Dan

Three positions are held and Scripture does not settle the question. The first is that a later hand updated the old name to the name readers knew, the way an editor might write in a familiar place name. Adam Clarke states that position outright on Joshua 19:47, calling that verse "another of the marginal or explicative notes which were added by some later hand."

The second is that the Dan of Genesis 14 is a different place from the northern city, since 2 Samuel 24:6 names a Dan-jaan on Joab's route and the region carried more than one similar name. The third holds to Mosaic authorship and reads the updated names as inspired later editing, noting that Deuteronomy 34 narrates Moses's own death and burial and so was plainly finished by another hand. This page names all three and reaches no verdict.

The text does not say so, and it goes out of its way to describe the opposite. The people of Laish are called tranquil and unsuspecting, with no oppressive ruler, far from the Sidonians and with no alliance with anyone, and the narrator repeats the point after the killing at 18:28: "There was no one to deliver them."

Nobody in the chapter asks God whether to go. The only word from God in it comes from a hired priest the Danites were about to steal. Charles Spurgeon preached on the passage in 1896 and said of the Danites, "I do not, in the least degree, commend the action of these people." The wider question of the conquest and the Canaanites is a different question from this raid and is handled in its own study.

Both, and the passage is careful about it. Micah's mother dedicates the silver to the LORD, and Micah says, "Now I know that the LORD will be good to me, because a Levite has become my priest." They meant the God of Israel. What they made was a graven image and a molten idol, they built a shrine outside the place God had chosen, and they hired a priest for wages.

Adam Clarke argued in 1832 that Micah was sincere and deserved more praise than blame. Matthew Henry read the same scene as idolatry that had bewitched him. The narrator's own frame sits over the whole thing at 17:6: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Jeroboam's stated reason is political. If his people went up to Jerusalem to sacrifice, he says in 12:26 and 12:27, they would go back to Rehoboam and kill him. His words when he presents the calves name the exodus, which is the God of Israel and not a Canaanite deity.

Matthew Henry wrote in 1710 that Jeroboam meant the calves "to represent, or rather make present, not any false god, as Moloch or Chemosh, but the true God only." That is what made them work and what made them fatal. Jehu, who destroyed Baal worship in Israel, kept the calves at Bethel and Dan.

That is what the Berean Standard Bible reads, and Gershom is named as Moses's son at Exodus 2:22. The Hebrew text of the verse carries a small letter nun raised above the line, which turns the name into Manasseh instead of Moses. The Vulgate reads Moses and the Septuagint reads Manasses, and translations still split on it.

Albert Barnes explained the raised letter as the work of scribes "probably grieved that a descendant of Moses should have been implicated in idolatrous worship," who "adopted this expedient for disguising the fact without absolutely falsifying the text." This page gives the reading and the mark and leaves the choice with the reader.

Revelation 7:5 to 7:8 names twelve tribes and Dan is not among them. Manasseh appears alongside Joseph, and Levi is included though Levi held no land. Three explanations are old.

The first is the Antichrist tradition. From at least the fourth century, writers connected Dan's absence with the serpent of Genesis 49:17 and taught that the Antichrist would come from Dan. Ambrose says it plainly in 397; Bede in 735 reports it as something "it is said"; Bonaventure in 1257 names the tradition and then writes, "I would not dare to assert that it will be so." The second is idolatry: Dan held a shrine from the days of the judges and a calf after that, and Adam Clarke read the omission as Dan and Ephraim being "the principal promoters of idolatry." The third works from the tribal lists themselves, where Dan is missing from the genealogies of 1 Chronicles and the Revelation list is irregular in more ways than one. A fourth proposal, offered without any manuscript to support it, is that a copyist read the Hebrew word for Dan as the start of Manasseh's name and wrote the wrong tribe into the list.

This page names all three and settles nothing. It adds the fact that keeps the question from becoming erasure: Ezekiel 48:1 gives Dan the first portion in the restored land, and 48:32 sets a gate of Dan in the city wall.

They were the practical ends of the land. Dan stood at the northern springs of the Jordan and Beersheba at the southern edge of the settled country, so naming both was Israel's way of saying the whole of it. Adam Clarke put it exactly that way in 1832.

The phrase runs through Judges, Samuel and Kings, and Chronicles reverses it to from Beersheba to Dan both times it uses it. Its last appearance is the saddest. Hezekiah sends word from Beersheba to Dan to come and keep the Passover, after the northern kingdom has already been carried away.

The mound at the Jordan springs has been excavated across many seasons, first under Avraham Biran and later under David Ilan. The find that carries beyond the site is an Aramaic victory inscription recovered in fragments in 1993 and 1994 and dated to about 840 to 835 BC. In it an Aramean king boasts of killing kings of Israel and of the House of David.

It is the earliest known inscription outside the Bible to name David's dynasty, and an enemy carved it within roughly a century and a half of David's lifetime. What it does not do is name David himself or describe anything he did. It carries the letters bytdwd, house of David. Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson and Philip R. Davies each pressed that reading after the find, Davies suggesting the phrase might be a place name rather than a dynasty. Most epigraphers read it as the dynasty. The full case is set out further up this page.

1 Enoch is a Second Temple Jewish work and a labeled study resource on this site, never Scripture. In it the Watchers come down on the summit of Mount Hermon, and Enoch is sent to carry their petition. The text then puts him at this place: "And I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon: I read their petition till I fell asleep."

The geography is the geography of this page. A Jewish writer of the Second Temple period put the springs of Dan just below and west of Hermon and treated that ground as where the Watchers' business was transacted. That is reception history, quoted here with its editor and date named. It explains nothing in Judges or Kings and is not offered as if it did.