What Does Genesis 34:17 Mean?

"Only on this condition will the men agree to live with us to become one people, when every male among us is circumcised as they are circumcised. Will not their livestock, their property and all their beasts be ours? Only let us agree with them, and they will live with us." Hamor's presentation of the circumcision condition is paired with an economic incentive he did not mention to Jacob and his sons: "will not their livestock, their property and all their beasts be ours?" He is implicitly suggesting that integration means assimilation, and in the long run the Jacob family's wealth would become part of the Shechemite community's wealth. This is an economic argument that Jacob's sons were not party to.

The implicit suggestion that the Jacob family's wealth will eventually become "ours" reveals a calculation that undermines Hamor's stated commitment to integration on equal terms. He is telling his community: accept the circumcision, and eventually everything Jacob has will belong to us anyway. The integration he is selling to his people is more advantageous to Shechem than what he proposed to Jacob; he presented it to Jacob as bilateral; he presents it to his community as ultimately self-interested absorption.

The irony is that Hamor's economic motivation for the integration is the mirror of Simeon and Levi's violence that will follow in verse 25-29. Both sides harbor agendas not disclosed in the formal negotiation. Hamor plans to absorb Jacob's wealth through integration; Jacob's sons plan to avenge their sister through massacre. Both agendas are concealed within the formal courtesy of the negotiation. The chapter's darkness extends equally to both parties' hidden calculations.