Free The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible by Jonathan Kirsch Page B

the knife?”
    The handmaiden nodded solemnly and then broke into bawdy laughter along with Simeon and Levi and the rest of the brothers.
    On the second day after the mass circumcision at the city gate, Simeon and Levi walked with the handmaiden to a distant hilltop where they would not be interrupted or overheard. They listened carefully as she described the lay of the land, the path to take if one wanted to pay a visit to Hamor’s big house and the other houses where the menfolk were resting from
their
encounters with the surgeon’s knife.
    On the third day, Simeon and Levi rose before dawn, strapped on their short swords, and slipped out of the compound in silence. Onlythe handmaiden saw them go, and then she went back to sleep for an hour or so before her long day of work would begin.
    Simeon and Levi knew that every last man in Hamor’s town—including Hamor himself, and his son, Shechem—was in his bed, still wrapped tightly with bandages in the place where the surgeon’s knife had cut him. A grown man who had just been circumcised is in no condition to be up and out of bed and walking about the town—every step would be another moment of pain. On that, the two brothers were counting.
    At the first house they encountered, Simeon and Levi unsheathed their swords and shouldered open the door with a loud crack that awakened only a pair of servant girls who were bedded down on the floor near the stove. The girls looked up, bleary and confused, as Simeon and Levi stalked past them in search of the room where the master of the house slept. As soon as the kitchen girls noticed the swords Simeon and Levi were carrying, they began to wail. And so, when Levi finally found a man with a black beard on a pile of bedding in a back room, the poor soul was already awake and alert as Levi dispatched Him with one short blow to the neck.
    The same brutal operation was repeated in dwelling after dwelling, tent and shack and house, as Simeon and Levi stalked through the streets of Hamor’s town and methodically did their work. They were shepherds, and they knew how to dispatch a living creature swiftly and efficiently. Now they put their expertise to a new use, although they held their victims in somewhat less regard than they would a beast being slaughtered for their table.
    Now and then, one of the men of Hamor rose from his bed and seized a staff or a sword in a desperate attempt at self-defense, but two armed men on their feet were always more than a match for somebedridden soul whose private parts were bloody and bandaged. By sunrise, they had slain all but two of the newly circumcised men in the town, and the last house they visited belonged to Hamor and Shechem, who were awake and astir but unsuspecting, still lingering in their beds and waiting to be called to breakfast by one of the servants.
    And it came to pass on the third day, when they were in pain, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city unawares, and slew all the males
.
    — GENESIS 34-25    
And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went forth
.
    — GENESIS 34:26.    
     
    Hamor half-rose in his bed when he saw Simeon and Levi at the threshold, but they reached him before he could cry out, and a single blow with the cutting edge of a sword across the neck silenced him forever. Shechem appeared behind them, bellowing like a bull, but no one but the servants was left to hear the sound. With another strike of the blade, Shechem, too, was dead.
    Blood-spattered and breathing heavily, Simeon and Levi searched the house from room to room until they found Dinah in the richly decorated bedchamber that had been set aside for her until her wedding day. Their sister stared at them with an expression of horror that they had never seen before, not even on the faces of their victims and the bystanders who had witnessed the