Tanach Thoughts

At long last, I can make this long-awaited post to properly explain Schnitzer's view on Dan's fear of boats (not prophets!). Shortly after making the first post , I reread Schnitzer's essay שבט דן והים (The Tribe of Dan and the Sea) and somewhat unsurprisingly, it turned out that I had been in such a hurry to share Schnitzer's chiddush on understanding the term "יגור" that I had dived head-first into a case of mistaken identity. In the previous post, I had written that the Danites had feared the sea-faring Sidonians and so they decided to relocate to northern Israel which bordered on non-sea-faring Sidonian territory. However, this is not what Schnitzer actually wrote. He opined that at the time, the Sidonians had yet to conquer the coastal region. Rather, the terrors of the sea at the time were...the Sea People! The Sea People, for those who don't know, were a mix of different ethnic groups, mostly Aegean in origin but not limited to and included also Ana...

I really hope I'll have time soon for the second Dan's naviphobia post (fear of boats, not prophets), but in the mean time, a quick, short note on Ivtzan: Ivtzan (אבצן) was one of the lesser-known judges, although he was made popular because the Talmud identified  him with Boaz. In one of my earliest posts , I brought some suggestions for the meaning of his name. At the time, I was only aware of a place called תבץ (Tevetz), and that seemed too different for a connection to be made, but a few days ago I discovered that there was also a place called אבץ  (Evetz), so it's possible that his name came from that and his name denotes some sort of connection to that place. Likelihood: I won't get into it too much right now, but there's a debate among both commentators and academic scholars on whether Ivtzan was from the Galilean Beit Lechem or the Judean Beit Lechem . A connection to the Galilean town of Evetz seems to strengthen the Galilean identification.