[Avodah] national flag???

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "kennethgmiller at juno.com" _kennethgmiller at juno.com_ 
(mailto:kennethgmiller at juno.com) 
-1

R'  Zev Sero wrote:

> Flags were invented in the early 2nd millennium  CE.  They did
> not exist in Biblical times, or in Chazal's.  I  don't know when
> standards were invented; the medrash about the tribes'  standards
> may be historical for all I know, but it wouldn't shock me if  it
> weren't.

[snip]> It's probably something that serves the  same purpose for which
> flags were invented, but it can't mean a flag,  unless they're
> a technology that was lost and rediscovered.    Chazal seem to
> have thought it meant a standard, which was an invention  known
> in their day, but perhaps not in David's; I don't  know.




.....Anyway, I concede that on Bamidbar 21:8, Rashi says that a  "neis" is 
a "klonas" - a pole. But there's another common word for flag:  "degel". And 
Rashi on Bamidbar 2:2 seems to use "degel" in what seems to me like  a 
pretty good description of a flag (although it is a flag of one solid  color).

Akiva Miller

 
>>>>
In modern Hebrew the word "degel" means flag (I don't know how long  the 
word "degel" has been used to mean flag -- maybe RZS knows?)  But Rashi  seems 
to have understood the word "degel" to mean a division.  There were  12 
shevatim (well, 13 counting Levi) around the Mishkan but only four degalim --  
three shvatim to a degel, i.e., three to a division.
 
In Bamidbar 2:2 it says that each person camped "ish al diglo be'osos  
leveis avosam" which according to Rashi seems to mean each person in his  
division, with "signs" for his father's house [trbe].  And what Rashi says  there 
is that each degel had its own os -- and then he goes on to explain  that 
the osos were colored cloths, a different color for each tribe.   He says that 
each person can recognize his own degel by its os -- IOW that he  can find 
his way home to his division, his area, by looking up at the  flag.  
 
Whether Rashi was being anachronistic by assuming that they had flags in  
the desert I don't know but as RAM mentioned, the technology involved in  
creating a flag and putting it on a pole (Rashi doesn't mention poles, but 
where  else would a flag be?) doesn't seem so advanced that they couldn't have 
had  flags in the desert.  And if RZS doesn't think they had flags, then  
what /were/ the "osos"?
 

--Toby  Katz
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