New Dan

A short explanation on the blog's hiatus: I have been extremely busy lately and that's why I haven't updated in a long time. I actually started making this post over a month ago. Then I had to work on other things, and this post was put on the backburner. I'll try to make a few more posts in coming weeks. I don't want this blog to die down.

Some time ago, it suddenly occurred to me that we know very little about the territory of the Tribe of Dan after they moved north. We know they built the City of Dan, and...that's it...

But one city can't support an entire tribe. Even the Levites, despite being a small tribe, received 48 cities.

So where are all of Dan's other cities and towns? What were the borders of "New Dan"?

I'm hoping to make this mapping out of their territory an on-going side-project. From what I know, we have next to no knowledge of their territory, so this will be very speculative. But I thought it would be a fun thing to try out.

Here's what I've got so far:

Baalat and Tadmor (?):

Rabbi Chanoch Ehrentreu (not the Dayan who passed away recently but his grandfather) in his book in Hebrew "Iyunim Bedivrei Chazal" (Studies in the Teachings of the Sages), p. 46 brought Rabbi Binyamin of Tudelah's view that the city Baalbek (today in Lebanon) is one of the cities built by King Shlomo, Baalat (Kings 1:9:18). Per this, Rabbi Ehrentreu suggested that this was the same Baalat as the one mentioned in the Territory of Dan in , since Josephus apparently also identifies the Baalat of Kings with the Baalat of Yehoshua.

Personally, I'm a little skeptical with identifying Baalbek with Baalat, but I think that Rabbi Ehrentreu was on to something regarding Josephus's view that the two Baalats are the same. One of my professors, who happens to be the same one who assisted me in writing my Levitical Cities essay, holds the view (unfortunately still unpublished in academic form) that the lists of cities in Yehoshua reflect multiple generations of city lists, with each successive list editor adding new cities, except that whoever last edited the list never removed cities that were destroyed/abandoned. So it makes sense to me that Baalat which appears, seemingly, in Dan's original, southern territory, is actually a northern city.

I'm skeptical with identifying Baalbek with Baalat because Baalbek is quite a way's off into what is now Lebanon, then quite close to Phoenician territories. Now, I may be entirely at fault here for having a brain that's hard-wired to thinking that the land of Israel is small and during the time of Shlomo the kingdom stretched much more northwards. Well, I know it stretched more in all directions, but Baalbek just seems too far off. Per the simple understanding of the Masoretic tradition of the same verse in Kings, we also have Tadmor (Palmyra) in the Kingdom of Shlomo, and that's even farther northeast, way past Damascus!

It's hard wrapping my mind around including Tadmor in Dan's territory. Perhaps in the time of Shlomo it was more plausible, but in the time of the split kingdoms, Israel had a lot of trouble with the Arameans, particular those of Damascus. If Tadmor was part of Israel, then that would mean that Israel constantly held a strategic advantage over the Arameans, being able to strike them from all sides, or most sides. But that doesn't sound like the way things were from the Tanach.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a field trip to southern Israel, and there we heard, among other things, the possibility of identifying Tamar (the way Tadmor is Masoretically spelled but not read in Kings) with Metzad Chatzevah, which has, among other things, an Iron Age fortress. Another possibility, though less likely, is the nearby Metzad Tamar (Tamar is the modern name based on the possible identification). If either of these views are correct, then we can cross off Tadmor from the list, but we may still have to deal with Baalat.

Avel Mayim:

Avel Mayim is a place mentioned only once in Tanach, in Chronicles 2:16:4:

"Ben-hadad acceded to King Asa’s request; he sent his army commanders against the towns of Israel and ravaged Ijon, Dan, Abel-maim, and all the garrison towns of Naphtali."

Since we know Dan wasn't part of Naphtali, it's possible to suggest that neither was Avel Mayim, and instead it was part of Dan. But that may not necessarily be the case. In the parallel verse in Kings 1:15:20 it says:

"Ben-hadad responded to King Asa’s request; he sent his army commanders against the towns of Israel and captured Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maacah, and all Chinneroth, as well as all the land of Naphtali."

Here we find that Avel Mayim is called Avel Beit Maachah. Right now there are excavations taking place in the site identified with Avel Beit Maachah (link to their website) and based both on various verses in Tanach and archeological findings, it seems that this town switched political allegiances a lot, between the Kingdom of Yisrael and various Aramaic entities such as Geshur and Maachah. So it's difficult to know both whether there were Israelites who lived there (as opposed to Arameans) and whether they were considered part of a particular tribal territory or were only considered part of the general kingdom.

Plans for the future:

• Checking out scholarly works on the tribal territories to see what they say about Dan.
• Checking out tels in the vicinity of Dan.
• Egyptian conquest lists that list towns possibly in the vicinity of Dan, and then attempting to identify them both as archeological sites and in other sources.