Dative Case.

I've always found the dative case to be a little weird. We
monolingual students of languages are at most left with the statement
that it refers to the direct object. --The IEist put the
reconstruction into the book.

But then, when you hang around language goups on the net, you learn
about the benefactive, the 'for-datives'. And you start thinking about
'from' constructions. --Beekes omits [a] from PIE.

And you also read about how dative-ablative collapsed together, etc.

Just what is the dative, in *pure* terms?

I collect English prepositions as a hobby. We have too many of them.