Dan's naviphobia

In the vast realm of phobias in which there's a phobia for everything from benches to books, one stands above all: Fear of boats.

Okay, not really. I just wanted to be somewhat dramatic.

This will be a fairly short post because I need to get back to studying for exams, but the other day I read an interesting essay by Shmuel Schnitzer, who was a journalist and also translated many books from various languages into Hebrew.

In a book of essays written in memory of Moshe Goldstein (still not sure who he was, but from the book he seems to have been some sort of academic scholar, possibly of biblical studies), Schnitzer published an essay dedicated to understanding the verse "ודן למה יגור אוניות", typically translated as "And Dan—why did he linger by the ships?" (Judges 5:17), which comes from the Song of Devorah. In this particular verse, she seems to be rebuking Dan. Schnitzer argued that it would make more sense to understand the word "יגור" not as "lingering" or "living upon" or "settling" or any other similar options, as in לגור or גר, but rather as "fear" - "And Dan—why does he fear the ships?". גור as referring to fear appears elsewhere in Tanach, such as Devarim 1:17: "לא תגורו מפני איש" - "Fear no man". This makes sense in light of the common view that by this point in time, Dan had already migrated to northern Israel, and thus was far from anywhere with boats, except maybe the Jordan River. The idea is, according to Schnitzer, that Dan left the western Shefelah/coastal region because of difficulties with the seafaring Sidonians, and instead moved to an area that had Sidonian boundaries, but had nothing to do with the seafaring aspects of the Sidonians.

Why did Dan fear the boats of the Sidonians? That's a post for another time.


(So these fine Jews are probably not descendants of Dan...
Image taken from the cover of this book by Shay Charka,
which, though I haven't read it, still recommend
because Charka's work is phenomenal)

 

Comments

  1. AlexJanuary 20, 2022 at 11:30 PM

    Naviphobia! Interesting coinage. At first I thought you meant fear of neviim.

    This theory would certainly explain why the pesukim make a point of mentioning that the natives of Laish lived "in the manner of the Sidonians" (Shoftim 18:7) but that they "were far away from Sidon" (18:28). I'm assuming Schnitzer mentions those points.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HarelJanuary 21, 2022 at 11:16 AM

      Ha! Good point. Though if only some people had real fear of nevi'im, things may have turned out quite differently... I simply googled fear of boats and that was the result.

      Yes, he mentions those exact verses. I hope to get into it more in a future post, when I'll have more time to examine his ideas.

      Delete

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