PALESTINE

The coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea is sometimes called the Levant. About 1250 B.C.E. much of the Levant was controlled by Phoenicians. They were a people who eventually became known as traders and merchants. They used dye extracted from a shellfish, the murex, to dye clothing a bright red. (This dye was often called purple, from a word (Latin or Greek?) purpureus. I assume the colour was a purply-red.)

A part of the Phoenicians lived between the coast of the southern Levant and the river Jordan; if flows south in this area to the Dead Sea. This region was called Canaan, and the particular Phoenicians who controlled it, Canaanites.

About 1250 B.C.E. two things happened.

Two groups of invaders moved into Canaan. We don't know which came first.

One was from a group of peoples then spreading around the Mediterranean, invading sometimes by land and sometimes by sea, and making a handful of permanent settlements. We know about them from Egyptian records, where they are called the Peoples of the Sea. (They may recently have migrated from Cyprus.) These invaders of Canaan became known as the Philistines.

Most of what we "know" about the Philistines comes from accounts of struggles with them by the Israelites, as related in books of the Hebrew Bible.

Who were the Israelites? Well, they were the other group of invaders who came along then.

The Israelites, the Hebrew Bible says, came from Egypt. They had been slaves there for 400 years. Originally, it seems, an Israelite named Joseph had been sold into slavery in Egypt (from Canaan) by his own brothers. But eventually he rose to be a trusted ruler in Egypt, in fact, the Pharaoh's right hand man. (Joseph's family in turn were the descendants of Abraham, who (3000 B.C.E.?) had originally lived in Ur (Erech) in Mesopotamia. Abraham had wandered through the Fertile Crescent into what is now Israel, where he had adventures and a son, Isaac, in extreme old age. Isaac in turn had a son, Jacob. Jacob became known as Israel ("he who struggles with God"). And it was this Jacob or Israel who had been the father of Joseph.)

Anyway, because of Jacob's name change the family of his descendants of became known as Israelites.

In Egypt, after a regime change, the Israelites had been turned into slaves. But after a 400-year sojourn in Egypt they were led out of it by their prophet and lawgiver Moses. They escaped into the Sinai desert. Entering Canaan 40 years later under Moses' successor Joshua (in what has come to be thought the 13th century) the Israelites fought to take control of various Canaanite towns like Jericho. (WARNING! Some contemporary scholars treat all early Israelite history as extremely doubtful. Its dates are certainly doubtful.)

Eventually successful in controlling the major inland towns of Canaan, the Israelites eventually established a kingdom of their own, Israel, under Saul. (The supposed dates for Saul's kingdom is about 1020-1000 B.C.E.) But the Israelites inland and the Philistines on the coast were constantly fighting. Saul died fighting the Philistines on a battle on Mount Gilboa. By Saul's death it is thought that the Canaanites had been assimilated into the Israelites. (The Phoenicians in the north in what we now call Lebanon continued to prosper as merchants, traders and explorers, and eventually colonized Carthage in Africa.)

Under Saul's conquering successors David (1000?-961?) and Solomon (961?-922?), Israel greatly expanded until it controlled an area from Lebanon to Sinai, and on both sides of the Jordan river.

But it apparently did not control the pesky Philistines in their seven towns on the coast (among which were Gaza, Gath and Ziklag). The Philistines remained a thorn in Israel's side.

Four or five hundred years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth the Philistines disappeared. We don't know what happened to them. Did they merge into the Hebrew population? In the story of Samson, the Israelite hero Samson fraternizes with Philistines. Were the Philistines annihilated by the Israelites or some other people? Was this campaign later forgotten? Were the Philistines dispossessed, perhaps removed from the area?

We don't know. I think that the explanation that they eventually adopted Israeli religion and customs and were absorbed into Israel is more likely.

Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, after Solomon's death. Israel, the larger, was conquered by the Assyrians in 734 B.C.E. Judah became a tributary of the Assyrians and survived as a nominally independent kingdom until it was conquered by the Chaldeans in 597 B.C.E. But the Persians under Cyrus (Koresh) then conquered the Chaldeans in 539, and emancipated the Jews in 548 B.C.E. They allowed the Jews to return to Israel. 40,000 did. By 516 the Jews had rebuilt their temple. From this date they officially regarded their exile as ended.

In 143 B.C.E. the Romans invaded and took over Israel. They seem to have called the areas near the coast Palestine (after the Philistines), breaking the region into smaller administrative areas like Judea (around Jerusalem) and Galilee (in the north). The areas far inland they called Syria.

After two bloody Jewish rebellions in 66-73 C.E. and 132-135 C.E. the Romans expelled nearly all the Jews from the area.

In the 600s C.E. the land was invaded by followers of the new faith of Islam. Many people converted. By the 1900s a high percentage of the people of the Holy Land were Muslims, except in Jerusalem, where many were Jews.

Interestingly, the people we now call Palestinians claim their ancestry from the Philistines. They claim that they have always lived in the area since the time of the Philistines. This is surely unlikely. Undoubtedly they are of mixed blood, having doubtless intermarried with Arab invaders and others over more than 2000 years. But only DNA tests are likely to establish the genetic history and inheritance of the Palestinians.

Will they turn out to be pure-blooded descendants of the Philistines? This is almost impossible. First, we don't know what the DNA of the Philistines was. Second, the odds are enormous that they wouldn't have a "pure" inheritance either. Everyone intermarries with everyone else, eventually; even if there are religious and social prohibitions against this. Third, the matter is colossally unimportant. Undoubtedly, the matter is only interesting in order to establish boasting rights about one's ancestry and one's presumed rights to territory which, in the current Near East situation, is what everything is about.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail

Last modified: 8:49 AM 9/7/2002