[Avodah] Where was Dan?

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2025 at 08:22:54PM -0400, Akiva Miller via Avodah wrote:
> > Why do you consider his contemporary generation a more important
> > audience than later ones? If you aren't bothered by the Chumash
> > referring to places we can't identify, why are you bothered by
> > the Dor Dei'ah having to settle for "the place where Dan will
> > live, wherever that is"?

> To me, it seems very obvious that things get forgotten over the course of
> time, and people accept that as natural. No one today is sure exactly which
> mountain is "Har Sinai", but that phrase is not totally meaningless. We
> understand what it refers to, and we understand why we're unsure which
> mountain it is...

The same is true for their understanding of a place named "Dan", in the
sense that they knew it means "the place where Dan will end up". And
they know why they're unsure -- Dan didn't end up there yet.

My objection, though, becomes more acute when dealing with theories
like R Dr Joshua Berman's comparing the architecture of the Mishkan
to that of Raamses II's War Camp. Yes, they parallel each other, but
how important can a comparison be when a century or so after Yehoshua,
none of us would remember what the war camp looked like?

There is a similar idea about tefillin being a response to Egyptian
headgear.

Both would be a case of something only the Dor Dei'ah knew until Modern
Archaology. Which opens the door to a likelihood that there are things
that were meaningful to them in ways we could not guess.

But the basic meaning isn't any more lost than the DD only knows of
"Dan" meaning "some place quite a trip from where Avraham started out".

...
> But I have always expected that the Dor Dei'ah did know these things. Maybe
> not every single individual, but surely there were experts who one might
> consult. It MUST have been so, because consider the reverse: Imagine Moshe
> Rabenu teaching Parshas Shmini, and six hundred thousand people all asking,
> "What's an atalef?" ...

> So too, if they are learning that Avram went to Dan, and someone asked,
> "Was Dan near or far? Where was it?", there must have been someone who
> could have answered. But if Dan was a place which did not yet have that
> name, then the pasuk would have been meaningless to all of Klal Yisrael.

Which Moshe could answer "wait and see, meanwhile, just know Hashem
is talking Avraham making a long trip.

Just as he must have said when teaching about bamos and someone asked
where the Maqom haMiqdash will be. (Although that's TSBP.)

> So, to suggest that there was a word which did not have a clear and precise
> meaning in the year 2448, is simply unacceptable.

I still don't see why we don't need clear and precise meanings, and
being vague is good enough, but their getting words that didn't yet have
precise meanings is a problem.

It isn't like the territory of Dan never would get a more precice meaning.

Dan in particular is interesting, because they didn't settle all of the
nachalah they were given. (The Dan region today, around Tel Aviv.) Likely
because -- like Shim'on's nachalah to the south -- the Pelishtim were
always a problem.

And the Dan we are talking here about isn't that original place where only
part (if any) of the sheivet remained, but the land north of the Kineret.

So, it would be revealing the outcome of future events if they knew
where Dan in particular would end up.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 What you get by achieving your goals
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   is not as important as
Author: Widen Your Tent      what you become by achieving your goals.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF            - Henry David Thoreau