In the Book of Genesis, Dinah (/ˈdaɪnə/; Hebrew: דִּינָה, Modern: Dīna, Tiberian: Dīnā, 'judged'; 'vindicated') was the seventh child and only daughter of Leah and Jacob.

In Genesis 34, Dinah went out to visit the women of Shechem, where her people had made camp and where her father Jacob had purchased the land where he had pitched his tent.

But "the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and his father Hamor deceitfully, because he had defiled their sister Dinah"; they said they would accept the offer if the men of the city agreed to be circumcised.

So the men of Shechem were deceived, and were circumcised; and "on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob and Leah, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and came upon the city unawares, and killed all the males.

"Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, 'You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.'

The traditional view is that Moses wrote Genesis as well as almost all the rest of the Torah, doubtlessly using varied sources but synthesizing all of them together to give the Hebrews a written history of their ancestors.

This view—which has been held for the past several thousand years, although it is not explicitly mentioned in either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible—holds that Moses included this story primarily because it happened and he viewed it as significant.

[citation needed] Source-critical scholars speculate that Genesis combines separate literary strands, with different values and concerns, and does not pre-date the 1st millennium BC as a unified account.

[10] Within Genesis 34 itself, they suggest two layers of narrative: an older account ascribing the killing of Shechem to Simeon and Levi alone, and a later addition (verses 27 to 29) involving all the sons of Jacob.

Such a supposed preoccupation with ethnic purity must therefore indicate a late date for Genesis in the 5th or 4th centuries BC, when the restored Jewish community in Jerusalem was similarly preoccupied with anti-Samaritan polemics.

One midrash states that Dinah was conceived as a male in Leah's womb but miraculously changed to a female, lest the maid-servants (Bilhah and Zilpah) be associated with more of the Israelite tribes than Rachel.

They possessed great moral zealousness (later, in the episode of the Golden Calf, the Tribe of Levi would demonstrate their absolute commitment to Moses' leadership by killing all the people involved in idol worship), but their anger was misdirected here.

Maimonides argued that the killing was understandable because the townsmen had failed to uphold the seventh Noachide law (denim) to establish a criminal justice system.

[30] He suggests that after the brothers killed all the men in the city, including Shechem and his father, Dinah refused to leave the palace unless Simeon agreed to marry her[30] and remove her shame (according to Nachmanides, she only lived in his house and did not have sex with him).

[34] At the 1850 Woman's Rights Convention in New York, a speech by Sojourner Truth was reported on in the New York Herald, which used the name "Dinah" to symbolize black womanhood as represented by Truth: In a convention where sex and color are mingled together in the common rights of humanity, Dinah, and Burleigh, and Lucretia, and Frederick Douglas [sic], are all spiritually of one color and one sex, and all on a perfect footing of reciprocity.

[34]Lizzie McCloud, a slave on a Tennessee plantation during the American Civil War, recalled that Union soldiers called all enslaved women "Dinah".