Dinah as Job's Wife in Early Jewish Literature

Rabbinic and other postbiblical literature preserves a tradition that Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, married Job. Apart from her thwarted marriage to Shechem (Genesis 34), the biblical text never mentions whether Dinah married or had children, and there is no mention of any of her descendants in the genealogies of Jacob’s children listed in Genesis 46.

Dinah’s marriage to Job is narrated in Biblical Antiquities, an anonymous text likely written in Hebrew in the first century CE but preserved only in Latin. (The text was once erroneously attributed to Philo of Alexandria, so the anonymous author is sometimes called Pseudo-Philo.) According to this passage, Dinah was the mother of all fourteen of Job’s children: the seven who die at the start of the book of Job and the seven who are born at the end.

Genesis Rabbah derives Dinah’s marriage to Job from the term nevalah, a wicked or foolish act or individual, which occurs in both the story of Dinah and Shechem and the book of Job. In Genesis 34:7, Shechem’s rape of Dinah is called a nevalah, and in Job 2:10, Job accuses his wife of speaking as a nevalah when she tells him to curse God.