Are the Palestinians the Philistines?

Though I keep declaring that this blog “maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun,” I’d better be cautious about the present horrendous conflict in the Holy Land. I started several letters to newspapers by saying that “Having lived and worked in a Palestinian school and later an Israeli kibbutz, I have intense sympathy for both of these closely related and tragically feuding peoples.” I wish the crisis could climax in a peace conference that would lead to a just compromise between them. Compromise is the noblest and most courageous tool of diplomacy.

But there is an interesting and, I think, politically neutral aspect that must have struck you if you’ve read the early books of the Old Testament. The war between Israel and its Palestinian opponents in the Gaza Strip appears remarkably like an echo of the wars of three thousand years ago between Israel and the Philistines, who inhabited Gaza and other cities of the coastal plain.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Layers

I may add to this map. Geography and history have laid down so many layers. The mountains, the plains, the trench below sea level. The desert and the sown. Ancient Phoenicia (roughly Lebanon). Ancient Judaea and Samaria (roughly the southern and northrtm parts of the West Bank). The UN’s 1947 partition boundary. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are what was left of the disconnected areas assigned to the Palestinians after shrinking in the 1948 war, and have since the 1967 war been ruled by Israel. There is now even the division between the north and south halves of the Gaza Strip, civilians having been told to flee from the north to the south yet still getting killed by airstrikes.

From the sea

The Philistines were a people of mysterious origin. And they became extinct, in a sense, and in a sense did not.

Between about 1210 and 1100 BC, Egypt had to repel several attempted invasions by “sea peoples” (as historians call them). The names of these peoples – nine, in various combinations – were recorded, along with pictures of some of them as captives, in inscriptions of the pharaohs Ramses II, Merneptah, and Ramses III. The names lend themselves to exuberant speculation. Did the Sherden come from Sardis in Lydia and end up in Sardinia? The Lukka must have been from Lycia. Did the Shekelesh become the Sicels of Sicily? Were the Ekwesh Achaeans (Greeks)? Were the Denyen Danaans (Greeks) or did they become the Israelite tribe of Dan? Did the Teresh come from Troy or Tarsus and become the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans?

(Vowels in Egyptian writing are uncertain, and many e could be something else.)

The general picture is that a tide of people was displaced from the Aegean region, perhaps by the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization at the end of the Bronze Age, which in turn was perhaps caused by droughts, or earthquakes, or invaders with iron weapons. And these refugees took to their ships, as a confederacy or as a crowd of pirates, and crossed the eastern Mediterranean to seek new homes.

P-l-s-t

And among those in the last invading wave were the Peleset, and they were compelled by Ramses III to settle on the nearest part of the Asian coast, which was still controlled by the Egyptian empire. There is little doubt that they were the people called in Hebrew P@lishtim (I use @ to represent the sh’wa or mid vowel, which in modern Hebrew usually becomes e).

We don’t know what the Philistines called themselves. The evidence for their language, in a few inscriptions on seals and a few loan-words in Hebrew, is so sparse that we don’t even know what linguistic group it belonged to. It could have been a Greek dialect, and thus of the Indo-European family to which English also belongs. Philistine styles of pottery were similar to late Mycenaean. One far-fetched suggestion is that their name was the Greek word palaistês, “wrestler” or “struggler” (plural palaistai), which would be some kind of parallel to the name Isra-el given to the patriarch Jacob after he “wrestled with God”!

The ethnic name took differing forms in various languages – it may have been closer to Pulasat in Egyptian and the languages of Mesopotamia, Phylistein in Greek. In Arabic, which has no p, the region is Falastîn or Filastîn

(My calligraphic rendering of Filastîn, made by cutting into felt with an Exacto knife.)

Philistia was a “pentapolis,” a confederacy of five major cities. These were, roughly from north to south, Ekron, Ashdod, Gath, Ashkelon, Gaza. Notice that Gaza, the southernmost, is the only one now inside the “Gaza Strip.” There were some other towns, Gezer, Gerar, Eglon, Ziklag, and the Philistines probably had trade or military influence in other parts of the region.

Canaan

This region into which the Philistines had landed was inhabited by peoples speaking Semitic languages of the Canaanite group. These included not only the Canaanites west of the Jordan but the Ammonites and Moabites east it, the Edomites and Amalekites to the south, the Phoenicians farther north along the coast, and the Israelites.

According to the Israelites’ traditions, they may have entered their “promised land” by capturing Jericho in 1571 BC, though there is much debate as to the dates and even the historicity of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, forty years in the wilderness, and invasion westward across the Jordan. (The name of their language, `ibrit, becoming ivrit in modern pronunciation and Hebrew in English, is from a root meaning “across, from the other side.”) It seems that they were already among the peoples in the land when the Philistines arrived from the opposite direction.

The Canaanite languages were a bunch of twigs on the linguistic tree. They must have evolved as dialects from a single language. To give an idea of the closeness of their relation: they are a subgroup of Northwest Semitic along with Aramaic, Amorite, and Ugaritic; which is a subgroup of West Semitic along with Arabic and the Ethiopic languages; which is a subgroup of Semitic along with East Semitic (Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian); which is a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family along with ancient Egyptian and its descendant Coptic, the Cushitic languages of the Horn of Africa, and the Berber languages of northwest Africa.

One of my “re-readable” books is Zellig Harris’s Development of the Canaanite Dialects. He elegantly used clues such as shifts in phonetics and grammar to trace and time the stages by which the languages separated.

The usual enemies

There were at least eight conflicts between the Philistines and the Israelites, including the episode of Samson and Delilah, the Philistines’ capture of the Ark of the Covenant at the battle of Aphek, David’s slaying of Goliath at Elah, the battle of Mount Gilboa in which Saul and Jonathan died, and Hezekiah’s final defeat of the Philistines “as far as Gaza.” There was at least one period when the Philistines dominated the Israelites and forbade them to forge weapons. When dancing women annoyed the king by singing “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands,” the victory they were celebrating was over the hereditary enemies.

The Philistines may have had a more refined culture than the tribes in the hills; but their name, from being a byword for “foe,” has been extended in English to “people with a crude attitude to art.”

The Philistines probably were not wiped out. They must have gradually gone over to the Canaanite speech of their surroundings. The northernmost of the five cities had its Ekronite dialect of Canaanite, with Phoenician influence. The Philistines, along with the Israelites, underwent conquests by the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, and before 400 BC they had ceased to be a distinct entity.ity.

Yet their name continued to be remembered for the region they had made their homeland. The Roman empire combined it with several regions, including Judaea and Samaria, into a province called Syria Palaestina – the forerunner of Palestine.

Replacement or absorption?

Invasions generally do not replace populations. Often the conquerors are a minority, sometimes not much more than an army, which sooner or later merges and interbreeds with the native majority. The language that eventually prevails is sometime that of the invaders, as in the case of the Muslim Arabs who conquered Syria and Egypt; sometimes that of the indigenous substrate, as with England after being conquered by the French-speaking Normans.

Dagon was the god of the Philistines. There is a village in the northern West Bank called Beit Dajan; it could be the site of an ancient “house of Dagon.” One of the pupils in the Jerusalem school where I worked was of the Dajani family.

It seems likely that the Israelites did not exterminate the people of all the cities and villages of Palestine but merged with them. If so, the population is still basically Canaanite. The genes of the Philistines and the Israelites have descended into both sides.

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

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