So, some daughters in the Word didn’t die. They just disappeared. And even if found they wouldn’t be as they once were.
Dinah was Jacob’s and Leah’s only daughter. By the time she came of age to be married she had already been marred by her parents. Her mother never came to terms with seven sets of stretch marks without an ounce of love to show for it. Her father had long made it plain that her aunt, not her or her brothers, were the love of his life.
They had moved to a new city. Dinah was getting older. Culture dictated it was time for her father to find her a husband. But he never took the time though alarms were going off.
Seeking to escape her home life, Dinah went out one day. A young man well connected, seeing Dinah unprotected, saying it politely took advantage of her and then turns around speaks tenderly to her and proposes. Later, two of her brothers who didn’t care, tried a little tenderness took him and all his kin out.
But, Jacob, more concerned about neighborly payback than the assault of his daughter, said nothing. Mama never came out to even give her a hug. Nobody cared that Dinah was lost and now turned out. Afterwards nothing is written of her death. She just simply disappears.
But if she reappeared, would she be recognized? Imagine a woman whose sexual awakening was a toxic mix of abuse and too late I’m sorry tenderness. Maybe she reappeared like her mama but more anxious and desperate to get the feeling of being wanted at least for a moment not realizing until it was too late, how much it had cost.
Next up Tamar again politely taken advantage of, not by a stranger on the street but a brother from another mother in the palace of her father David the king. David, like Jacob, insisted on sweeping everything under the rug only to be tripped up by it later.
Her brother Absalom gave Amnon the ultimate pay back. He took his sister to live with him, but Tamar was never the same. There’s no word of her death but after her brother’s death; the only man who cared about her, killed by the army of the man who didn’t, you can bet Tamar got worse. Her brother had held her mind together and with him gone it probably began to disintegrate until nothing was left.
But then there’s Mary running around Galilee whose daughter we don’t know. But someone stepped in, a loving and wise male relative who in accordance with the culture arranged a marriage to a man who wouldn’t let her disappear under the weight of gossip and scandal. He was an average Joe who proved to be exceptional in caring for and protecting her and her son, who wasn’t his.
References – Genesis 34, 2 Samuel 13, 18
