DAN. A border town of northern Palestine, well known from the phrase so often used to ex press the whole extent of the country—' All Israel, from Dan even to Beer-sheba' (Judg. xx. t ; I Sam. iii. 20 ; 2 Sam. iii. to). It is occasionally em ployed alone in a somewhat similar meaning ; thus in Jer. viii. 16—.`The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan ; the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones' (also iv. s5). The site of this ancient town has been satisfactorily identified, though scarcely a vestige of it remains. Josephus says that it stood at the lesser' fountain of the Jordan . . . in the plain of Sidon a day's journey from that city, and that the plain around it was of extra ordinary fertility. (Antig. i. to. I ; v. 3. I ; viii. 8. 4 ; Bel. 7ud. iv. I. t). Eusebius and Jerome are still more explicit—' A village, four miles distant from Paneas, on the road leading to Tyre; it was the boundary of (6pcov rijs 'Iovactias), and at it the Jordan took its rise.' Jerome adds--.' De quo at Jordanis flumen erumpens a loco sortitus est nomen. Tor quippe Ael:Opov, id est, fluvium sive rivum Hebrmi vocant' (Onomast. s. v. Dan). Four miles west of Baneas, on the road to Tyre, in the midst of a wide and rich plain, is one of the two great fountains of the Jordan. It rises at the base of a little truncated hill or mound, called Tell el Kay, that is, the hill of the or the hill of Dan." Thus we see the old name is pre served in an Arabic translation. The name of the fountain also suggests the identity, and corroborates in part the statement of Jerome. It is Leddan, a word manifestly formed from Dan,' by prefixing a double article (Robinson, B. R. iii. 392). Some writers, both ancient and modern, have confounded Dan with Paneas or Philippi (Philostorgius, Hist. vii. 3 ; Theodoret in Genes. ; Sanson, Gee's. Sac. s.v. ; Alford on Matt. xvi. 13). This error appears to have arisen chiefly from indefinite re marks of Jerome in his commentary on Ezek. xlviii. 18 : Dan ... ubi hodie Paneas, quire quondam sarea Philippi vocabatur ;' and on Amos viii., Dan in terminis terrre Judaic, ubi rune Paneas It is plain from Jerome's words in the Ono masticon that he knew the true site of Dan ; and therefore these notices must be understood as meaning that Csarea Philippi was in his days the principal town in the locality where Dan was situ ated, and that both were upon the border of Pales tine. The Jerusalem Targum calls it Dan of Cxsarea,' intimating its vicinity to the latter (on Gen. xiv. 14; see Reland Pal. 919-21).
There is a more serious difficulty connected with Dan's early history. We read in Gen. xiv. 14 that Abraham pursued the kings unto Dan,' and in Deut. xxxiv. 1, that the Lord sheaved Moses all the land of Gilead unto Dan ;' yet we learn from Judg. xviii. that the six hundred Danites, when, as is stated in the previous article, they captured Laish, called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father ; howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.' This occurred
about fifty years after the death of Moses. Some endeavour to remove the difficulty by affirming that the name Dan' was interpolated in both Genesis and Deuteronomy at a later date ; but we can meet it without having recourse to such a dan gerous expedient as correcting the sacred text from mere conjecture. Such a conjecture, too, is highly improbable. Why should the name Dan he inter polated when the whole story of the capture of Laish was made familiar to the Jews by the book of Judges ? It has also been suggested that there was another city of the same name in that locality, and that it is to it and not to Laish that reference is made in the book of Genesis. The mention of Dan-jaan in 2 Sam. xxiv. 6, appears to give some sanction to this view. But may it not be that this city (like Hebron and Jerusalem) had itself two ancient names, Laish and Dan, the former of which had come into general use at the time of the Danite conquest, but the latter had been better known in the days of Abraham, and the Danites revived it in honour of their progenitor ? The capture of Laish, its occupation by the Danites, and the establishment of an idolatrous worship there, have already been detailed. It .appears that Jeroboam took advantage of the con firmed idolatry of the Danites (Judg. xviii. 30), erected a temple in their city, and set up there one of his golden calves for the benefit of those to whom a Tilgrimage to Jerusalem would not have been politic, and a pilgrimage to Bethel might have been irksome 0 Kings xi]. 28). A few years afterwards Dan was plundered by Benhadad, king of Damascus, along with some other border towns (xv. zo). From this period Dan appears to have gradually declined. It was still a small village in the time of Eusebius. It is now utterly desolate.
Tell el-Kady is cup-shaped, resembling an ex tinct crater, and is covered with a dense jungle of thorns, thistles, and rank weeds. Its circumference is about half a mile, and its greatest elevation above the plain eighty feet. There are some traces of old foundations, and heaps of large stones on the top and sides of the southern part of the rim, where perhaps the citadel or a temple may have stood. There are also ruins in the plain a short distance north of the tell. There are doubtless other re mains, but they are now covered with grass and jungle. At the western base of the tell is the great fountain, and there is a smaller one within the cup, shaded by noble oak trees. The whole region round the site of Dave was faithfully described by the Danite spies who were sent to seek out new possessions for their tribe—' We have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good . . . a spa cious land . . . a place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth." (Robinson, B. R. iii. 39o, sy. ; Bibliotheca Sacra, Feb. 1346 ; Thomson, The Land and the Book).—J. L. P.