The following article was written for and appears in the Jewish Chronicle 4th May 2007

‘The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name, and cursed, and they brought him to Moses – and his mother’s name was Sh’lomit, daughter of Divri, of the tribe of Dan’ (Leviticus 24:11)

The unnamed blasphemer is identified by the name of his mother. There is a simple reason for this: the blasphemer’s Israelite lineage is matrilineal. According to the preceeding verse, the son of the ‘Israelite woman’ had an ‘Egyptian’ father (24:10).

So, who was Sh’lomit, the daughter of Divri of the tribe of Dan? We don’t know. All we have is her name. Midrash Ha-Gadol, a compilation of ancient and medieval rabbinic sources, expresses a stereotypical male viewpoint: ‘Her name is mentioned to indicate that she was the only woman in the camp who entered into an improper union. Her character was indicated by her name. She said ‘hello’ (shalom) to all the men and she was a chatterbox’ (dabranit – pun on divri, which is related, etymologically, to the Hebrew for ‘word’). Alternatively, a female interpretation might posit that she was a woman who spoke divrey shalom, ‘words of peace’, and created a connection between Israel and Egypt.

So, who was Divri? Again – we don’t know. His name appears only in this verse. And what of the tribe of Dan? Interestingly, the original Dan was the son of Jacob and Rachel’s non-Israelite handmaid, Bilhah – that is a patrilineal Israelite. In the Biblical census of the Book of Numbers the tribe of Dan is portrayed as the second largest tribe after Judah (Numbers 1:38-39) and at its height, the territory Dan occupied was the most northerly region occupied by the ten Israelite tribes. This detail takes on an additional significance when we note that all the handmaid tribes – Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher – settled in the territory closest to the north and eastern borders of Canaan, where they were the most exposed to Israel's immediate, and finally, deadly enemy, Assyria. Did their geographical marginality also reflect a marginal status as ‘half-Israelites’ among the tribes? The only other piece of information we have about the unnamed blasphemer is that he ‘struggled’ with an ‘Israelite man’ before he blasphemed (24:10). We are not told why. Perhaps, exclusive attitudes to Jewish status began right there.