The Abduction of Dinah: Reading Genesis 28:1035:15 as a Votive Narrative

Daniel Hankore argues that the story of Genesis 28:10--35:15 has been misunderstood and mistranslated for two thousand years. He seeks to shed new light on it from Ethiopia's Hadiyya culture, revealing Genesis 28:10--35:15 to be a votive narrative. Making use of relevance theory Hankore tries to reconstruct the intended message of the story from the narrator's point of view. Genesis 28:10--35:15 is presented as a coherent narrative unit and each episode of the story, including the Dinah story, is a part of the building blocks of the discourse structure of this coherent votive narrative. Hankore shows that a correct understanding of the Hebrew concept (vow) in the context of the ancient Israelite's social institution is fundamental for the reading and translating of Genesis 28:10-35:15.