The Abduction of Dinah: Genesis 28:10-35:15 as a Votive Narrative

The process of understanding a text from the narrator’s point of view is crucial for the tasks of interpreting and translating the Bible. If the translator’s understanding of a narrative from the narrator’s point of view is erroneous, then the whole process of translating the message into another language may also fall into error. This poses Bible translators a difficult challenge: ‘How can we understand the narrator’s point of view of the biblical stories which are culturally, geographically, and historically remote from our own?’ Understanding a text from the narrator’s point of view must precede the translation process. In this work Hankore presents an argument for the intended utterance of Genesis 28:10-35:15 before proposing in brief how to translate it. By following this process, Hankore shows that a correct understanding of the concept of the ancient Israelite vow in the framework of a social institution is fundamental to reading and translating Genesis 28:10-35:15, and goes on to show how this same votive framework assists an explanation of the relevance of Genesis 34 to the Jacob story.