.  And certainly we find the insistence that God is not done until these voices, all voices, are heard. 

For more study . . . .

Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz 

Reading Trauma Narratives: Insidious Trauma in the Story of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah by L. Juliana Claassens