Deuteronomy 33:22

Dan is a lion’s whelp.

Dan; or activity in conflict

1. The section in Moses’ blessing devoted to Dan offers three significant points of contrast with all the other sections of the poem.

(1) It is the shortest of all. This sudden economy of his utterances is all the more noticeable because of the lavish scattering of his choicest flowers of eloquence upon the three preceding blessings.

(2) There is no indication in the case of Dan as to the local inheritance which he should occupy in Canaan. In the case of the other tribes, from Benjamin onwards, Moses paints for us a kind of bird’s-eye view of the portions which God was about to assign to them in the promised land; but although the lot of Dan invited this pictorial treatment as well as did any other, we have no description of any of its well-known features, its fertile corn lands, its sandy seaboard, or its gently swelling hills towards the east, where Sorek and Zorah gave their names to the choicest vintages of southern Palestine.

(3) There is no mention of, or allusion to, the Divine name in what Moses says concerning Dan. No word is used that could suggest any special relation as subsisting between this tribe and Israel’s covenant God. In this respect Dan stands absolutely alone amongst all his brethren.

2. Nor does the history of the tribe do ought but confirm the unhappy suggestion which flows from all these features of brevity and of omission in Moses’ words. That history is exceedingly meagre, and records very little to the credit of the Danites. The character of their ancestor, which seems also to have been transmitted to the tribe, was crafty, deceitful, and cruel. In the Book of Judges this tribe has no small space appropriated to its doings, but the narrative is one of shame and of inexcusable sin against both universal laws of justice, humanity, and truth, and the special obligations of the Hebrew nation. Moreover, two incidental notices which we find in the later historical books suggest that the Danites disregarded the law of Moses, which forbade intermarriages with heathens, and that they fell very early into the idolatrous practices of their Phoenician and Philistine neighbours (2Ch 2:14; 1 Kings 12:28; Judges 18:1; Judges 14:1).

3. When we have noted the uniform tenor of these glimpses into the character and conduct of the tribe of Dan, we can hardly be surprised to find that no members of that tribe cared to return with Judah into the land of promise when the captivity in Babylon ended. No Danite name occurs in the lists which Ezra and Nehemiah compiled in reference to the returned exiles of Israel; and the only conclusion which can be drawn from that omission is, that all the tribe of Dan despised or neglected the opportunity of temporal redemption which God had given to His people as the earnest of a better spiritual blessing when Messiah should appear. How sad in its inferences is this single fact! But the sadness of the omen is increased when we read the list of the sealed in the Book of Revelation and find no mention in it of the tribe of Dan. The only interpretation which can be put upon it is, that Dan had somehow forfeited his right to the blessings of Israel’s covenant, and that, for his special unfaithfulness and sin, his very name had been blotted out of the Lamb’s book of life (Exodus 32:33). (T. G. Rooke, B. A.)