When Eldad and Medad start prophesying in the camp, we find (Bemidbar 11:27):
הַנַּעַר would be "the young man," not "a young man."
Who is this young man?
An open-canon approach allows that persons mentioned in a verse might not be mentioned elsewhere, and thus the identity of the person would only be found outside the canon of Biblical text. Adopting this approach, the young man is some young, random Israelite.
Chazal generally tend to assume a closed-canon approach - and so we would expect to be able to identify the young man with some other Biblical personality.
Add to this that the definite article, the heh hayedi'a, is used, perhaps suggesting that this is some known young man.
Rashi states that some say that this was Gershom, Moshe's firstborn. This would make sense in context - what identifiable young man would run to report to Moshe?
In the Sifri on Bemidbar, they report that some say that this was Yehoshua ben Nun, pointing out the pasuk in Shemot 33:11:
naar, a young man. I would further say: He is also the known mesharet of Moshe, as we see both in this pasuk in Shemot and in one of the verses cited above in Bemidbar. We may add to this the fact that Yehoshua ben Nun is mentioned in the immediate context in Bemidbar, so if we are adopting a closed-canon approach, we do not need to look far for the young man's identity.
In the Sifri, Rabbi Shimon objects, based on the next pasuk:
response, Rabbi Shimon says, we may deduce that the young man in the preceding verse is not Yehoshua.
I would answer to this that it is not uncommon to have a character first referred to without a name, and later refer to him by name. To throw out some examples, we have Moshe, we have Rivka, and best of all, we have Elimelech, Naami, Machlon and Kilyon.
Further, וַיַּעַן does not need to mean answer. Do a study of the root, and discover that it often means to speak up. So Yehoshua could speak up with his suggestion to Moshe of what to do, and need not be responding to the naar, who in this case would be himself.
parshiot
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2 comments:
Interesting question. I'll see if I could find more on it, but off the cuff, I would point out that the Eldad and Medad incident in Bemidbar 11 seems to occur within the context of the quail, which in turn happened at Kivrot HaTaavah (see verse 34). They went to Chatzerot next (verse 35).
In Bemidbar 33 we have the list of encampments:
Ramses-> Succot-> Etam -> Pi HaChirot -> Marah -> Elim -> Red Sea -> Midbar Sin -> Dofka -> Alush -> Refidim -> Midbar Sinai -> Kivrot HaTaavah -> and on.
So of a total of 42 encampments, it was 13 encampments from the start, and 6 from the Red Sea. So without knowing the specific year, it seems fairly early.
Meanwhile, Yosef is called a naar even when he is explicitly 17 years old (see Bereishit 37:2). So it is possible for Gershom to still be young enough to be called naar.
Further, as I posted in this post on parshablog, firstly, naar can mean other things (such as servant), and further, according to traditional chronology, Binyamin is called naar even though he is 30 years old, and Yosef is called naar even though he is 28 years old.
I'll see if I can find more information about what year this is supposed to be, and how Gershom would then be.
just a slight update:
According to Bemidbar 10:11 and on, we read that they left midbar sinai "in the second year, in the second month, on the twentieth day of the month, that the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle of the testimony...And the children of Israel set forward by their stages out of the wilderness of Sinai"
If they went to Kivrot HaTaavah from there, it would seem possible that this happened in the second year, and so that would be fairly early - enough for Gershom to still be quite the youngster.
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