101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

154 101 Myths of the Bible
accepted this condition but Simeon and Levi had a secret agenda. When the males
were recovering from the operations and unable to fight well, the two brothers secretly
entered the city and slaughtered the king’s family. Jacob, afraid of the consequences, fled
with his family from Shechem to Beth-el.
It would seem that for some reason the biblical editors substituted the story of the
rape of Dinah for the story about the homosexual rape of Horus/Jacob by Set/Esau.
The basis for the story was the Greek myth of Danaus and Aegyptus, a source that we
previously noted (see Myth #47) had an influence on the genealogy of the Hamitic
branch of Noah’s family.
The only complete account of the Greek myth appears in the writings of Apollodorus,
a Greek writer of the first century B.C. The summary presented here is
adapted from his narrative.
Danaus and Aegyptus were the twin sons of Belus, king of Egypt. The monarch
appointed Aegyptus ruler over Arabia and Danaus ruler over Libya (i.e., that part of
Africa west of the Nile). Eventually, Aegyptus conquered Egypt and named the country
after himself. Danaus, fearing his brother’s power, fled from Libya to the Greek
kingdom of Argos, where he persuaded the current ruler to make Danaus king.
Aegyptus pursued Danaus and proposed that his fifty sons marry Danaus’s fifty
daughters (called the Danaides in Greek myth). Danaus, fearing a plot against his life,
agreed, but secretly instructed his daughters to hide knives in their wedding beds and
kill their husbands on the wedding night. All but one of the daughters carried out the
instructions and the surviving husband succeeded Danaus to the throne.
On the surface, the biblical story of Dinah bears a startling resemblance to the
Greek legend. In both stories, a king proposed a group marriage between the members
of his family and a less powerful family; the less powerful family consented to the marriage
but secretly plotted to kill the king’s sons; the less powerful family massacred the
king’s sons and move to a new territory. (In an isolated fragment of text from another
source, the Danaides killed Aegyptus’s sons while still in Egypt and then fled to Argos.)
Also, the daughters of the less powerful family are known as the Danaides (i.e.,“daughters
of Danaus” in Greek) and the central character of the less powerful family in the
biblical story is Dinah, sharing the same root name as Danaus and the Danaides.