The story of Dinah in Genesis 34 is already one of the most violent chapters in the Torah. The Targum Jonathan, the ancient Aramaic translation, does not soften it. Instead, it sharpens the moral argument at the chapter's climax in a way the Hebrew text never does.
The basic narrative follows the biblical account closely: Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to observe the customs of the local women. Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite and prince of the land, seized her by force. He then claimed to love her and asked his father to negotiate a marriage. Jacob heard what happened but kept silent until his sons returned from the fields.
When the sons of Jacob arrived and learned the news, the Targum says they were "indignant and very violently moved." Simeon and Levi, Dinah's full brothers through Leah, devised a plan: they told Shechem's people that intermarriage was impossible unless every male in the city underwent circumcision. Shechem agreed eagerly. Hamor pitched it to the city elders as a business deal—"their flocks, their substance, and all their cattle, will they not be ours?" The men of the city consented.
On the third day, when the men of Shechem were weakened from their wounds, Simeon and Levi entered the unsuspecting city with swords drawn and killed every male, including Shechem and Hamor. They retrieved Dinah from Shechem's house. The remaining sons of Jacob looted everything—livestock, wealth, women, and children.
Jacob rebuked them: "You have made my name evil among the inhabitants of the land." He feared retaliation from the surrounding Canaanite and Perizzite populations. But here the Targum expands Simeon and Levi's response far beyond the terse biblical reply. In the Hebrew, they say only: "Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?" The Targum gives them a full legal argument. They declared that it would not be fitting for it to be said in the congregations of Israel that the uncircumcised defiled a virgin and idol-worshippers debased Jacob's daughter. Instead, it should be said that the uncircumcised were slain on account of the virgin, and idol-worshippers destroyed on account of Jacob's daughter. They concluded: Shechem son of Hamor would not mock them, for he would have made Dinah like "a whorish woman and an outcast who has no avenger." The Targum transforms a brief retort into a declaration of collective honor, framing the massacre as the only alternative to permanent national shame.