Shabbat Parashat Vayigash - 5784

Shabbat Parashat Vayigash - 5784

Rabbi Hal Miller

  Shimon's sons, Yemuel and Yamin and Ohad and Yachin and Tzohar and Shaul,

  son of the Canaanite woman. [Bereishit 46:10]

This is not Shaul the king of later generations, but the son of Shimon, head of the tribe.

What is the Torah telling us of his being the son of a Canaanite woman? There is a

wide range of opinions in the commentaries.

Bereishit Rabbah [80:11] tells us that this is Dinah, daughter of Yaakov and sister of

Shimeon. Our first reaction might be that the Torah forbids a man from taking his sister

as a wife, but that law was not yet implemented. It is true that our forefathers observed

the Torah laws even before Mount Sinai, but there were exceptions, such as Yaakov

having married sisters, Yehudah taking Tamar, and Avraham serving meat and dairy to

the visiting angels. Bereishit Rabbah seems to imply that Dinah was pregnant by

Shechem, and that Shimeon married her to legitimize the pregnancy. Thus Shaul may

have been the son of a Canaanite father, and since Dinah "acted in the manner of the

Canaanites" she was called a Canaanite woman. It also says that she was called that

because upon her death, Shimeon buried her in the land of Canaan.

Ibn Ezra maintains that this verse only means that Shimeon married a Canaanite

woman, in violation of what the patriarchs had directed. Radak clarifies this, saying

that all of Yaakov's sons followed that command, but after he had the other sons

with a non-Canaanite wife, he married an additional wife, who was a Canaanite,

and that Shaul was the son of that second wife. This opinion has nothing to do with

Dinah, but refers to some unnamed other woman.

Rav Hirsch agrees that the woman involved here is Dinah and that Shimeon married

her as above to legitimize her child. She is called a Canaanite woman because her son

was physically the son of a Canaanite, Shechem. The point of our verse then is to show

that even Shaul was an upstanding member of the Israelite family, being the son of a

Jewish woman.