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...

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 ...