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Someone wrote "I have a question. You wrote that the one in Daniel 7:13-14 ("one like a son of man") refers to the Jewish people, the nation of Israel -- but Rashi -- the great Jewish commentator -- says it was the messiah. Why are you disagreeing with Rashi?"
The prahse כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ k'var enash (it is Aramaic, not Hebrew) translates to: "[something] like a human being." Rashi is an acronym for רבי שלמה יצחקי / Rav Shlomo Yitzachi (1040 - 1105 CE) -- a man considered to be the great T'nach and Talmud commentator. Rashi did write that Daniel 7:13 - 14 is referring to the messiah. Link. But is Rashi giving us the literal reading of this passage? After all the text says "like" a human -- not a human. The messiah will be a normal human with two Jewish parents, his father being a descendant of Kings David and Solomon. He won't be "like" a human -- he will BE a human! We must conclude that Rashi's comment regarding this verse is not the literal / p'shat. The vision in Daniel 7:13 - 14 is actually explained to Daniel by an angel in Daniel 7:27. The entity called "like a son of man" (like a human) in Daniel 7:13 - 14 is identified in Daniel 7:27 as the Jewish people: "And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under all the heavens will be given to the people of the exalted (high) holy ones; its kingdom is a perpetual kingdom, and all dominions will serve and obey [it]." The people. Not one person (e.g. the messiah). Ergo Rashi's interpretation can't be literal (p'shat)... Although people often think that Rashi always gives the p'shat this is not true -- very often he gives an aggadic interpretation. In B'reshit / Genesis 3:8 Rashi wrote: "I have come only [to teach] the simple meaning of the Scripture and such Aggadah that clarifies the words of the verses, each word in its proper way." Aggadah / אַגָּדָה is a teaching method used to support a moral perspective -- a deeper, but not literal, meaning. "Midrash aggadah can take any biblical word or verse as a starting point, but there is no one standardized method of interpretation. Indeed, some scholars define midrash simply as any Jewish statement with a reference to a specific biblical verse or verses." Link. Here Rashi tells us that he does not always "stick" to the literal meaning of a passage, but will also rely on aggadah at times. R' Herczeg (translator of the Artscroll Rashi series) wrote a book entitled Patterns in Rashi where he stated: "To Rashi, the line between drash (a deeper or even Midrashic meaning -- often inferred from other scripture) and p'shat (the "plain" ("simple") meaning of a passage) is vague. He viewed p'shat as the simple meaning of the pasuk (the Biblical verse being discussed), but only insomuch as it adheres to it grammatically and contextually. Whenever Rashi could not find a p'shat that fit with the grammar of the pasuk, he looked to Chazal's (Chazal refers to the sages from the final 300 years of the Second Temple) collection of aggadot... "You might say he felt that it was "pshat enough" even though it might not be the simplest explanation... "Other later rishonim disagreed with Rashi. Meforshim like Ramban, Ibn Ezra, and Rashbam viewed pshat and drash as distinct categories, reserving the simplest explanation of the pasuk and that alone for p'shat..." Rishorim refers to "the first ones" -- leading rabbis and legal scholars who lived during the 11th to 15th centuries CE). This is why we can only conclude that Rashi saying that the one "like a human" in Daniel 7:13 - 14 refers to the messiah is a drash interpretation, not p'shat (plain meaning). And remember -- Daniel is having a dream. In his dream the one like a human, just like the beasts, represent something other than what they appear to be. The beasts represent empires -- and so does the one who appears to be human. . . It is an empire, a people, a nation -- the Jewish people. Note that Daniel says like a son of man. "Son of man" is the biblical way of saying "human". Daniel 7 does not say "a human." It says LIKE a human. The Aramaic is כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ k'var enash, "[something] like a son of man (human)." Son of man would be בַר אֱנָשׁ . bar enash (בַר / bar in Aramaic means son of)-- but there is another letter there -- the letter כְּ / kaf. In Aramaic (and remember, this passage is in Aramaic, not Hebrew) the use of a כְּ / kaf as a prefix to a word means "like." Like a human. Not a human. Remember that this was a dream, and dreams use imagery to tell our minds something. Daniel himself did not understand the dream, (verse 15) and an angel interpreted it for him (verse 16). The vision, Daniel’s frustration and the interpretation all occurred within the dream. "I saw in the visions of the night, and behold with the clouds of the heaven, one like a man was coming, and he came up to the Ancient of Days and was brought before Him." Daniel 7:13. Remember this is a DREAM. Daniel is having a vision of the future in the form of a dream -- so none of it is literal. The important thing in the dream is its message. . . One like a man, or like a human being, did not ascend to heaven (as the list maker presents as a prophecy Jesus fulfilled). No, the one who is like a human came from the sky -- from the heavens IN THE DREAM. Daniel had many visions about the messianic era -- so some, including Rashi, interpret the vision of one "like a human" to be the messiah -- but others state that it refers to the rise of Israel after the end of the various empires who came after the Second Temple period... Given verse 27 this certainly appears to be the p'shat (plain meaning).
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