Few chapters in Genesis have been read in as sharply opposed ways as this one, and the disagreement runs through the text's own silences. Classical rabbinic commentary, including material gathered in Genesis Rabbah, largely reads the episode as Dinah's violation and her brothers' violent but understandable defense of family honor, with some midrash going further to blame Dinah's own initiative in going out among the Hivite women as an invitation to danger, a reading modern scholars have criticized as blaming the victim.
Modern biblical scholarship has reopened the chapter from several directions at once. Some scholars, following the ambiguity in the Hebrew verb describing what Shechem does and his subsequent wish to marry her, have argued the episode may be closer to an unauthorized seduction or elopement than a violent rape as commonly translated, a reading Tikva Frymer-Kensky surveys and ultimately rejects in her study of the chapter, arguing that the text's own vocabulary and the brothers' fury are only fully explained if a genuine violation occurred. Other readings focus less on Shechem's act than on the story's ending, reading Simeon and Levi's massacre, and Jacob's later deathbed curse against them in Genesis 49 for their anger, as evidence the text itself condemns the brothers' revenge even while never condemning Shechem in equally direct language.
What is not disputed is the chapter's most striking feature: a story that begins and ends with Dinah is told entirely through the words and decisions of the men around her, and the tradition's long argument over what happened is, in large part, an argument over how to fill a silence the text leaves standing.