Dan: the name of Jacob's fifth son, of the tribe descended from him, and of the far northern city that tribe captured and renamed after him
Dan is a name that was also an ordinary Hebrew word. It means "he judged," and the verb behind it (דִּין) reaches from settling a court case all the way to standing up for someone and winning their rights, so the name can just as fairly be heard as "he vindicated." The Bible plays on that twice. Rachel, still childless, says God has judged her case and given her a son, and the boy is named Dan. Generations later Jacob says over him, "Dan shall judge his people." Most scholars think the naming speech is a play on sound rather than a strict word history, but the play only works because every Hebrew ear caught the everyday verb sitting inside the name.
From the man the name travels outward, and a reader has to keep track of where each verse is pointing:
- the man himself, Jacob's fifth son and the first child of Bilhah
- the tribe descended from him, counted in the censuses, camped on the north side of the camp, and given land of its own
- the city at the very top of the country, called Laish (לַיִשׁ) until Danite settlers took it and put their ancestor's name on it
- the shrine at that city, which became shorthand for the wrong kind of worship once a northern king set a golden calf there, matched by another at Bethel (בֵּיתְ־אֵל)
- the northern end of a stock phrase that pairs Dan with Beersheba (בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע) in the far south to mean the whole country, top to bottom
The tribe's story is unusually rough. Dan is handed land on the lowlands next to the Philistines, cannot hold it, and moves north instead. The account of that move ends with the Danites setting up a carved image and taking on a wandering priest, which reads as a deliberate blackening of the northern shrine's beginnings. Chronicles, which traces family lines tribe by tribe, gives Dan almost none. And because Jacob's saying pictures Dan as a snake striking a horse's heels, and because Jeremiah hears invading cavalry "from Dan," later writers turned the name into a byword for the great enemy at the end of time. Against all of that, Ezekiel's vision of a restored land lists Dan first among the tribal portions and gives it a gate in the ideal city.
Nuances
What the verb in "Dan shall judge his people" promises. The root covers settling legal cases, governing, and securing someone's rights, so commentators differ over which shade Jacob's saying carries.
- contestedThe line is about rule and leadership: Dan will govern its own people as the other tribes govern theirs.; TWOT, s.v. דין
- contestedThe line is about vindication: Dan, the son of a servant woman, will nonetheless secure its own rights and place within Israel.; HALOT, s.v. דין; D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. דין; R. de Hoop, Genesis 49 in Its Literary and Historical Context, Oudtestamentische Studiën 39 (Brill, 1999)
How to read the pair of oaths in Amos 8:14. The first swears by "your god, O Dan"; the second, in Hebrew, swears by "the way of Beersheba," an odd expression to stand parallel to a deity, and the oldest Greek translation read a god there instead.
- contestedBoth oaths name deities: the god of the shrine at Dan, and a divine title lying behind the strange word used of Beersheba, whether by emending it or by reading it as a cultic term for power or dominion.; S. M. Paul, Amos, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1991); F. I. Andersen and D. N. Freedman, Amos, Anchor Bible 24A (Doubleday, 1989)
- contestedThe Beersheba phrase should be left as it stands and understood of the pilgrimage road to Beersheba or the worship practised there, not of a god.; H. W. Wolff, Joel and Amos, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1977)