All Those Going Out of the Gate of His City

Abstract

"The phrase wry[ r[ç yaxy Alk (Gen 34:24a, b) is part of the narrator’s summary of the Shechemites’ response to the circumcision proposal. The lexical and semantic evidence supports a military collocation for the phrase. Moreover, the language surrounding Abraham’s transaction at the city gate with Ephron (Gen 23:10b, 18b) is shown to be an inadequate semantic parallel, depending more on culture and architecture. This article argues that the repetition of the phrase in the same verse (34:24a, b) reflects the narrator’s rhetorical skill that “humanizes” a catastrophe, underscoring its distributive and irreversible state. By arguing more for “elders” or “citizens,” the translations have missed the narrator’s association of the circumcised group with a war idiom"