The Philistines Their History And Civilization

THE BMTISH; ACADEMY

The Philistines
Their History and Civilization

By

R. A. Stewart Macalister, MJL, F.SJI

(Professor of Celtic Archaeology, University CoHege, DnoSn)

The Schweich Lectures
1911

Welche Ironic der Weltgeschichte, dass die so wenig 'philisterhafte' Nation
in mehreren Sprachen Europas jetzt ihren Namen znr Bezetchnung des fcigen
und langweiligen Spiessburgers heigeben muss !

W. MAX

'Philistinism', after all, stands for two great habits, decency and order.

Ths Qitarierly Review, 1899

London

Published for the British Academy

By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Ptfess

Amen Corner, E.C.

icns

PREFACE

AMOXU the Nations that came within the purview of the Old
Testament Writers nations seldom mentioned without stricture,
whether for idolatry, immorality, or cruelty perhaps none were
the object of so concentrated an aversion as were the Philistines.
The licentiousness of the Amorites. the hard-heartedness of the
Egyptian taskmasters, the fiendish savagery of the Assyrian warriors^
each of these in turn receives its due share of condemnation. But
the scornful judgement passed by the Hebrews on the Philistines has
made a much deeper impression on the Bible-reading West than have
their fulminations against other races and communities with which
they had to do. In English, from at least the time of Dekker, 1 the
word 4 Philistine * has been used in one or other of the senses of the
modern colloquialism outsider ' ; and, especially since the publication
of the essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, it has become almost a technical
term for a person boorish or bucolic of mind, impervious to the
higher influences of art or of civilization. In French and German
probably, indeed, in most of the languages of Europe the word is
used in familiar speech with a greater or less approximation to the
same meaning.

The following little book is an attempt to collect in a convenient
form the information so far available about the Philistine people. It
is an expansion of a course of three lectures, delivered in 1911 before
the British Academy under the Schweich Fund. In preparing it
for publication, the matter has been revised and re-written throughout;
and the division into lectures primarily imposed by the exigencies of
time-allowance has been abandoned for a more systematic and con*
venient division into chapters and sections.

It is hoped that the perusal of these pages will at least suggest

1 The Xeic English Dictionary quotes, Inter alia, 'Silke and satten, you mad
Philistines', silke and satten ' (Dekker, 1600) : * They say, you went to Court last
Night very drunk; nay, I'm told for certain you had been among Philistines*
(Swift, 1738) : * The obtuseness of a mere English Philistine we trust is pardonable '
(The Examiner, 1827) : * Philistinism ! -we have not the expression in English.
Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing ' (M. Arnold*
1863): and the quotation from the Quarterly AVtvar. which is printed on the
title-page.

5v

PREFACE

a iloubt as to the justice of the colloquial use of the name of this
ancient people.

As it may lx? well to preserve a record of the syllabus of the
original lecture*, a copy of it is subjoined.

1 (15 December, 1911}. The evil reputation of the Philistines. Recent
ntsean'hes and discoveries. A sketch of the development of Cretan civilization.
The Keftiu in the Egyptian records. The sack of Cnossos and subsequent
developments. The 4 Peoples of the Sea\ Their raid on Egypt Its repulse.
Recovery of the 'Peoples of the Sea' from their reverse. The adventures of
Wen-Amon. The earliest reference to the Philistines in the Old Testament.
The Abraham and Isaac stories. The references in the history of the Exodus.
Shamgar. Samson.

Leetnr? II {18 December, 1911 ; . The domination of the Philistines. The capture
of the Ark and the outbreak of plague. Samuel and Saul. Relative culture of
Philistines and Hebrews during the reign of Saul. The incidents of David's out-
lawry. Acfaish, king of Gath. Gilboa. The Philistine domination broken by
David. The various versions of the story of Goliath. The Philistines under the
later monarchy. The Philistines in the Assyrian records. Nehemiah. The
Maccabees. Traditions of the Philistines among the modern peasants of Palestine.
Theories of the origin of the Philistines. Caphtor and the Cherethites.

Lecture III (22 December, 1911). The Organization of the Philistines. Their
country and cities. The problem of the site of Ekron. The language of the
Philistines. Alleged traces of it in Hebrew. Their religion and deities. Their art.
Recent discoveries. The place of the Philistines in History and Civilization.

I have to express my acknowledgements to my friends and col-
leagues, the Rev. P. Boylan, Maynooth, and the Rev. Prof. Henry
Browne, S. J. ; also to the Very Rev. Principal G. A. Smith, Aberdeen,
and Mr. E. H. Alton, of Dublin University, for allowing me to
consult them on various points that arose in the course of this work.
The first and last named have most kindly read through proof-sheets
of the work and have made many valuable suggestions, but they have
no responsibility for any errors that the discerning critic may detect.

The figures on pp. 118, 119 are inserted by permission of the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

R. A. & M.

DUBLIX,

JVfer Year, 1913.

CONTEXTS

CHARTER I

1AGE

THE OKIGIX OF THE PHILISTINES 1

CHAPTER II

THE HisTOKr OF THE PHILISTINES 9

1. The Adventures of Wen-Amou among them . . 29

2. Their Struggle with the Hebrews . #8

3. Their Decline and Disappearance .... 62

CHAPTER III

THE LAND OK THE PHILISTINES f&

CHAPTER IV

THE CULTCRE OF THE PHILISTINES 79

1. Their Language ........ 79

2. Their Organization : (A) Political, (B) Military,

(C) Domestic 87

8. Their Religion 90

4. Their Place in History and Civilization . . . 114

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

n<;. iAiii:

1. A Keftian from the Tomb of Rekhmara and a Cretan from Kuo^t* . i*

2. Sketch-map to illustrate the Battle of Geba -TO

3. Sketch-map of Philistla . 77

4. The Phaestos Disk 84, &>

>. Coins of Gaza and A?hkelon Ill*

(5. The Characters on the Phae&to* Disk 1NJ

7. Wagons of the Pula>ati 1!

JJ. The Head-dress of the PuJasati 118

. The Sea-fi^ht between llames>u III anil the Allies . . .11*.*

10. A Bird , as painted on an Amorite and a Philistine Vase respectively . 1-1

11 . Sketch-plan*! and Elevationt? of the Marneion at Caza and of Solomon'*,

Temple 13*

THE PHILISTINES

THEIR HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES

THE Old Testament history is almost exclusively occupied with
Semitic tribes. Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Hebrews, Ara-
maeans all these, however much they might war among themselves,
were bound by close linguistic and other ties, bespeaking a common
origin in the dim, remote recesses of the past. Even the Egyptians
show evident signs of having been at least crossed with a Semitic
strain at some period early in their long and wonderful history. One
people alone, among those brought conspicuously to our notice in the
Hebrew Scriptures, impresses the reader as offering indications of
alien origin. This is the people whom we call * Philistines" 1 .

If we had any clear idea of what the word * Philistine " meant, or to
what language it originally belonged, it might throw such definite
light upon the beginnings of the Philistine people that further
investigation would be unnecessary. The answer to this question is,
however, a mere matter of guess-work. In the Old Testament the word is
regularly written P e listlm (^?0|), singular P e listT 05*f), twice 1
P e listiyim (O^fl&r.Ss). The territory which the}- inhabited during the
time of their struggles with the Hebrews is known as "eres P e listim
(D'fltfbs jn) the Land of Philistines', or in poetical passages,
simply Peleseth (ns^B) 'Philistia'. Josephus regularly calls them
TlaXaumvoC, except once, in his version of the Table of Nations in
Genesis x (Ant. I. vi. 2) where we have the genitive singular

1 In Amos ix. 7 and in the Kethibh of 1 Chron. xiv. 10. The almost uniform
rendering of the Greek version ,v\cffrcei/t) seems rather to favour this orthography.
The spelling of the first syllable, *u, shows, however, that the modern punctuation
with the shta is of later growth, and that in the time of the Greek translation the
pronunciation still approximated rather to the form of the name as it appears in
Egyptian monuments (Purasati).

B

2 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Various conjectures a* to the etymology of this name have been put
forward from "time to time. One of the oldest, that apparently due
to Fonrmont, 1 connects it with the traditional Greek name rTcXarryot ;
an equation which, however, does no more than move the problem of
origin one step further back. This theory was adopted by Hitzig,
the author of the first book in modern times on the Philistines, 2
who connected the word with Sanskrit valaksa * white \ and made
other similar comparisons, as for instance between the name of
the deity of Gaza, Mama, and the Indian Varuna. On the other
hand a Semitic etymology was sought by Gesenius, 3 Movers, 4 and
others* who quoted an Ethiopic verb falasa, * to wander, roam,'
whence comes the substantive^/a/ifoJ, fi a stranger.' In this etymology
they were anticipated by the translators of the Greek Version, who
habitually render the name of the Philistines by the Greek word
aAA<J$rAoi/' even when it is put into the mouths of Goliath or Achish,
when speaking of themselves. Of course this is merely an etymological
speculation on the part of the translators, and proves nothing more than
the existence of a Hebrew root (otherwise apparently unattested)
similar in form and meaning to the Ethiopic root cited. And quite
apart from any questions of linguistic probability, there is an obvious
logical objection to such an etymology. In the course of the following
pages we shall find the court scribes of Ramessu III, the historians of
Israel, and the keepers of the records of the kings of Assyria, agreeing
in applying the same name to the nation in question. These three
groups of writers, belonging to as many separate nations and epochs
of time^ no doubt worked independently of each other most probably
in ignorance of each other's productions. This being so, it follows
almost conclusively that the name * Philistine ' must have been derived
from Philistine sources, and in short must have been the native
designation. Now a word meaning c stranger' or the like, while it
might well be applied by foreigners to a nation deemed by them

critiques sur Pongine, Tkistoire et la succession des anciens p&uples
. 254.

2 F. Hitadgr, rrgeschichte und Myttologie der PhUister, Leipzig, 1845.

1 Gesenius, Thesaurus, *.r.

4 Movers, Uidersuchungen tiber die Religion und die Oottheiten der Phonizier (1841),
voL i, p. 9.

s Except (a} in the Hexateuch, where it is always transliterated *v\i<rrtcifi, some-
times *XTT/t or SiAioTief/i; (ft) in Judges x. 6, 7, 11, xiii. 1, 5, xiv. 2, where again
we find the word transliterated : in some important MSS. however, including Codex
Alexandrinus, axxfyuAot is used in these passages; (c) in Isa. ix. 11 (English
ix. 12, where we find the curious rendering *EXXipos, possibly indicating a variant
reading in the text that ky before the translators.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 3

intruders, would scarcely be adopted by the nation itself, as its chosen
ethnic appellation. This Ethiopic comparison it seems therefore safe to
reject. The fantasy that Redslob * puts forward, namely, that nc6s
*Philistia" was an anagram for r6ss% the Sheplielah or foot-hills of
Judea, is perhaps best forgotten : place-names do not as a rule come
to be in this mechanical way, and in any case ' the Shephelah "* and
* Philistia 1 were not geographically identical.

There is a peculiarity in the designation of the Philistines in
Hebrew which has often been noticed, and which must have a
certain significance. In referring to a tribe or nation the Hebrew
writers as a rule either (a) personified an imaginary founder, making
his name stand for the tribe supposed to derive from him
e.g. 'Israel' for the Israelites; or (fi) used the tribal name in the
singular* with the definite article a usage sometimes transferred to
the Authorized Version, as in such familiar phrases as e the Canaanite
was then in the land' (Gen. xii. 6) ; but more commonly assimilated
to the English idiom which requires a plural, as in * the iniquity of
the Amoritefs] is not yet fulP (Gen. xv. 16). But in referring to the
Philistines, the plural of the ethnic name is always used, and as a rule
the definite article is omitted. A good example is afforded by the
name of the Philistine territory above mentioned, 'eres P e listim,
literally * the land of Philistines ' : contrast such an expression as
'eres hak- K e na*ani, literally *the land of the Canaanite 1 . A few
other names, such as that of the Rephaim, are similarly constructed :
and so fax as the scanty monuments of Classical Hebrew permit us to
judge, it may be said generally that the same usage seems to be
followed when there is question of a people not conforming to the
model of Semitic (or perhaps we should rather say Aramaean) tribal
organization. The Canaanites, Amorites, Jebusites, and the rest, are
so closely bound together by the theory of blood-kinship which even
yet prevails in the Arabian deserts, that each may logically be spoken
of as an individual human unit. No such polity was recognized
among the pre-Semitic Hephaim, or the intruding Philistines, so
that they had to be referred to as an aggregate of human units.
This rule, it must be admitted, does not seein to be rigidly main-
tained ; for instance, the name of the pre-Semitic Horltes might
have been expected to follow the exceptional construction. But
a haxd-and-fast adhesion to so subtle a distinction, by all the writers
who have contributed to the canon of the Hebrew scriptures and by

1 TUB alttest. Xamen der Bftvlkerung, p. 4; adopted by Arnold in Ersch and
Gruber's Encyclopaedia* s. v. PhHister.

4 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

all the scribes who have transmitted their works, is not to be
expected. Even in the case of the Philistines the rule that the
definite article should be omitted is broken in eleven places. 1

However, this distinction, which in the case of the Philistines is
carefully obsened (with the exceptions cited in the footnote), indicates
at the outset that the Philistine*? were regarded as something apart
from the ordinary Semitic tribes with whom the Hebrews had to do.

The name of the Philistines, therefore, does not lead us very far in
our examination of the origin of this people. Our next step must be
to inquire what traditions the Hebrews preserved respecting the
origin of their hereditary enemies ; though such evidence on a
question of historical truth must obviously even under the most
favourable circumstances be unsatisfactory.

The locus classicvs is, of course, the table of nations in Genesis x.
Here we read (vv. 6, 13, 1-4), * And the sons of Ham : Cush, and
Mizraim, and Put, and Canaan . . . And Mizraim begat Ludim, and
'Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim, and Pathrusim, and
Casluhim (whence went forth the Philistines) and Caphtorim. 11 The
list of the sons of Ham is assigned to the Priestly source ; that of the
sons of Mizraim (distinguished by the formula * he begat **) to the
Yahvistic source. The ethnical names are almost all problematical,
and the part of special interest to us has been affected, it is
supposed, by a disturbance of the text.

So far as the names can be identified at all, the passage means that
in the view of the writer or writers who compiled the table of nations,
the Hamitic or southern group of mankind were Ethiopia, Egypt,
*Puf, and Canaan. Into the disputed question of the identification
of the third of these, this is not the place to enter. Passing over the
children assigned to Cush or Ethiopia, we come to the list of peoples
supposed by the Yahvist to be derived from Egypt. Who or what
most of these peoples were is very uncertain. The Ludim are supposed
to have been Libyans (d in the name being looked upon as an error
for 6) ; the Lehabim are also supposed to be Libyans ; the *Anamim
are unknown, as are also the Casluhim ; but the NapkiuJilm and
Pathrusim seem to be reasonably identified with the inhabitants of
Lower and Upper Egypt respectively. 2

1 Namely Joshua xiSi. 2; 1 Sam. iv, 7, vii. 12, xiiL 20,xvii. 51, 52 ; 2 Sam. v. 19,
xxL 12, 17 ; 1 Chron. xi. 13 ; 2 Chron. xxi. 16.

* For fuller particulars see Skinner's Commentary on Genesis (pp. 200-214).
Sayce finds Caphtor and Kasluhtt on an inscription at Kom Ombo : see Hastings^
Dictionary, s, v. Caphtor ; and Jlfan, 1903, No. 77. But see also Hall's criticisms,
ib. No. 92.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 5

There remain the Caphtorim, and the interjected note * whence
went forth the Philistines \ The latter has every appearance of
having originally been a marginal gloss that has crept into the text.
And in the light of other passages, presently to be cited, it would
appear that the gloss referred originally not to the unknown Casluhim,
but to the Caphtorim. It must, however, be said that all the versions,
as well as the first chapter of Chronicles, agree in the reading of the
received text, though emendation would seem obviously called for.
This shows us either that the disturbance of the text is of great anti-
quity, or else that the received text is, after all, correct, and that the
Casluhim are to be considered a branch o or at any rate a tribe
nearly related to, the Caphtorim.

The connexion of the Philistines with a place called Caphtor is
definitely stated in Amos ix. 7 : * Have not I brought up Israel out
of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the
Syrians from Kir?' It is repeated in Jeremiah xlvii. 4, where the
Philistines are referred to as 6 the remnant of the 1 of Caphtor \ The
word "7 is rendered in the Revised Version * island \ with marginal
rendering *sea coast' : this alternative well expresses the ambiguity in
the meaning of the word, which does not permit us to assume that
Caphtor, as indicated by Jeremiah, was necessarily one of the islands
of the sea. Indeed, even if the word definitely meant * island**, its
use here would not be altogether conclusive on this point : an isolated
headland might long pass for an island among primitive navigators,
and therefore such a casual mention need not limit our search for
Caphtor to an actual island.

Again, in Deuteronomy ii- 23, certain people called the Caphtorim,
* which came out of Caphtor', are mentioned as having destroyed the
*Avvim that dwelt in villages as far as Gaza, and established them-
selves in their stead. The geographical indication shows that the
Caphtorim must be identified, generally speaking, with the Philistines :
the passage is valuable as a record of the name of the earlier in-
habitants, who, however, were not utterly destroyed : they remained
in the south of the Philistine territory (Joshua xiii. 4).

The question of the identification of Caphtor must, however, be
postponed till we have noted the other ethnic indications which the
Hebrew scriptures preserve. Chief of these is the application of the
word C e rethi (TQ?) * Cherethites ' to this people or to a branch of
them.

Thus in 1 Samuel xxx. 14 the young Egyptian servant, describing
the Amalekite raid, said * we raided the south of the Cherethites and

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

a common denunciation, which we find practically repeated in the
important passage Zephaniah ii. 5, where a woe is pronounced on the
dwellers by the sea-coast, the nation of the Cherethites, and on
* Canaan, the land of the Philistines"; this latter is a noteworthy
expression, probably, however, interpolated in the text. In both these
tat passages the Greek version renders this word Kpijrcj 'Cretans';
it simply transliterates (XcA,c0 with many varieties of

spelling). 1

In both places it would appear that the name 'Cherethites* is
chosen for the sake of a paronomasia (ma = to cut ofT). In the
obscure expression children of the land of the covenant * (man pK VI
Ezek. xxx. 5) some commentators 2 see a corruption of Tron w
f Children of the Cherethites\ But see the note, p. 128 post.

In other places the Cherethites are alluded to as part of the
bodyguard of the early Hebrew kings, and are coupled invariably
with the name **&* Pelethites. This is probably merely a modifica-
tion of wfefi, the ordinary word for * Philistine', the letter * being
omitted in order to produce an assonance between the two names. 3
The Semites are fond of such assonances : they are not infrequent
in modern Arab speech, and such a combination as Shuppim and
Huppim (1 Chron. vii. 12) shows that they are to be looked for
in older Semitic writings as well. If this old explanation 4 be not
accepted, we should have to put the word * Pelethites' aside as hope-
lessly unintelligible. Herodotus's Philitis, or Philition, a shepherd
after whom the Egyptians were alleged to call the Pyramids, 5 has
often been quoted in connexion with this name, coupled with baseless
speculations as to whether the Philistines could have been the Hyksos.

* Such are 3&y/x, Xa/wtti, XA0<, XcAlce, XcAjSi, XcA0,

XeXtafe, XcXc0(c v XcActfa, XcAoffft, XaMci, XoAAeft, Xo/*0c, Xo/*00t, Xo/>/,
Xcpcta, X*fnj$u, X^T, Xc/>c00ci, Xc/xAv y Xcpcot, Xupt, Xep
Ox*teMt, Oxfpe*h OxcAfr, OXA^/, OxcXe0 y Fc00f. The Pdethites appear under
eqiiafijr Strange guises: *ten, *X7t, *XT, ^eXcrcc, *Xcrre, *Xe00i, *e\W,
*X^ti, cXr9i, feAc&tffA, Omrer, OXT, O^eXrt, O^eA0t y O$cXc00u, Q<pc\ereti,
n^cXc00, O<XA, OAc0ir, Ovt/*r, ncAcjSc, O0C0U, XerreuoJ.

9 Carnffl, Da* Buck du Proph. E~~*k. p. 368, followed by Toy, Ezeldel (in Sacred
BooksofO.T.),?. 88.

* Possibly the instinct for triliteralism may also have been instrumental in the
evolution of ibis form.

* It is given in Lakemacber, Obtervationtg Philologies (1729), iL 88, and revived
by Ewald in his KrifiicJu Grammatik for htbraitchen Sprache ',1897% p. 397.

1 HdL it 1%

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 7

With regard to the syntax of these two names, it is to be noticed
that as a rule they conform to the ordinary Hebrew usage, contrary
perhaps to what we might have expected. But in the two prophetic
passages we have quoted, the name of the Cherethites agrees in
construction with that of the Philistines,

In three passages 2 Samuel xx. 8, 2 Kings xL 4, 19 the name
of the royal body-guard of 'CherethitesT appears as "1| 'Carians'.
If this happened only once it might be purely accidental, due to
the dropping of a n by a copyist; but being confirmed by its three-
fold repetition, it is a fact that must be noted carefully * for future
reference.

Here the Hebrew records leave us, and we must seek elsewhere
for further light. Thanks to the discoveries of recent years, our
search need not be prolonged. For in the Egyptian records we find
mention of a region whose name, feftlti, has an arresting similarity
to the 'Caphtor' of Hebrew writers. It is not immediately obvious
whence comes the final r of the latter, if the comparison be sound ;
but waiving this question for a moment, let us see what is to be
made of the Egyptian name, and, above all, what indications as to its
precise situation are to be gleaned from the Egyptian monuments.

The name k-f-tnv / Tbv t^^i I sometimes written k-f-ty-w

^= Jr^ /

/ ft ^\ i& \ first meets us on Egyptian monuments of the

Eighteenth Dynasty. It is apparently an Egyptian word : at least,
it is capable of being rendered * behind % and assuming this rendering
Mr. H. R. Hall 2 aptly compares it with our colloquialism * the Back
of Beyond 7 . Unless this is to be put aside as a mere VoVcsetymdlogie 9
it clearly would be useless to search the maps of classical atlases for
any name resembling Keftiu. It would simply indicate that the
Egyptians had a sense of remoteness or uncertainty about the position
of the country ; and even from this we could derive no help, for as
a rule they manifest a similar vagueness about other foreign places.

It is specifically under Thutmose III that 'Keftiu' first appears
as the name of a place or a people. On the great stele in the Cairo
Museum in which the king's mighty deeds are summarized, in the
form of a Hymn to Amon, we read * I came and caused thee to smite

the west-land, and the land of Keftiu and Asi (^ TTT |j j| I*M)

1 The Greek version has "SL*p*6i in the first of these passages, in the others Xo/yi
with a number of varieties of spelling, Xo/y, Xo/w, &c., all of them showing o as
the first vowel.

1 Journal ofth* British School at Athens, viii (1901-2% p. 157.

8 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

are terrified". In the Annalistic Inscription on the walls of the
Temple of Karnak the name appears in interesting connexion with
maritime enterprise. *The harbours of the king were supplied
with all the good things which he received in Syria, namely ships
of Keftiu, Bybloss and Sektu [the last-named place is not identified],
cedar-ships laden with poles and masts." * A silver vessel of Keftiu
work * was part of the tribute paid to Thutmose by a certain chief-
tain. 1 Keftiu itself does not send any tribute recorded in the annals ;
but tribute from the associated land of Asi is enumerated, in which
copper is the most conspicuous item. This in itself proves nothing,
for the copper might in the first instance have been brought to Asi
from somewhere eke, before it passed into the coffers of the all-
devouring Pharaoh : but on the Tell el-Amarna tablets a copper-
producing country, with the similar name Alasia, is prominent, and
as Cyprus was the chief if not the only source of copper in the
Eastern Mediterranean, the balance of probability seems to be in
favour of equating Asi and Alasia alike to Cyprus. In this case
Keftiu would denote some place, generally speaking, in the neighbour-
hood of Cyprus.

The next important sources of information are the wall-paintings
in the famous tombs of Sen-mut, architect to Queen Hatshepsut ;
of Rekhmara, vizier of Thutmose III ; and of Menkheperuseneb, son
of the last-named official, 2 high priest of Amon and royal treasurer.
In these wall-paintings we see processions of persons, with non-Semitic
European-looking faces ; attired simply in highly embroidered loin-
cloths folded round their singularly slender waists, and in high boots
or gaiters ; with hair dressed in a distinctly non-Semitic manner ;
bearing vessels and other objects of certain definite types. The
tomb of Sen-mut is much injured, but the Cretan ornaments there
drawn are unmistakable. In the tomb of Rekhmara we see the
official standing, with five rows of foreigners carrying their gifts,
a scribe recording the inventory at the head of each row, and an
inscription explaining the scene as the * Reception by the hereditary
prince Rekhmara of the tribute of the south country, with the

1 The name of this chieftain's land is mutilated (fpTy)- Mr. Hall (op. cit. p. 167,
Oldest Civilisation of Greece, p. 163) restores Yantanay, and renders Cyprus'.
W. Max MHller compares with this name the word Adinai, found in the List of
Keftian names given on p. 10.

* For these tombs see Hall, British School at Athens, vol. x (1903-4), p. 154, and
Proc. 8oc* Bib. Arch, xxxi, Plate XVI [Sen-mut] ; Wilkinson, Manners and Customs
of the A*ci**t Effyptians, i, Plate II, A.B. [Rekhmara] ; Virey, Mtmoires de la
mittwn n Cairc, v, p. 7 [Rekhmara], p. 197 ff [Menkheperuseneb"'. In the last-
named, Keftiu is translated and indexed * Phenicle '.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES

tribute of Punt, the tribute of Retenu, the tribute of Keftiu, besides
the booty of all nations brought by the fame of Thutmose III ". In
the tomb of Menkheperuseneb there are again two lines of tribute-
bearers, described as * the chief of Keftiu, the chief of Kheta, the
chief of Tunip, the chief of Kadesh' ; and an inscription asserts that
these various chiefs are praising the ruler of the Two Lands, cele-
brating his victories, and bringing on their backs silver, gold, lapis
lazuli, malachite, and all kinds of precious stones.

Fig. 1. A. A Keftiau from the Tomb of Rekhmara.
B. A Cretan from Kuossos.

Some minor examples, confirming the conclusions to which these three
outstanding tomb-frescoes point, will be found in W. Max Muller's
important paper, Neue Darstellungen 4 mykenischer'* Gesandter . . . in
altagyptischen Wandgemdlden (Mitt, vorderas.-Gesell., 1904, No. ).

Recent investigations in the island of Crete have enabled us to
identify with certainty the sources of the civilization which these
messengers and their gifts represent. Wall-paintings iiave there been
found representing people with the same facial type, the same costume,
the same methods of dressing the hair ; and as it were the originals of
the costly vases they bear have been found in such profusion as to
leave no doubt that they are there on their native soil. The messengers,
who are depicted in the Egyptian frescoes, are introducing into Egypt

10 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

some of the thcft-trwim of Cretan art; specifically, art of the
periods known as Late Minoan I and II, 1 the time of the greatest
glory of the palace of Knossos ; and as they are definitely described in
the accompanying hieroglyphs a* messengers of Keftiu, it follows that
Keftiu was at least a centre of distribution of the products of Cretan
civilization, and therefore a place under the influence of Crete, if
it was not actually the island of Crete itself. And the clear evidence,
that excavation in Crete has revealed, of a back-wash of Egyptian
influence on Cretan civilization at the time of the coming to Egypt
of the Keftian envoys, turns the probability into as near a certainty
as it is at present possible to attain.

The next document to be noticed is a hieratic school exercise-tablet,
apparently (to judge from the forms of the script) dating from the end
of the Eighteenth Dynasty. It is now preserved in the British Museum,
numbered 5647.- On the one side are some random scribbles, like
the meaningless words and phrases with which one tries a doubtful
pen:

* The {goddess Ubast they are small, numerous of precious things,
when his majesty was seen^ as he turned his face there was for the
feast day, one jar "of wine [this line repeated] Ru-unti Ru-dadama
Smdt-ty "* [three names],

On the other side is

* To make names of Keftiu :

Asahurau

Nasuy

Akasou

Adiuai

Pinaruta

Rusa

Sen-Xofer [an Egyptian name, twice repeated]

Akasou
fct a hundred of copper, aknu^ases * [reading uncertain]

Benesasira
[two illegible names]

Sen-nofer

Sumrssu [Egyptian] *

Though the reading of some of the items of this list is not quite
certain, it seems clear that the heading 'irt rn n keftw, <to make
names of Keftiu 1 *, indicates that this tablet is a note of names to be used

1 See the brief summary of the various stages of Cretan culture during the
Bronze Age, later in the present chapter.

1 See Spiegelberg, Z^Uehrift far Msyrwlogi* (1893), viii. 385 (where the text is
pubushed incompletely), and W. Max Miiller in Jf ttMbnyM der vordmsiatischm
v, p. 6, where facsimiles will be found.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES II

in some exercise or essay. The presence of the familiar Philistine name
Achish, in the form Akaou, twice over, is suggestive, but otherwise
the tablet does not help forward our present inquiry into the position
of Keftiu and the origin of the Philistine people.

These various discoveries of recent years make it unnecessary to dis-
cuss at any length other theories which have been presented in ancient
and modern times CLS to the identification of the name of Keftiu or of
Caphtor. The Ptolemaic Jonathan Oldbuck who translated for his
master the Decree ofCanopux into Hieroglyphics, revived this ancient
geographical name to translate 4>ow//o7$: a piece of irresponsible
pedantry which has caused nothing but confusion. Even before the dis-
coveries of the last fifteen or twenty years it was obvious that the
Keftiu of Rekhmara's tomb were as unlike Phoenicians as they could
possibly be ; and their gifts were also incompatible with what was
known of Phoenician civilization. Endless trouble was thus given to
would-be harmonists. Another antiquary of the same kind and of the
same period, who drew up the inscription to be cut on the temple at
Kom Ombo, has likewise made illegitimate use of the name in ques-
tion. A catalogue of the places conquered by the founder of the
temple, after the manner of the records of achievements of the great
kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, was de rigiteur : so the obsequious
scribe set down, apparently at random, a list of any geographical
names that happened to come into his head. Among these is kptar,
the final r of which seems to denote a Hebrew source ; perhaps he
learnt the name from some brother antiquary in the neighbouring
Jewish colony at -Aswan.

The Greek translators of the scriptures, the Peshitta, and the
Targums, in Deuteronomy ii. 23, Amos is. 7, render the name Cappa-
docia. This seenis to be merely a guess, founded on similarity of sound.

In modern times, even before the days of scientific archaeology,
the equation of Caphtor to Crete has always been the theory most
in favour. Apart from Jeremiah^ description of the place as an
6 island ' which as we have already mentioned is not quite con-
clusive the obvious equation Cherethites = Cretans would strike
any student. Calraet 1 gives a good statement of the arguments
for the identification which were available before the age of exca-
vation.

For completeness 1 sake we may refer here to various other theories
of Philistine origin which have been put forward by modern
scholars : it is, however, not necessary to give full references

1 Dissertations quipeuvent serrir de vrolegomenes de Tlcriture saint (1730% II. ii,
p. 441.

18 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

to all the writers who have considered the question. The favourite
hypothesis among those who rejected the Caphtor-Crete identifica-
tion was founded on the Greek Version and Josephus : Caphtor was
by them identified with Cappadocia, and Casluhim with the Colchians,
Hitzig, as stated earlier in this chapter, identified them with the
Fela-gian.s, who came, according to his view, from Crete to North
Egypt, identified with the Casluhim of the Table of Nations : their
language he suppoi*ed to be cognate with Sanskrit, and by Sanskrit he
interpreted many of the names of people and places. Quatremere,
reviewing Hitzig's hook in the Journal des Savants (1846, pp. 257,
411), suggested a rival theory, deriving them from West Africa,
equating Casluhim with Sheluh, a sept of the Berbers. Stark
(Gaza, p. 70) assigned them to the Phoenicians, accepting the South
Semitic etymology of the name Pelistim, Caphtor being the Delta,
and Casluhim a name cognate with the Kasios mountain, denoting
a tribe living between Kasios and Pelusium. 1 Kohler 2 had a compli-
cated theory to reconcile all the various lines of Biblical evidence : he
took Caphtor to be the Delta ; the Philistines springing from there
settled in Casluhim (between Casios and Pelusium) : * going forth '
from Casluhim they sailed to Crete, and then returned to Philistia.
Knobel (Dfe Volkertafel der Genesis, p. 215 sqq.) proposed a double
origin for the Philistine people. The main body he took to be
Semites who came out (geographically, not racially) from the Casluhim
in North Egypt ; and the Caphtorim were a southern tribe of Cretan or
Carian origin. Knobel gave a very careful analysis of the evidence
available at his time, but he overlooked the Medinet Habu sculptures,
and, on the other hand, gave too much weight to the gossip of
Herodotus about Philitis and the Pyramids.

Ebers 8 made an elaborate attempt to find in the Delta a site
for Caphtor; but this can hardly stand against later discoveries.
They are no goods from the Land of Goshen which Rekhmara^s
visitors are carrying. W. Max Miiller 4 equates Keftiu to Cilicia,
mainly on the ground of the order in which the name occurs in
geographical lists: but though this is not an argument to be
lightly set aside, we are confronted with the difficulty that Cilicia
could hardly have been a centre of distribution of Minoan goods
in the time of Kekhmara. 5

1 A place which, as has often been noticed, has the same radicals as the name of
the Philistines.

1 Lthrbxch d. bibl GetchicMe, voL i.

8 Aegypten nnd da* Buck .Ifow, p. 127 ff. * Asitn und Europa* p. 337.

* An elaborate refutation of the Cilfcian hypothesis will be found in Noordtzij.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 13

Schwally 1 argues thus for the Semitic origin of the Philistines :
that if the Philistines were immigrants, so were the Phoenicians and
Syrians (tests Amos): that the identity of Caphtor and Crete is an
unproved assumption : the Greek translation twice rendeJs * Chere-
thites "* by * Cretans' 1 , it is true, but not elsewhere, showing uncertainty
on the subject: and the reading * Crete " in Zephaniah ii. 6 is wrong. All
the personal names, and all the place-names (except possibly El-tekeh
and Ziklag)are Semitic, and there is no trace of any non-Semitic deity.
Stade 2 asserts the Semitic origin of the people, without giving any
very definite proofs ; Tiele 3 claims the Philistines as Semites on the
ground of their Semitic worship. Beecher (in Hastings's Diet, of the
Bibky s. v. Philistines) claims the name of the people as * probably
Semitic 1 , but considers that most likely they were originally Aryan
pirates who had become completely Semitized. The non-circumcision
of the Philistines is a difficulty against assigning to them a Semitic
origin ; and the various Semitic elements in their names, religion,
and language can most reasonably be explained by borrowing pre-
sumably as a result of free intermarriage with Semites or Semitized
aborigines.

On the other hand, it may be said at once that it is perhaps a little
premature to call them Aryans. On the whole, the probability seems
to be against the Philistine being an Aryan tongue it certainly was
not, if (as is not unlikely) it had affinities with Etruscan.

But these identifications are to a large extent the personal
opinions of those who put them forward. The identification of
Caphtor and Keftiu with Crete is so generally accepted, that there
is a danger that some difficulties in the way should be overlooked.
For first of all we are met with a question of philology : whence
came the final r in the Hebrew word ? It has been suggested that
it might be a nominative suffix of the Keftian language. It would
in any case be more probably a locative or prepositional suffix : for place-
names are apt to get taken over into foreign languages in one or
other of those cases, because they are generally referred to in con-
texts that require them ; just as Eriu, the old Irish name of Ireland,
has been taken over into English in its prepositional case, now spelt
Erin. It might possibly be a plural : Mr. Alton has suggested to me a
comparison with the Etruscan plural ending er, ar, ur. Letting the
question of the exact case pass, however, as irrelevant, there are two
points that must be indicated regarding the suggestion that r is

* Ztitschr.fur wissensch. Tkeologie, xxxiv (1891), p. 103.

* G8eh. ck* Volk. I*r. i. 142.

* Geschisdenis van den GodsdieMt in de Oudheid, i. pp. 214, 341.

14 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

a Keflian case-ending. la the first place, it assumes that Keftiu
is, after all, not the Egyptian word it resembles, but the native
*Keftiair name for the place in question: it is incompatible with
the * Bock of Beyond * theory of the meaning of the name* In the
second place, it is difficult to understand how the Hebrews should
have picked up a * Keftian " case-ending or any such grammatical
formative, rather than the Egyptians ; for the Egyptians were
brought into direct contact with Keftians, while the Hebrews
arrived on the scene too late to enjoy that advantage. Ebers
attempted to solve the difficulty by supposing the r to come from
the Egyptian adjective wr, * great \ tacked on to the place-name.
Max Muller (Mien und Europa, p. 390) and Wiedemann (Orient.
Littcwtnrzeitungi xiii, col. 49) point out that there is no monumental
evidence for such an expression, and that in any case fc Great Keft-
land' would be Keft-'a, not Keft-o?r. The latter (loc. cit.) has
an ingenious solution : in an astronomical text in the grave of
Ramessu VI occurs a list of places "i wm}r (the land of the Amorites)

pb (unidentified) and " != * f ^ a *& kfthr (< Upper Kefti').
**-=*- "3? .ma-

* Caphtor*, he suggests, may be a corruption of this latter expression.
The hypothesis may be noted in passing, though perhaps it is not
altogether convincing.

Behind this problem lies another, perhaps equally difficult : why
did the Hebrews call the home-land of the Philistines by this name,
which even in Egypt was already obsolete ?

To this question the only reasonable answer that seems to present
itself is to the effect that by the time of the Hebrews Crete or Keftiu
had, with its gorgeous palaces, passed into tradition. Like the
I Breasail or Avallon of Celtic tradition, the place which the Hebrew
writers called e Caphtor * was no longer a tangible country, but a
dreamland of folklore, the legends of which had probably filtered
into Palestine from Egypt itself. Whether Caphtor was or was
not the same as the island of Crete was to the ancient Hebrew
historian a question of secondary interest beside the all-important
practical fact that the Philistines were obstinate in their occupation
of the most desirable parts of the Promised Land. When the in-
spired herdsman of Tekoa spoke of the Philistines being led from
Caphtor, he was probably just as unconscious of the requirements
of the scientific historian as a modern herdsman who told me that
a certain ancient monument on a Palestinian hill-slope belonged ' to
the time of the RunT. He no doubt believed what he said : but
who or what the Bum may have been, or how many years or centuries

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 15

or geological aeons ago they may have flourished, he neither knew
nor cared.

All, then, that the Hebrews can tdl us about their hereditary
enemies is, that they came from a vague traditional place called
Caphtor a place by the sea, but of which they have nothing more
to say. The tradition of Caphtor seems to be a tradition of the
historical glories of Crete, so far as the Egyptians knew of them, and
the name seems to be a tradition of the name which, for some reason
not certainly known, the Egyptians applied to the source of the
desirable treasures of the Cretan civilization.

Even down to late times the tradition linking Philistia with
Crete persisted in one form or another. Tacitus heard it, though in
a distorted form : in the oft-quoted passage Hist. v. he confuses
the Jews with the Philistines, and makes the former the Cretan
refugees. 1 MEI N A, Minos, is named on some of the coins of Gaza.
This town was called by the name Jfiitoa : and its god Mama was
equated to *Zeus the Crete-born." 12

But did the Philistines come from Crete? That is the question
which we must now consider.

The last generation saw the labours of Schliemann at Troy and
elsewhere, and was startled by the discovery of the splendid pre-
Hellenic civilization of Mycenae. For us has been reserved the yet
greater surprise of finding that this Mycenaean age was but the latest,
indeed the degenerate phase of a vastly older and higher culture. Of
this ancient civilization Crete was the centre and the apex.

The course of civilization in this island, from the end of the
Neolithic period onwards, is divided by Sir Arthur Evans into three
periods 3 which he has named Early, Middle, and Late *Minoan*
respectively, after the name of Minos the famous legendary Cretan
king. Each of these three periods is further divided into subordinate

1 *Iudaeos Creta Insula profugos nouissima Libyae insedisse memorant, qua
tempestate Saturnus ui louis pulsus cesserit regnis.'

s Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. Tdfa, mfeis &otv'unp, vvy 5 HaXxuarivris wpb TTJS
Aiyfarov. \^0rj teal *Afa [TO]' *oi ptxp 2rf/WM "Afar cdrrip xalovffiv, <S*-d*A0r0s
rov iraiSbs *RpaK\{av$. fjiv6o\o-fov(Tt 84 rivts (hrd Aior KriuGrjvtu. sou tv aur droAzircfr t^v
ISiay Tafav avru row IJepcrav T& xiftunxi KaXovvrow. teal p.fivdcnjs avrfjs ixcT ic\^&ij Si
/cat Mivwa, on MiVws ffvv rots a5c\$ois Alaacy KO! 'Patiap&vffet ?ar l aurou ravrrjv cicaXeerev.
&0ev Kal rd rov "Kprjraiov Atds vap avrus clrcu & teal tcaO* ^ys ifcaXow Mdpvav tp/oyveutJ-
fievov 'KprjrcTffVTj. ras vap0c*ous fap ourw K/wyr*? irpoaayoptvovfft Mapvav.

8 The bare outline statement, which is all that is necessary here, can be supple-
mented by reference to any of the numerous books that have appeared recently on
the special subject of Cretan excavation : such as Professor Burrows's pleasantly
written work entitled Th* Dvcorerie* in Crete (London, Murray, 1907), which con-
tains a most useful bibliography.

16 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

periods, indicated by numbers, ; thus we have Early Minoan I, II, III,
and so for the others. The general characters of these nine periods
may now be briefly stated, with the approximate dates which Egyptian
synchronisms enable us to assign.

" Into the question of the origin of the early inhabitants of Crete we
need not enter. That there was some connexion between Crete and
Egypt in their stone-age beginnings seems on various grounds to be
not improbable. 1 The neolithic Cretan artists were much like
neolithic artists elsewhere. They never succeeded in attaining a very
high position among workers in flint; Crete has so far produced
nothing comparable with the best work of the Egyptians and the
Scandinavians. Their pottery was decorated with incised or pricked
patterns filled in with white powdered gypsum, to make a white pat-
tern on a black ground.

The Early Minoan I period inherited this type of ornament and
ware from its predecessors, but improved it. Coloured decoration
now began to be used, the old incised ornaments being imitated with
a wash of paint. The ornament was restricted to simple geometrical
patterns such as zigzags. The pottery was made without the wheel.
In this period short triangular daggers in copper are found. In
Early Minoan II the designs are more free and graceful: simple
curves appear, side by side with straight lines, towards the end of
the period. The potter's wheel is introduced. Rude and primitive
idols in marble, alabaster, and steatite are found. The copper
daggers are likewise found, but the use of flint and obsidian is not
yet wholly abandoned. In Early Minoan HI there is not much
advance in the art of the potter. We now, however, begin to find
seals with a kind of hieroglyphic signs upon them, apparently imitated
(in manner if not in matter) from Egyptian seals. These seern to
give us the germ of the art of writing, as practised later in Crete.
Scholars differ (between 2000 and 3000 B.C.) as to the proper date
to assign to the end of the Early Minoan civilization : for our present
purpose it is not important to discuss the causes of disagreement, or
to attempt to decide between these conflicting theories.

The next period, Middle Minoan 7, takes a great step forward.
We now begin to find polychrome decoration in pottery, with
elaborate geometrical patterns ; we also discover interesting attempts
to picture natural forms, such as goats, beetles, &c. Upon the ruins
of this stage of development, which seems to have been checked by
some catastrophe, are founded the glories of Middle Minoan 77, the
period of the great palace of Phaestos and of the first palace of
1 See Hall, Proc. Soc. Biblical Archaeology* xxri, pp. 144-148.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 17

Knossos. To this period also belongs the magnificent polychrome
pottery called Kamures ware. Another catastrophe took place : the
first palace of Knossos was ruined, and the great second palace built
in its place : and the period known as Middle Minoan III began.
It was distinguished by an intense realism in art, speaking clearly
of a rapid deterioration in taste. In this period we find the picto-
graphic writing clearly developed, with a hieratic or cursive script
derived from it, adapted for writing with pen and ink. The Middle
Miuoan period came to an end about 1600 B.C.

Late Afinoan I shows a continuation of the taste for realism. Its
pottery is distinguished from that of the preceding period by the
convention that its designs as a rule are painted dark on a light
background: in Middle Minoan III they are painted light on a
dark background. Linear writing is now developed. The palace
of Phaestos is rebuilt. Fine frescoes and admirable sculptured vases
in steatite are found in this period, to which also belong the oldest
remains at Mycenae, namely the famous gold deposits in the shaft
tombs. In Late Minoan II the naturalistic figures become con-
ventionalized, and a degeneration in art sets in which continues into
Late Minoan III. The foreign imports found at Tell el-Amarna
and thus of the time of Ikhnaton, are all of Late Minoan HI ; this
affords a valuable hint for dating this phase of development.

Now while some of the earlier periods shade into one another, like
the colours of a rainbow, so that it is difficult to tell where the one
ends and the next begins, this is not the case of the latest periods,
the changes in which have evidently been produced by violence. The
chief manifestation is the destruction of Knossos, which took place,
apparently as a result of invasion from the mainland, at the very
end of the period known as Late Minoan II : that is to say about
1400 B.C. The inferior style called Late Minoan HI the style which
till recent years we had been accustomed to call Mycenaean succeeded
at once and without any intermediate transition to the style of Late
Minoan II immediately after this raid. It was evidently the degraded
style that had developed in the mainland among the successful in-
vaders, founded upon (or, rather, degenerated from) works of art
which had spread by way of trade to the adjacent lands, in the
flourishing days of Cretan civilization.

We have seen that in Egyptian tombs of about 1500 B. c. there are
to be seen paintings of apparently Cretan messengers and merchants,
called by the name of Keftiu, bearing Cretan goods : and in addition
we find the actual tangible goods themselves, deposited with the
Egyptian dead. In Palestine and elsewhere occasional scraps of

18 THE i&'inVEICII LECTURES, 1911

*he * puloeu " styles come to light. But the early specimens of Cretan
art found in the*e regions arc all exotic, just as (to quote a parallel
often cited in illustration) the >pecimens of Chinese or Japanese
porcelain exhibited in London drawing-rooms are exotic; and they
afft-ct but little the inferior native arts of the places where they are
found. It is not till we reach the beginning of Late Minoan III, .
after the sack of Knossoi', that we find Minoan culture actually taking
root in the ea^ern lands of the Mediterranean, such as Cyprus and
the adjacent coasts of Asia Minor and Syria. We can hardly dis-
Hxriate thi> phenomenon from the sack of Knossos. The very limita-
tions of the area over which the * Mycenaean * art has been found
are enough to show that its distribution was not a result of peacefiil
trade. Thus, the Hittite domination of Central and Western Asia
Minor was still strong enough to prevent foreign settlers from
establishing themselves in those provinces : in consequence Mycenaean
civilization is there absent. The spread of the debased Cretan culture
over Southern Asia Minor, Cyprus, and North Syria, between 1400
and 1200 B.C. must have been due to the movements of peoples, one
incident in which was the sack of Knossos J : and this is true, whether
those who carried the Cretan art were refugees from Crete^ or were
the conquerors of Crete seeking yet further lands to spoil.

In short, the sack of Knossos and the breaking of the Cretan power
was an episode it may be, was the crucial and causative episode in
a general disturbance which the fourteenth to the twelfth centuries B. c.
witnessed over the whole Eastern Mediterranean basin. The mutual
relations of the different communities were as delicately poised as in
modern Europe: any abnormal motion in one part of the system
tended to upset the balance of the whole. Egypt was internally in
a ferment, thanks to the eccentricities of the crazy dilettante Ikhnaton,
and was thus unable to protect her foreign possessions ; the nomads of
Arabia, the Sutu and Habiru, were pressing from the South and East
on the Palestinian and Syrian towns ; the dispossessed Cretans were
crowding to the neighbouring lands on the north ; the might of the
HJttites, themselves destined to fall to pieces not long afterwards,
blocked progress northward: it is little wonder that disorders of.
various kinds resulted from the consequent congestion.

It is just in this time of confusion that we begin to hear, vaguely
at first, of a number of little nationalities people never definitely

1 Other causes were at work producing the same result of restlessness among the
peoples. Thus Mr. Alton snggests to me that the collapse of the island of Thera
must have produced a considerable disturbance of population in the neighbouring
lands.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 19

assigned to any particular place, but appearing now here, now there,
fighting sometimes with, sometimes against, the Egyptians and their
allies. And what gives these tribelets their Mirpo&sing interest is the
greatness of the names they bear. The unsatisfying and contemptuous
allusions of the Egyptian scribes record for us the * day of small
things' of people destined to revolutionize the world.

We first meet these tribes in the Tell el-Amarna letters. The
king of Alasia (Cyprus) complains that his coasts are being raided
by the LnWtu 9 who yearly plunder one small town after another. 1
That indefatigable correspondent, Rib-Addi\ in two letters, complains
that one Bihura has sent people of the ?utu to his town and slain certain
Sherdan men apparently Egyptian mercenaries in the town guard. 2
In a mutilated passage in another letter Rib- Add! mentions the
Slierdan again, in connexion with an attempt on his own life. Then
Abi-Milki reports 3 that * the king of Dannna is dead, and his brother
has become king after him, and his land is at peace \ It is almost the
only word of peace in the whole dreary Tell el-Amarna record.

Next we hear of these tribes in their league with the Hittites
against Ramessu II, when he set out to recover the ground lost to
Egypt during the futile reign of Ikhnaton.* With the Hittites were
allied people from

^ ,
Drdnw
I I

M[?]sw

^

M^wnw or irwnw

D ^n "$\ IQ" be* Pdsw

\\

This was in 1338 B.C. On the side of Ramessu fought mercenaries
called ;rd?n ? ^ j) no doubt

i T.A. Letters, ed. Winckler, No. 28; ed. Knudtzwn, No. 38.

a ib. W. 77, K. 123. See also W. 100.

s ib. W. 151, K. 151.

* For an exhaustive study of the great battle of Kadesh between Ramessu and
the united tribes, see Breasted, The Battle of Kadeslt (Univ. of Chicago Decennial
Publications, Ser. I, No. 5 '.

20 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Sherdan of whom we have heard already in the Tell el-Amarna
letters. These people were evidently ready to sell their services to
whomsoever paid for them, for we find them later operating against
their former Egyptian masters.

About thirty years later, when Merneptah was on the throne, there
was a revolt of the Libyans* and with many allies from the ' Peoples
of the Sea " they proceeded to attack Egypt. Though the Philistines
do not actually appear among the names of the allies, the history of
thi* invasion is one of the most important in the engines of that
remarkable people. The details are recorded in four inscriptions set
up by the king after his victory over the invaders, one of which
inscriptions is the famous * Israel * stela.

The first inscription is that of the temple of Karnak, a translation
of which will be found in Breasted's Ancient Records* vol. iii, p. 241.
This inscription begins with a list of the allied enemies :

The beginning of the inscription is lost, but the list is probably
complete, as in the sequel, where the allied tribes are referred to
more than once, no other names are mentioned.

Merneptah, after extolling his own valour and the military
preparations he had made, tells us how he had received news that

* B | v. U M I &f (Maraiwi or something similar) 6 the miser-

<r* '^a v 1 1 \\ I y^J

able chief of Libya', with his allies aforesaid, had come with his
family to the western boundary of Egypt. Enraged like a lion,
he assembled his officers and to them expressed his opinion of the
invaders in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. c They spend
their time going about and fighting to fill their bellies day by day :
they come to Egypt to seek the needs of their mouths : their chief is
like a dog, without courage . . . .' Some of the vigorous old king's
expressions have been bowdlerissd by the hand of Time, which has

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 521

deprived us of a course of the inscribed masonry of the temple :
but notwithstanding we have an admirable description of restless sea-
rovers, engaged in constant plunder and piracy. Then Memeptah,
strengthened by a vision of his patron Ptah which appeared to him
in the night, led out his warriors, defeated the Libyans uhose *vile
fallen chief justified Merneptahfs opinion of him by fleeing, and, in
the words of the official report of the Egyptian general to his master,
* he passed in safety by favour of the night ... all the gods overthrew
him for the sake of Egypt : his boasting is made void : his curses
have come to roost : no one knows if he be alive or dead, and even
if he lives he will never rule again. They have put in his place
a brother of his who fights him whenever he sees him '. The list
of slain and captives is much mutilated, but is of some importance.
For the slain were reckoned by cutting off and counting the phalli of
circumcised, the hands of uncircumcised victims. 1 Prom the classifica-
tion we see that at the time of the victory of Merneptah, the Libyans
were circumcised, while the Shardanu and Shekelesh and Ekwesh, as
we may provisionally vocalize the names, were not circumcised. The
inscription ends with the flamboyant speech of Merneptah to his
court, and their reply, over which we need not linger. Nor do the
other inscriptions relating to the event add anything of importance
for our present purpose.

About a hundred years later we meet some of these tribes again, on
the walls of the great fortified temple of Medinet Habu near Thebes,
which Ramessu III, the last of the great kings of Egypt, built to
celebrate the events of his reign. These events are recorded in
sculptured scenes, interpreted and explained by long hieroglyphic
inscriptions. It is deplorable that the latter are less informing than
they might have been : we grudge bitterly the precious space wasted
in grovelling compliments to the majesty of the victorious monarch,
and we would have gladly dispensed with the obscure and would-be
poetical style which the writer of the inscription affected. 2

Raniessu III came to the throne about 1200 B.C. 3 Another
Libyan invasion menaced the land in his fifth year, but the energetic
monarch, who had already been careful to organize the mili*'."y
resources of Egypt, was successful in beating it back. War-galleys

1 See W. Max MuUer's important note in Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch, x, pp. 147-134,
where reasons are given against the exactly opposite interpretation, followed by
many authorities (e.g. Breasted, Ancient Records*. On the other hand the contrary
practice seems to be indicated by 1 Sam. xviii. 35. The difficulty of rendering lies
in the fact that we have to deal with Egyptian words not found elsewhere.

3 See Breasted, Ancient Records, iv, pp. 1-&5.

8 Petrie says 1309, Breasted 1198.

tt THE SnnVEICH LECTURES, 1911

from the northern countries especially the Purasatl and the Zakkala,
accompanied the invading Libyan*; but this latter element in the
assault wus only a foretaste of the yet more formidable attack which
they were destined to make on Egypt three years later that is to
say, roughly alxmt 1192 B.( .

The inscription describing this war is engraved on the second pylon
of the temple of Medinet Hnbu. Omitting a dreary encomium of the
Pharaoh, with which it opens, and a long hymn of triumph with which
it endsi we may confine our attention to the historical events recorded
in the hieroglyphs, and pictured in the representations of battles that
accompany thbin. The inscription records how the Northerners were
disturbed, a:id proceeded to move eastward and southward, swamping
in turn the land of the Hittites, Carchemish, Arvad, Cyprus, Syria,
and other places in the same region. We are thus to picture a great
southward march through Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Or,
rather, we are to imagine a double advance, by land and by sea : the
landward march, which included two-wheeled ox-carts for the women
and children, as the accompanying picture indicates; and a sea
expedition, in which no doubt the spare stores would be carried more
easily than on the rough Syrian roads. Clearly they were tribes
accustomed to sea-faring who thus ventured on the stormy Mediter-
ranean; clearly too, it was no mere military expedition, but a
migration of wanderers accompanied by their families and seeking
a new home. 1

The principal elements in the great coalition are the following :

MI ^ Hh *=* Ik ^ Ik } $ i Srdn w

/VWWV Q i

Ik vfo i Dnvnw

D <=> iQl v Pritw

TSkrw

as well as theSkrs^w, of which we have heard in previous documents.

* With hearts confident and full of plans *, as the inscription says,

they advanced by land and by sea to Egypt. But Ramessu was

ready *to trap them like wild-fowl \ He strengthened his Syrian

1 The details of these sculptures are more fully described later in this book.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 23

frontier, and at the same time fortified the harbours* or river mouth;
* with warships, galleys, and barges \ The actual battles are not
described, though they are pictured in the accompanying cartoons :
but the successful issue of the>e military preparation* is graphically
recorded, * Those who reached my boundary," hays the king, 'their
seed is not : their heart and their soul are finished for ever and ever.
As for those who had assembled before them on the sea ... they were
dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach : >3ain and made
heaps from end to end of their galleys, while all their things were
cast upon the water.'

The scenes in which the land and naval engagements are represented
are of great importance, in that they are contemporary records of the
general appearance of the invaders and of their equipment. The naval
battle, the earliest of which any pictorial record remains, is graphically
portrayed. We see the Egyptian archers sweeping the crews of the
invading vessels almost out of existence, and then closing in and finishing
the work with their swords ; one of the northerners'' vessels is capsized
and those of its crew who swim to land are taken captive by the
Egyptians waiting on the shore. In later scenes we see the prisoners
paraded before the king, and the tale of the victims counted by
enumerating the hands chopped off the bodies.

The passage in the great Harris Papyrus, which also contains
a record of the reign of Ramessu III, 1 adds very little to the informa-
tion afforded us by the Medinet Habu inscription. The * Danaiuna *
are there spoken of as islanders. We are told that the Purasati
and the Zakkala were * made ashes ', while the Shekelesh (calledgin
the Harris Papyrus Shardani, who thus once more appear against
Egypt) and the Washasha were settled in strongholds and bound.
From all these people the king claims to have levied taxes in clothing
and in grain.

As we have seen, the march of the coalition had been successful
until their arrival in Egypt. The Hittites and North Syrians had
been so crippled bj' them that Ramessu took the opportunity to
extend the frontier of Egyptian territory northward. We need not
follow this campaign, which does not directly concern us : but it has
this indirect bearing on the subject, that the twofold ravaging of
Syria, before and after the great victory of Ramessu, left it weakened
and opened the door for the colonization of its coast-lands by the
beaten remnant of the invading army.

Rajnessu III died in or about 1167 B.C., and the conquered tribes

1 Breasted, op. clL p. 201.

g* THE SCHVVEICH LECTURES, 1911

began to recover their lo*t ground. For that powerful monarch was
succeeded by a series of weak ghost-kings who disgraced the great
name of Ramessu which, one and all, they bore. More and more
did they become puppets in the hands of the priesthood, who cared
for nothing but enriching the treasures of their temples. The
frontier of Egypt was neglected. Less than a hundred years after
the crushing defeat of the coalition, the situation was strangely
reversed, as one of the most remarkable documents that have come
down to us from antiquity allows us to see. This document is the
famous Golenischeff papyrus, now at St. Petersburg. But before
we proceed to an examination of its contents we must review the
Egvptian materials, which we have now briefly set forth, a little
more closely.

The names of the tribes, with some doubtful exceptions, are easily
equated to those of peoples living in Asia Minor. We may gather
a list of them out of the various authorities which have been set
out above, adding to the Egyptian consonant-skeleton a provisional
vocalization, and remembering that r and 7 are interchangeable in
Egyptian :

1. Lukku .

2. Sherdami.

3. Danouu .
k Dardanu .

5. Masa .

6. Mawuna or Yaruna
T jPidasa .

i . . Jeicesb .
9. Ekwesh .

10. Turisha .-

11. Shekelesh
IS. Pulasati .

13. Zakkala .

14. Washasha

Tell el-Amarna Ramessu II Merneptah Ramessu III

c. 1400 B.C. 1333 B.C. c. 1300 B.C. c. 1198 B.C.

XXX

X X X X

X - X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

All X denotes * present in\ a fi absent fronT the lists. The
majority of these fourteen names too closely resemble names known
from classical sources for the resemblance to be accidental. It will
be found that almost every one of these names can be easily identified
with the name of the coast dwellers of Asia Minor ; and vice versa,
with one significant exception, the coast4and regions of Asia Minor
are all to be found in recognizable forms in the Egyptian lists. The
-ska or -shu termination is to be neglected as an ethnic formative.

Thus, beginning with the Hellespont, the TROAS is represented in
the Turisha, who have been correctly identified with the future
TYKRHEXIANS (Tursci) as are the Pulasati with the future PHILISTINES.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 25

ODAKCS in the Troad i> represented by the Dardtmn. They are
tj.iv. carriers of the Trojan tradition* to Italy. 1 MYMA is represented
by the J/OMI, Lydia by the Shcrdanu from the town of SAEDIS.
These are the future SABDIXZAN*. And the more inland region of
MAEOXIA is echoed in the JUlnw/jia, if that be the correct reading.
We now come to a gap : the Carian^ at the S. W. corner of Asia
Minor, do not appear in any recognizable form in the libt, except
that the North Carian town of PEiiAsrs seems to be echoed by
the Pidasa. To this hiatus we shall return presently. The LTCIAXS
are conspicuous as the Lukku.

The name of the sea-coast region of Painphylia is clearly a later
appellation, expressive of the variety of tribes and nationalities
which has always characterized the Levant coast. The inland Pisidian
town of SAGALASbus finds its echo in the Shekefah. The CILICIAKK
are represented by the Kekkcth, and this brings us to the corner
between Asia Minor and North Syria.

The only names not represented in the foregoing analysis arts
the Danunii, Ekzeesh, and the three tribes which first appear in
the Ramessu III invasion, the Pulasati^ Zakkala^ and Waxhaitha.
The first two of these, it is generally agreed, are to be equated to the
DAXAOI and the ACHAEAXS - the first appearance in historic record
of these historic names. The latter do not appear in the Ramessu III
lists: there were no Achaeans in the migration from Asia Minor.
The Pulasati are unquestionably to be equated to the future PHILIS-
TINES, north of whom we find later the Zakkala settled on the
Palestinian coast. The Washa.<sha remain obscure, both in origin
and fate ; but a suggestion will be made presently regarding them.
They can hardly have been the ancestors of the Indo-European

OSCAKS.

The various lines of evidence which have been set forth in the
preceding pages indicate Crete or its neighbourhood as the probable
land of origin of this group of tribes. They may be recapitulated :

(1) The Philistines, or a branch of them, are sometimes called
Cherethites or Cretans.

(2) They are said to come from Caphtor, a name more like Kefliu
than anything else, which certainly denotes a place where the Cretan
civilization was dominant.

* Turisha has also been identified with the Cilician town of TARSUS.

2 With reservations : see Weill, Rtvae archtologviue, ser. IV, vol. iii, p. 67. And
even the identification of the Danaoi is uncertain. It is at least improbable that
Rib-Addi of T^re, in the letter quoted above, should report on the peacefulness of
so remote a people as the Danaoi.

26 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

(3) The hieratic >chool-tablet mentions 'AkasoiT as a Keffcian
name : it is al&o Philistine [Achish].

To this may be added the important fact that the Phaestos disk,
the inscription on which will be considered later in this book, shows
u* among its signs a head with a plumed head-dress, very similar to
that shown on the Philistine captives represented at Medinet Habu.

We must not, however, forget the fact at which we paused for
a moment, that thrice the Philistine guard of the Hebrew kings
lire spoken of as the Carians ; and that the Carians are not other-
wise represented in the lists of Egyptian invaders. We are probably
not to confine our .search for the origin of the Zakkala-Philistine-
Washasha league to Crete alone: the neighbouring strip of main-
Laid coast probably supplied its contingent to the sea-pirates. The
connexion of Caria with Crete was traditional to the time of Strabo ;
6 the most generally received account is that the Carians, then called
Leleges, were go\*erned by Minos, and occupied the islands; then
removing to the continent, they obtained possession of a large tract
of sea-coast and of the interior, by driving out the former occupiers,
who were for the greater part Leleges and Pelasgi. 1 * 1 Further, he
quotes Alcaeus's expression, * shaking a Carian crest,' which is sugges-
tive of the plumed head-dress of the Philistines. Again, speaking
of the city Caunus, on the shore opposite Rhodes, he tells us that
its inhabitants * speak the same language as the Carians, came from
Crete, and retained their own laws and customs * 2 which, however,
Herodotus 8 contradicts. Herodotus indeed (be. cit.) gives us the
same tradition as Strabo regarding the origin of the Carians : they

*had come from the islands to the continent. For being subjects
of Minos, and anciently called Leleges, they occupied the islands
without paying any tribute, so far as I can find by inquiring into
the remotest times; but whenever Minos required them, they
manned his ships ; and as Minos subdued an extensive territory, and
was successful in war, the Carians were by far the most famous of
all nations in those times. They also introduced three inventions
which the Greeks have adopted; of fastening crests on helmets,
putting devices on shields, and putting handles on shields. . . .
After a lone time the Dorians and lonians drove the Carians out
of the islands and so they came to the continent. This is the
account that the Cretans give of the Carians, but the Carians do
not admit its correctness, considering themselves to be autochthonous
inhabitants of the continent . . . and in testimony of this they show
an ancient temple of Zeus Carios at Mylasa.'

1 Strabo, xiv. ii. 37. * Strabo, xiv. ii. 3.

3 i. 172.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES 27

If then by the Pulasati we are to fill in the hiatus in the list of
Asia Minor coast-dwellers, the most reasonable explanation of the
name is after all the old theory that it is to be equated with Pdaxgi.
And if the worshippers of Zeus Carlo* settled in Palestine 9 they
might be expected to bring their god with them and to erect
a temple to him. Now we read in 1 Samuel vii, that the Philistines
came up against the Israelites who were holding a religious ceremony
in Mizpah ; that they were beaten l>ack by a thunderstorm, and
chased in panic from Mizpah to a place called Beth-Car (v. 11). We
may suppose tlxat the cha>e stopped at Beth-Car because it wa* within
Philistine territory ; but unfortunately all the efforts to identify this
place, not otherwise known, have proved futile. Very likely it was
not an inhabited town or village at all, but a sanctuary: it
was raised on a conspicuous height (for the chase stopped under
Beth-Car) : and the name means House of Car, 1 as Beth-Dagon means
House or Temple of Dagon. This obscure incident, therefore, affords
one more link to the chain.

If the Cretans and the Carian& together were represented by
Zakkala-Pulasati-Washasha league, we might expect to find some
elements from the two important islands of Rhodes and Carpathos,
which lie like the piers of a bridge between Crete and the Carian
mainland. And I think we may, without comparisons too far-fetched*
actualh* find such elements. Strabo tells us* that a former name of
Rhodes was Ophiusm : and we can hardly avoid at least seeing the
similarity between this name and that of the Washasha/' And a*> for
CarpathoS) which Homer calls Crapathos, is it too bold to hear in this
classical name an echo of the pre-Hellenic word, whatever it may ha\e
been, which the Egyptians corrupted to Keftiu, and the Hebrews to
Caphtor?*

What then are we to make of the name of the Zakkala or
Zakkara? This has hitherto proved a crux. Petrie identifies it
with Zakro in Crete 5 ; but as has several times been pointed out
regarding this identification, we do not know how old the name Zakro
may be. As we have seen that all the other tribes take their name

1 B<u0x<sp in the Greek Version v in some MSS. -*op). Cf. the first footnote on p. 7.

2 xiv. ii. 7.

3 Hall looks for the \Vashasha in Crete, and finds them in the name of the Cretan
town p a os [Oldest Civilization of Grtece, p. 177]. But if this comparatively obscure
Cretan name were really represented in the Egyptian lists, we might reasonably
look for the more important names to appear also. The name appears in the form
Oafasios) in an inscription from Halicarnassus : see Weill in Revue archtologiqw,
ser. IV, voL iii, p. 63.

4 Baur, Amos, p. 79, has already suggested this identification.

5 Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch^ 1904, p. 41.

28 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

from the coasts of Asia Minor, it is probable that the Zakkala are the
Cretan contingents to the coalition : and it may be that in their name
we are to see the interpretation of the mysterious CasluJilm of the
Table of Nations 1 (OT&D3 being a mistake for 'bo). The most
frequently suggested identification, with the TEUCBIANS (assigned by
Strabo on the authority of Callinus to a Cretan origin), is perhaps
the most satisfactory as yet put forward ; notwithstanding the just
criticism of W. Max Miiller 2 that the double Te and the vowel of the
first syllable are difficulties not to be lightly evaded. Clermont-
Ganneau 3 would equate them to a Nabatean Arab tribe, the Actxa/njzjoi,
mentioned by Stephanus of Byzantium ; but, as Weill 4 points out, it
is highly improbable that one of the allied tribes should have been
Semitic in origin ; if the similarity of names be more than an accident,
it is more likely that the Arabs should have borrowed it.

The conclusion indicated therefore is that the Philistines were a
people composed of several septs, derived from Crete and the south-
west corner of Asia Minor. Their civilization, probably, was derived
from Crete, and though there was a large Carian element in their
composition, they may fairly be said to have been the people who
imported with them to Palestine the memories and traditions of the
great days of Minos.

1 Gen. x. 14.

a Mitthtil. der wdera*. QeselUchaft, v, p. 3. On Teucer see Frazer, Adonis, Attis,

* Rtcueil cPArcteologte orientate, iv. 250. * loc. cit. p. 64.

CHAPTER II

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES
I. THE ADVENTCIIES OF WEX-AHON AMOXC; THKM

THE Golenischeff papyrus l was found in 1891 at El-Khibeh in
Upper Egypt. It is the personal report of the adventures of an
Egyptian messenger to Lebanon, sent on an important semi-religious,
semi-diplomatic mission. The naivete of the style makes it one
of the most vivid and convincing narratives that the ancient East
affords.

Ramessu XII is nominally on the throne, and the papyrus is dated
in his fifth year. The real authority at Thebes is, however, Hrihor,
the high priest of Araon, who is ultimately to usurp the sovereignty
and become the founder of the Twenty-first Dynasty. In Lower
Egypt, the Tanite noble Nesubenebded, in Greek Smendes, has
control of the Delta. Egypt is in truth a house divided against
itself.

On the sixteenth day of the eleventh month of the fifth year of
Ramessu, one Wen-Amon was dispatched from Thebes to fetch
timber for the barge called User-het, the great august sacred barge
of Amon-Ra, king of the gods. Who Wen-Amon may have been,
we do not certainly know ; he states that he had a religious office,
but it is not clear what this was. It speaks eloquently for the rotten
state of Egypt at the time, however, that no better messenger could
be found than this obviously incompetent person a sort of Egyptian
prototype of the Rev. Robert Spalding ! With him was an image
of Amon, which he looked upon as a kind of fetish, letters of credit
or of introduction, and the wherewithal to purchase the timber.

Sailing down the Nile, Wen-Amon in due time reached Tanis, and
presented himself at the court of Nesubenebded, who with his wife
^ received the messenger of Amon-Ra with fitting courtes^y.

He handed over his letters, which (being themselves unable to
decipher them) they caused to be read : and they said, * Yea, yea,

1 See Max Miiller, Ulitflieilunaen der deutschtn vorderasiatischen
1900, p. 14; Ennan, ZeitscMft fur tigyptische Spracht, xxxviii, p. 1; Breasted,
Ancient Records, iv, p. 274.

30 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

I will do all that our lord Amon-Ba saith: Wen-Amon tamed at
Tarns till a fortnight had elapsed from his first setting out from
Thebes; and then his hosts put him in charge of a certain Mengebti,
captain of a ship about to sail to Syria. This was rather casual;
evidently Mengebti's vessel was an ordinaiy trading ship, whereas we
might have expected (and as appears later the Syrians did expect)
that one charged with an important special message should be sent
in a special ship. At this point the thoughtless Wen-Amon made
his fitst blunder. He forgot all about reclaiming his letters of
intttiduction from Xesubenebded, and so kid up for himself the
troubles even now in store for the helpless tourist who tries to land
at Beirut without a passport Like the delightful pilgrimage of the
mediaeval Dominican Felix Fabri, the modernnes* of this narrative
of antiquity is not one of its least attractions.

On the "first day of the twelfth month M engebtf s ship set sail.
After a journey of unrecorded length the ship put in at Dor,
probably the modern Tantura on the southern coast of the promon-
tory of CarmeL Dor was inhabited by Zakkala (a very jmportant
piece of information) and they had a king named Badyra. We are
amazed to read that, apparently as soon as the ship entered the
harbour, this hospitable monarch sent to Wen-Amon * much bread*
a jar of wine^ and a joint of beef. I verily believe that this was
a tale got up by some bakhshish-hunting huckster. The simple-
minded tourist of modem days is imposed upon by similar magnificent
fables.

There are few who have travelled much by Levant steamers without
having lost something by theft. Sufferers may daim Wen-Amon as
a companion in misfortune. As soon as the vessel touched at Dor,
some vessels of gold, four vessels and a purse of silver in all 5 deben
or about 1| Ib. of gold and 31 deben or about 7J Ib. of silver were
stolen bv a man of the ship, who decamped. This was all the more
serious, because, as appears later, these valuables were actually the
money with which Wen-Amon had been entrusted for the purchase of
the timber.

So Wen-Amon did exactly what he would have done in the
twentieth century A.D. He went the following morning and inter-
viewed the governor, Badyra. There was no Egyptian consul at the
time^ so he was obliged to conduct the interview in person. * I have
been robbed in thy harbour,' he says, 'and thou, being king, art he
who should judge, and search for my money. The money indeed
belongs to Amon-Ra, aad Nesubenebded, and Hrihor my lord : it also
belongs to Waiati, and Makamaru, and Zakar-Baal prince of Byblos '

THE IIISTOHY OF THE PHILISTINE? 31

the last three being evidently the names of the merchants who
had been intended to receive the money. The account of Abraham'*
negotiations with the Hittites is not more modem than the king's
reply. We can feel absolutely certain that he said exactly the words
which Wen-Amon puts in his mouth : *Thy honour and excellency !
Behold, I know nothing of this complaint of thine. If the thief were
of my land, and boarded the ship to >teal thy treasure, I would even
repay it from mine own treasury till they found who the thief was.
But the thief belongs to thy >hip (so I have no responsibility).
Howbeit, wait a few days and I will ^eek for him." Wen-Amon had to
be content with this a&>.sunmce. Probably nothing wa> done after he had
been bowed out from the governor's presence : in any case, nine days
elapsed without news of the mining property. At the end of the
time Wen-Amon gave up hope, and made up his mind to do the best
he could without the money. He still had his image of Amon-Ra,
and he had a child-like belief that the foreigners would share the
reverent awe with which he himself regarded it. So he sought per-
mission of the king of Dor to depart.

Here comes a lacuna much to be deplored. A sadly broken frag-
ment helps to fill it up, but consecutive sense is unattainable. * He
said unto me " Silence ! * . . . and they went away and sought their
thieves . . . and I went away from Tyre as dawn was breaking . . .
Zakar-Baal, prince of By bios . . . there I found 30 deben of silver and
took it ... your silver is deposited with me ... I will take it ...
they went away ... I came to ... the harbour of Byblos and . . .
to Amon, and I put his goods in it. The prince of Byblos >ent a
messenger to me . . . my harbour. I sent him a message . . ."* These,
with a few other stray words, are all that can be made out. It seems
as though Wen-Amon tried to recoup himself for his loss by
appropriating the silver of some one else. At any rate, the fragment
leaves Weu-Anion at his destination, the harbour of Byblos. Then
the continuous text begins again. Apparently Zakar-Baal has sent
a message to him to begone and to find a ship going to Egypt in
which he could sail. Why Zakar-Baal was so inhospitable does not
appear. Indeed daily, for nineteen days, he kept sending a similar
message to the Egyptian, who seems to have done nothing one way
or another. At last Wen-Amon found a ship about to sail for
Egypt, and made arrangements to go as a passenger in her, despairing
of ever carrying out his mission. He put his luggage on board and
then waited for the darkness of night to come on board with his
image of Amon, being for some reason anxious that none but himself
should see this talisman.

32 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

But now a strange thing happened. One of the young men of
Zakar-BoaFs entourage was seized with a prophetic ecstasy the first
occurrence of this phenomenon on record and in his frenzy cried,
" Bring up the god ! Bring up Amon's messenger that has him !
St-nd him, and let him go." Obedient to the prophetic message
Zakar-Baal sent down to the harbour to summon the Egyptian. The
latter was much annoyed, and protested, not unreasonably, at this
sudden change of attitude. Indeed he suspected a ruse to let the
ship go oft; with his belongings, and leave him defenceless at the
tuercv of the Bvblites. The only effect of his protest was an
additional order to * hold up * the ship as well.

In the morning he presented himself to Zakar-Baal. After the
sacrifice had been made in the castle by the sea-shore where the
prince dwelt, Wen-Amon was brought into his presence. He was
* sitting in his upper chamber, leaning his back against a window,
while the waves of the great Syrian sea beat on the shore behind
him \ To adapt a passage in one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's best-
known stories, we can imagine the scene, but we cannot imagine
Wen-Amon imagining it: the eye-witness speaks in every word of
the picturesque description.

The interview was not pleasant for the Egyptian. It made so
deep an impression upon him, that to our great gain he was able
when writing his report to reproduce it almost verbatim, as follows :

* Amotfs favour upon thee,' said Wen-Amon.

*How long is it since thou hast left the land of Amon ? * demanded
Zakar-Baal apparently without returning his visitor's salutation.

6 Five months and one day, 7 said Wen-Amon.

(This answer shows how much of the document we have lost. We
cannot account for more than the fourteen days spent between Thebes
and Tanis, nine days at Dor, nineteen days at Byblos six weeks in
all -phis the time spent in the voyage, which at the very outside
could scarcely have been more than another six weeks.)

* Well then, if thou art a true man, where are thy credentials ? *
We remember that Wen-Amon had left them with the prince of

Tanis, and he said so. Then was Zakar-Baal very wroth. * What 1
There is no writing in thy hand? And where is the ship that
Nesubenebded gave thee? Where are its crew of Syrians? For
sure, he would never have put thee in charge of this (incompetent
Egyptian) who would have drowned thee and then where would
they have sought their god and thee ? *

This is the obvious sense, though injured by a slight lacuna.
Nothing more clearly shows how the reputation of Egypt had sunk

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 33

in the interval since the exploits of Kame^su III. Zakar-Baal .-peaks
of Mengebti and his Egyptian crew with much the same contempt as
Capt. Davis in Stevenson^s Ebb-tide speaks of a crew of Kanakas.
Wen-Amon ventured on a mild protest. * Nesubenebded has no
Syrian crews : all his ships are manned with Egyptians/

* There are twenty ships in my harbour,' said Zafcar-Baal sharply,

*and ten thousand ships in Sidon " The exaggeration and the

aposiopesis vividly mirror the vehemence of the speaker. He was
evidently going on to say that these ship?, though Egyptian, were
all manned by Syrians. But, seeing that Wen-Amon was &* he
expresses it, * silent in that supreme moment" 1 he broke off, and
abruptly asked

'Now, what is thy business here? *

We are to remember that Wen-Amon had come to buy timber,
but had lost his money. We cannot >ay anything about whether he
had actually recovered the money or its equivalent, because of the
unfortunate gap in the document already noticed. However, it would
appear that he had at the moment no ready cash, for he tried the
effect of a little bluff. *I have come for the timber of the great
august barge of Amon-Ra, king of the gods. Thy father gave it, as
did thy grandfather, and thou wilt do so too/

But Zakar-Baal was not impressed. *True," !*aid he, 'they gave
the timber, but they were paid for it : I will do so too, if I be paid
likewise." 1 And then we are interested to learn that he had his father's
account-books brought in, and showed his visitor the records of large
sums that had been paid for timber. c See now," 1 continued Zakar-
Baal in a speech rather difficult to construe intelligibly, fi had I and
my property been under the king of Egypt, he would not have sent
money, but would have sent a command. These transactions of my
father's were not the payment of tribute due. I am not thy servant
nor the servant of him that sent thee. All I have to do is to speak,
and the logs of Lebanon lie cut on the shore of the sea. But where
are the sails and the cordage thou hast brought to transport the logs ?
. . Egypt is the mother of all equipments and all civilization ; how
then have they made thee come in this hole-and-corner way ?"" He
is evidently still dissatisfied with this soi-dteant envoy, coming in
a common passenger ship without passport or credentials.

Then Wen-Amon played his trump card. He produced the image
of Amon. 'No hole-and-corner journey is this, O guilty one !' said
he. * Amon owns every ship on the sea, and owns Lebanon which thou
hast claimed as thine own. Amon has sent me, and Hrihor my lord
has made me come, bearing this great god. And yet, though thou didst

) THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

well know that lie was here, thou hadst kept him waiting twenty-nine
days in the harbour. 1 Former kings have sent money to thy fathers,
but not life and health : if thou do the bidding of Amon, he will
send thee life and health. Wish not for thyself a thing belonging to
Amon-Ra/

These histrionics, however, did not impress Zakar-Baal any more
than the previous speech. Clearly WearAmfiU saw * n his face that
the lord of Byblos was not overawed by the image of his god, and
that he wanted something more tangible than vague promises of life
and health. So at length he asked for his scribe to be brought him
that he might write a letter to Tanis, praying for a consignment of
goods on account. The letter was written, the messenger dispatched,
and in about seven weeks returned with a miscellaneous cargo of gold,
silver, linen, 500 rolls of papyrus (this is important), hides, rope,
lentils, and fish. A little present for Wen-Amon himself was sent as
well by the lady Tentamon. Then the business-like prince rejoiced,
we are told, and gave the word for the felling of the trees. And at
last* some eight months after Wen-Amon^s departure from Thebes,
the timber lay on the shore ready for delivery.

A curious passage here follows in the papyrus. It contains
one of the oldest recorded jokes if not actually the oldest in the
world. "When Zakar-Baal came down to the shore to give the
timber over to Wen-Amon, he was accompanied by an Egyptian butler,
by name Pen-Amon. The shadow of Zakar-Baafs parasol happened
to fell on the envoy, whereupon the butler exclaimed, Lo, the
shadow of Pharaoh thy lord falletb, on thee!' The point of the
witticism is obscure, but evidently even Zakar-Baal found it rather
too extreme, for he sharply rebuked the jester. But he proceeded
himself to display a delicate humour. *Now,' said he, fi l have done
for thee what my fathers did, though thou hast not done for me what
thy fathers did. Here is the timber lying ready and complete. Do
what thou wilt with it. But do not be contemplating the terror of
the sea' (there cannot be the slightest doubt that Wen-Amon was at
this moment glancing over the waters and estimating his chances of
a smooth crossing). ' Contemplate for a moment the terror of Me !
Ramessu IX sent some messengers to me and' here he turned to the
butler * Go thou, and show him their graves ! *

* Oh, let me not see them ! ' was the agonized exclamation of Wen-
Amon, anxious now above all things to be off without further delay.
* Those were people who had no god with them ! Wherefore dost
thou not instead erect a tablet to record to all time "that Amon-Ra
1 An inconsistency : he has added ten days to his former statement.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINKS *>

sent to me and I sent timber to Egypt, to beseech ten thousand years
of life, and so it came to pass "* ? '

* Truly that would be a great testimony ! " said the sarcastic prince,
and departed.

Wen-Amon now set about loading his timber. But presently
there sailed eleven ships of the Zakkala into the harbour possibly
those on whom he had made a rjuh attempt at piracy to recoup him-
self for his losses at Dor. The merchants in them demanded his
arrest. The poor Egyptian >at down on the shore and wept. *They
have come to take me again !' he cried out it would appear that
he had been detained by the Zakkala before, but the record of this
part of his troubles is lost in one of the lacunae of the MS. We
despair of him altogether when he actually goes on to tell us that
when news of this new trouble reached Zakar-Baal, that magnate
wept also. However, we need not question the charming detail that
he sent to Wen-Amon an Egyptian singing-girl, to console him with
her songs. But otherwise he washed his hands of the whole affair.
He told the Zakkala that he felt a delicacy about arrenting the
messenger of Amon on his own land, but he gave them permission to
follow and arrest him themselves, if they should see fit. So away
Wen-Amon sailed, apparently without his timber, and presumably
with the Zakkala in pursuit. But he managed to evade them.
A wind drove him to Cyprus. The Cypriotes came out, as he
supposed, to kill him and his crew ; but they brought them before
Haiiba* their queen. He called out 'Does any one here understand
Egyptian ?* One man stepped forward. He dictated a petition to
be translated to the queen

And here the curtain falls abruptly, for the papyrus breaks off,
and the rest of this curious tragi-comedy of three thousand years ago
is lost to us.

We see from it that the dwellers on the Syrian coast had com-
pletely thrown off the terror inspired by the victories of Ramessu III.
An Egyptian on a sacred errand from the greatest men in the
country, bearing the image of an Egyptian god, could be robbed,
bullied, mocked, threatened, thwarted in every possible way.
Granted that he was evidently not the kind of man to command
respect, yet the total lack of reverence for the royalties who had sent
him, and the sneers at Egypt and the Egyptian rulers, axe very
remarkable.

We see also that the domain of the People of the Sea' was
more extensive than the scanty strip of territory usually allowed them
on Bible maps. Further evidence of this will meet us presently,

Tl Q

36 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

but meanwhile it may be noted that the name 'Palestine' is much
less of an exfamon of the name *Philistia' than the current maps
would have us suppose. In other words, the two expressions are
more nearly synonymous than they are generally taken to be. We
find Dor* south of Carmel, to be a Zafckala town ; and Zakkala ships
are busy in the ports further north.

Indeed, one is half inclined to see Zakkala dominant at Byblos
itself. Wen-Amon was a person of slender education even of his
own language he was not a master and he was not likely to render
foreign names correctly. Probably he could speak nothing but Egyp-
tian : he was certainly ignorant of the language of Cyprus, whatever
that may have been : and possibly linguistic troubles are indicated by
hit> rendering of the name of the lord of Byblos. Can it be that
this was not a name at all, but a title (or rather the Semitic transla-
tion of a title, given by a Zakkala dragoman) : that Zakar is not
T3r * remember', but the name of the Zakkala: and that Baal here,
as frequently elsewhere, means c lord' in a human and not a divine
sense? If so, the name would mean 'the lord of the Zakkala %
a phrase that recalls 'the lords of the Philistines' in the Hebrew
Scriptures. The syntax assumed is of course quite un-Semitic : but
it is often the case in dragomans' translations that the syntax of the
original language is preserved. Something like this idea has been
anticipated by M. A. J. Reinach. 1

Zakar-baal was no mere pirate chieftain, however. He was a sub-
stantial, civilized, and self-reliant prince, and contrasts most favour-
ably with the weak, half-blustering, half-lacriniose Egyptian. He
understood the Egyptian language ; for he could rebuke the jest of
his Egyptian butler, who would presumably speak his native tongue
in 'chaffing' his compatriot; and no doubt the interview in the upper
room was carried on in Egyptian. He was well acquainted with the
use of letters, for he knew where to put his finger on the relevant
parts of the accounts of his two predecessors. These accounts were
probably not in cuneiform characters on clay tablets, as he is seen to
import large quantities of papyrus from Egypt. He is true to his
old maritime traditions : he builds his house where he can watch the
great waves of the Mediterranean beat on the shore, and he is well
informed about the ships in his own and the neighbouring harbours,
and their crews.

There is a dim recollection of a Philistine occupation of Phoenicia

1 * Bybios, oh rfcgne un prince qui pourrait bien 6tre un Tchakara semitise, si Ton
en cioit son nom de Tchakar-baal.' RWUB archtolofftqu*, ser. IV, vol. xv, p. 45.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES S7

recorded for us in an oft-quoted passage of Justin (xviii. ;3. S\ l
in which he mentions a raid by the king of Adikclon, just before the
fall of Troy, on the Phoenician toun of Sidon (<o called from an
alleged Phoenician word *sidon\ meaning 'fish"). This is of course
merely a saga-like tradition, and us we do not know from what
authority Justin drew hi> information we can hardly put a very
heavy strain upon it. And yet it seems to hang together with the
other evidence, that in the Mycenaean jieriocl, when Troy was taken,
there actually was a Philistine Mettleuient on the Phoenician coast
As to the specific mention of Jj/fAvfcw, a suggestion, perhaps a little
venturesome, may be hazarded. The original writer of the history
of this vaguely-chronicled event, whoever be may Lave been, possibly
recorded correctly that it was the Ztikkala who raided Sidon. Some
later author or copyist was puzzled by this forgotten name, and
* emended 1 a rege Sacalomorum to a rege Ascalmlorum. Stranger
things have happened in the course of manuscript transmission. 2

The Papyrus gives us some chronological indications of importance.
The expedition of Wen-Amon took place in the fifth year of Hamessu
XII, that is to say, about JLJlfi. B.C. Zakar-Baal had already been
governor of Byblos for a considerable time, for he had received
envoys from Ramessu IX (1144-1129). Suppose these envoys to
have come about 1130, that gives him already twenty years. The
envoys of Ramessu IX were detained seventeen years ; but in the
first place this may have been an exaggeration, and in the second
place we need not suppose that many of those seventeen years
necessarily fell within the reign of the Bender of these messengers.
Further, Zakar-BaaPs lather and grandfather had preceded him in
office. We do not know how long they reigned, but giving twenty-
five years to each, which is probably a high estimate, we reach the
date 1180, which is sufficiently long after the victory of Bamessu III
for the people to begin to recover from the blow which that event
inflicted on them.

1 * Et quoniam ad Cartbaginiensium mentionem ucntum est, de origine eorum
pauca dicenda sunt, repetitis Tyriorum paulo altius rebus, quorum casus etiam
dolendi fuerunt. Tyriomm gens condita a Phoenicibus fuit, qui terraemotu uexati,
relicto patriae solo, Assyrium stagnum primo, mox mari proximum Uttus incolue-
ront, condita ibi urbe quam a piscium ubertate Sidona appellauerunt ; nam piscem
Phoenices sidon uocant. Post multos deinde annos a rege Ascaloniorum expugnati,
nauibus appulsi, Tyron urbem ante annum Troianae cladis condiderunt.'

a On the other hand Scylax in his Perijilu* calls Ashkelon -a city of the
Tynans'.

88 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

II. Tiiuft SmriiGLE WITH THE HEBREWS

We now turn tf) the various historical references to the Philistines
in the Hebrew Scriptures.

It happens that the Zakkala, with whom the Golenischeff Papyrus
\> concerned, are not mentioned by name in the received text of the
Old Testament. The southern Philistines were more conspicuous in
the history of the Hebrews, and this name is in consequence used
indifferently for all the tribal subdivisions of the hated enemy. The
first appearance of the Philistines on the coast of Southern Pales-
tine is not recorded in the Old Testament, but it may possibly be
inferred indirectly. In the oldest monument of Hebrew speech,
the Song of Deborah, the tribe of Dan is referred to as a maritime
people who * remained in ships" 1 while their brethren bore the brunt
of the invasion of Sisera. Towards the end of the Book of Judges,
we find that certain of the tribe of Dan are compelled to seek a home
elsewhere, and choose the fertile, well-watered, but hot and fever-
haunted Laish, a place remote from everywhere, and where the
people were * quiet 1 as they well might be in that malaria-stricken
furnace. Why did the Danites leave for this unsatisfactory territory
their healthy and rich land by the sea-coast ? Probably because they
were driven by pressure from without. The migration of the Danites
can best be explained by the settlement of the Philistines. And it
is suggestive that the first great champion to stand for Israel against
the intruders, Samson, belonged to Zorah, whence went forth the
Danite spies (Judg. xviii. ).

The first allusion to the Philistines which we meet with in the Old
Testament, that in the genealogical table of the nations in Genesis x,
we have already discussed. Next we find a cycle of stories, told with
but little variation both of Abraham and of Isaac (Gen. xx, xxi, xxvi),
in which those heroes of old are brought into contact with a certain
* Abimelech, king of the Philistines \ In both cases the patriarch,
to save himself, conceals his true relationship to his wife, which is
revealed to the deceived monarch: in both, the latter displays a
singular dignity and righteousness in the delicate position in which
his guest's duplicity places him : and in both there is a subsequent
dispute about the possession of wells. The stories are in short
doublets of one another, and both echo a similar tale told of Abraham
in Egypt, at an earlier stage of his career (Gen. xii). Whoever
added the inept title to Psalm xxxiv evidently had these stories in
his mind when he inadvertently wrote e a Psalm of David when he
changed his behaviour before Abimelech'' instead of Achishi an un-

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILKTINKS 39

conscious remifli?cence of the* tale might pu^ibly htue been suggested
by vv. 12, 13 of the Ptalm in question.

The use of the wonl 6 Phiii>iine " in these .stories ha> long been
recognized as an anachronism. Perhaps with less harshiiCi* and equal
accuracy we might characterize it a^ a rather free use of modem name*
and circumstances in telling an ancient tale. Even now we might
find, for example, a popular writer on hirfory Baying that this event
or that of the Early British period took place * in Norfolk ", although
it i? obvious that the territory of the North Tolk must have received
its Saxon name in later times. The talt* of Abraham and IMIOC were
written when the land where their scenes were laid wa> in truth the
Land of the Philistines ; und the story-teller was not troubled with
the question as to how far back that occupation lasted. lucked when
Abimelech fir&t appears on the scene he is not a Philistine, but the
Semitic king of the town of Gerar. The two passages in Gen. xxi,
which might be understood * they returned into [what we call]
Philistia \ . . * Abraham sojourned in [what is now] Philistia ", have
misled the writer (or copyist) of Gen. xxvi into supposing that
Abimelech was actually king of the Philistines. In fact the Greek
Version of xxvi. 8 seems to preserve an indication of older readings
in which he was simply called, as in the other story, king of
Gerar.

Noordtzij (Filht. p. 59) attempts to demonstrate a pre-Ramessu
occupation of S. Palestine by the Philistines, principally on the ground
that the time between Rame&u III and Sam>on or Saul is too short
for the * semitizing * process to have taken place. This seeing hardly
a cogent argument to me: the ' semitization * was by no means
complete : the special Semitic rite of circumcision was not adopted :
there is no reason to suppose that the language of the Philistines
had been abandoned for a Semitic language. And we need have no
difficulty in supposing such changes to take place with great rapidity.
Thanks to the undermining influence of returned American emigrants,
the Irish peasant has shown a change of attitude towards traditional
beliefs in fairies and similar beings? within the past twenty years as pro-
found as any change that might have taken place between Ramessu III
and Saul under the influence of the surrounding Semitic populations.

A similar anachronism meets us in Exodus xiii. 17, enshrining an
ancient tradition that the ordinary caravan-route from Egypt by way
of the coast was avoided in preference to the long and wearisome
march through the desert, in order to keep clear of the Philistines
and their military prowess. Likewise in the song preserved in
Exodus xv, we find (v. 14) despondency attributed to the dwellers

40 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

in PhilistiA at the news of the crashing of the Red Sea. This song,
however, is probably not very ancient.

On the other Land, the writers who have contributed to the
Pentateuch in its final form do not all >hare the indifference to
chronological detail shown by the Yahwist tstory-teller. Often as
are the tribes of Canaan enumerated in passages anticipatory of the
conquest of the Promised Land, the Philistines are never mentioned :
they have no share in the territory of the Hittite, the Girgashite, the
Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Jebusite. In view of the prominence
of the Philistines in the later history, this is a very significant fact.
The solitary' exception is so vague that it might almost be said to
prove the rule a reference to the Mediterranean sea by the name of
*the Sea of the Philistines' in Exodus xxxiii. 31. In Joshua xiii. &,
the * districts " or fi circles "* of the Philistines are enumerated among
the places not conquered by the leader of the Hebrew immigration
the following verse, to which we shall return later, enumerates the
4 districts '. But there is no reference to the Philistines in the parallel
account contained in Judges i. There, in verse 19, the dwellers in the
valley *, i. e. in the low coast -land on which the Judahite territory
bordered, are depicted as successfully resisting the aggression of the
Hebrew tribe with the help of their iron chariots : the previous verse,
which contradicts this, and which unhistorically claims that Judah
captured the cities Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron, must necessarily be an
interpolation. 1 In Judges iii. 8 we find an agreement with the passage
just cited from Joshua the five lords of the Philistines, as well as the
* Canaanites * (whatever may be exactly meant by the name in this
connexion), the Phoenicians, and the Hi[tt]ites are enumerated as
being left unconquered. The curious reason assigned, that this was
to practise the Hebrews in war, is at any rate concordant with the
old tradition that the terror of the warlike Philistines prevented the
Hebrews following the direct route into the Promised Land.

The passages examined so far have rather been concerned with the
settlement of the protagonists in the great struggle for the possession
of Palestine than with the course of the struggle itself. We are to
picture the Hebrew tribes crossing the Jordan from the East, and
some little time afterwards the Philistines (and Zakkala) establishing
themselves on the rich coast-lands: this much we can see with the
aid of the Egyptian records cited in the preceding pages. We now
follow the history of the conflict.

At the outset we are confronted by a puzzling group of passages.
In the very ancient Song of Deborah, picturing the distracted state
1 See Moore's Commentary, p. 37.

THE HISTORY OF THE I'HIIJbTI.VEg 41

of the country under foreign oppressors, the writer describes how
travellers and caravan*, from fear, abandoned the main thoroughfares
and journeyed along the by-paths f which the winding valle\> of
Palestine offer an endles-, choice. This was in the days of a certain
Shamgar son of Anath l (Judge* v. 6). The name has a foreign
appearance-: a Hittite analog}- (Soiigar) has teen sought for it.
We cannot, however, conclude that he was necessarily a foreigner,
even though his progenitor is said to be Anath, which happens
to be a well-known goddess-name. There is not another case of
a Hebrew bearing so frankly idolatrous a name in the Old Testa-
ment* But 5n the Aswan papyri we have a glimpse of what
Jewi>h life was, independent of priestly influences ; and these
show an extraordinary tolerance of heathen names and practices.
We find Hosea son of Peti-Khnum. Names like 'Athar-ili, Nebo-
nathan, Ben-Tirash occur in the community : the daughter of one
Mahseiah swears in a law-court by the goddess Sati. Shamgar son
of Anath would have been quite at home in this company.

The antecedent for this reference in Deborah^ Song appears to lie
in a verse at the end of chapter iii (v. 31), which *ays that Shamgar
-son of Anath killed six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad, and
saved Israel. It 5s, however, obvious that this verse is out of place.
It interrupts the flow of the narrative : there is no word of Philistine
oppression in the context, and the text proceeds * When Ehud was
dead . . . "" certain things happened, following on the story of Ehud
which the Shamgar passage interrupts. The later development of
the history contains no recognition of the labours of Shamgar. There
are indeed few passages in literature which are so clearly no part of
the original document: and we can hardly doubt that it has been
inserted from some other source, or from another part of the book, in
order to provide an explanation for the allusion in DeboraKs Song.

It is curious that the chief Greek MSS. read Airax instead of
4 Anath' here, but not in Deborah's Song. 3 A number of Greek MSS.
repeat the verse relating to Shamgar after xvi. 31 i. e. immediately
after the story of Samson. This seems a better place for it.*

1 The additional note of time, k ln the days of Jael% is generally rejected as
a gloss.

3 See Moore's Judges^ pp. 143, 143, and Journal of American Oriental Society,
xixb, p. 159.

3 The name Shamgar is given as Sa/ze^op, ^apayap, 2/7a/>, 'S.fjua-^ap, AficyaB,
5a/7a0, Mcuyap, Eprfap. His father's name in Judges iii is given as Aivajx, Awax,
Aw0, EwzXi AtfutB, Awa0 ; in Judges V as Av<z0, KCWX0, Eva0, E?a0a;i, Avefle/*.

* The verse as repeated says that * Semegar (or JEmegar; son of Anan ^Ainan,
Enan) arose after Samson, and slew of the Foreigners, 600 men without the cattle,
and he also saved Israel*. Note the transformation of the ox-goad.

452 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

The Shanigar story, in >hort, lo jks like one of the floating traditions
that have more paiiicularly cryNtallized round Samson and the mighty
men of David. A remarkable parallel to the exploit of Shamgar has
been found in the deed of * Shammah the Hararite ** a not dissimilar
name one of David's followers, who in some such rough and ready
way defended a field of crops barley or lentils from Philistine
marauders. 1

But can the story be so summarily dismissed ? Grant all the
difficulties that Shamgar's name has a foreign aspect, that the prose
account of him is an interpolation, that the Philistines seem to appear
too early on the scene; yet the scanty allusion to this obscure
champion may after all record a tradition of the beginnings of the
great struggle.

For besides Shamgar, Deborahfs Song mentions another arresting
personality. The very grandeur of the paean throws a romantic halo-
round the person of the unfortunate Sisera, victim of a crime against
the desert law of hospitality difficult to parallel even in the wild
annals of Bedawin life. The heartless glee with which the poet
triumphs over the chieftain's anxious, watching mother makes the
latter for us one of the most pathetic figures in the whole crowded
gallery of the Old Testament. Time has brought its revenge for both
mother and son.

In the prose version of the combat, Sisera is represented as the
general of Jabin, king of Hazor, and the latter is the head of the
attack on Israel. But Jabin.has an altogether secondary place in the
narrative, and Sisera is the central figure. Jabiu, indeed, is probably
imported into the story from the source that lies at the back of
Joshua xi, where there is no mention of Sisera. In Psalm Ixxxiii. 9
Sisera is mentioned before Jabin. He has a town of his own,.
* Harosheth of the Gentiles," 1 more than a day's journey from the
city of Jabin ; and the vignette of his mother surrounded by her
court ladles gives us a picture of a more important establishment
than that of a mere captain of a host. Sisera in short is an indepen-
dent king, and the story as we have it is either an account of a single
campaign in which two kings were in league, or, more probably,
a combination of the narratives of two campaigns wholly independent.

Harosheth is generally identified with the modern Harathiyeh, in the
bottle-neck which forms the mouth of the plain of Esdraelon a region
entirely in Philistine hands, at least at the end of Saul's wars. This
identification seems feirly trustworthy. Not far off from Harosheth
was a village with the name Beth-dagon : and Harosheth itself is distin-
1 3 Sam. rxiiL 11 ; 1 Chron. xi. 13.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 4*

guished by the appellation * of the goyluT or foreigners. In Joshua
xii. 23 'the king of the goylm in Gilgal " is mentioned in noteworthy
juxtaposition with Dor, which figures o conspicuously in the report
of Wen-Amon ; but thi* pa-sage ha* been suspected and various
emendations Higge*taU chief of which is to read Vzh for bfei nd
to translate * king of nation- belonging to Galilee'. Thib is of course
reminiscent of the famou> * Galilee of the Gentile*' 1 : but on the
other hand we may compare ntrfcss r^'itf * the Galilees of Philistia* in
Joshua xiiL 2 and Joel iii. 4 (= Hebrew iv. 4?), which in the latter
passage is mentioned immediately after the Philfotiue territory. The
word goylm is of no more specific meaning than our word * nations^:
though usually applied to foreigners, it may even on occasion be
applied to the nation of Israel : so it cannot be >aid to be very
conclusive. But one wonders whether in such passages and phrases
as these it might not bear the special meaning of the foreigners par
excellence, the most outlandish people with whom the Hebrews came
into contact that is to say the Philistines and their cognate tribes,
for whom the Greek translators reserve the name o\\o<iAoi. In the
present case they would more especially be the Zakkala, of whom
Wen-Amon tells us, but who are not mentioned by name in the
Hebrew writings.

Sisera?s enormous host of iron chariots, a possession which, a& we
saw, also enabled the coast-dwellers of the South to hold their own, is
emphasized in the prose account of the battle, as in the speech put
by Deborah's Song into his mothers mouth : and it i> interesting to
notice that we hear again of these iron chariots as being on the plain
of Esdraelon (Joshua xvii. 16),

The name of the prince also is suggestive. It is not Semitic : and
the numerous Hittite names ending in slra Khetasira.and the like
have been quoted to indicate its possible origin. But we should not
forget Badyra, the Zakkala prince of the neighbouring town of Dor.
And may it not be asked whether Sisera, fcnc'D, could be a reduplicattc
form derived from the root of pD scren (the latter being possibh
a participle), the one word of the Philistine language which w
certainly know the technical term for the * lords" of the Philistin<
state ? This guess presupposes that the language of the Philistine
was Indo-European an assumption which it has not yet been possibl
either to prove or disprove. Some possible evidence of reduplication i
afforded by such combinations as REREIET and perhaps KRKOKLE
in the Praesos inscriptions. It is interesting to note that the nam

1 Isa. ix. 1 ( Hebrew viii. 33).

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911
occurs in the I5*t of Keftian names on the Egyptian tablet

. f O. i

described on a previous page*

If Sisera was a Philistine or at least one of cognate race, we have
some use for Shamgar and his ox-goad. Otherwise, the latter must be
expunged from the list of Judges, if he be not actually numbered among
the oppressors, as Moore in his Commentary is inclined to do. The
combination AN AIT, which ends one of the Praesos inscriptions just
mentioned, has been compared to the name of Shamgar's parent
Anath ; but there is no probability that such a coincidence between
a short iascription on the one hand, and a few proper names on the
other, is of any importance*

In Judges x. 6, 7, 11 there is mention of Philistine oppression, in
strange and scarcely intelligible connexion with the Amorites. This
passage does not help us nearer to the solution of problems. It is in
the narrative of Samson that the Philistines first come conspicuously
on the scene. It is unnecessary to summarize the familiar incidents :
indeed for our purpose these chapters, though of the deepest interest,
are disappointing. The narrator is content to tell his tale, without
troubling himself about the attendant circumstances which we would
so gladly know.

In discussing this remarkable series of episodes it is unnecessary
to raise the question of their historicity. 1 Still more irrelevant
would be a discussion of the pseudo-scientific hypothesis that Samson
(like Achilles, Heracles, Max Miiller, Gladstone, and other demonstrated
characters of mythology) was a solar myth. It is sufficient for the
purpose of our present discussion that the tale gives us an early
tradition of the condition of affairs at the time indicated ; and as
I have said elsewhere, 2 it is probably to be regarded as a prose epic
concentrating into the person of a single ideal hero the various
incidents of a guerrilla border- warfare.

This being postulated, one or two points of importance strike us in
reading the story. The first is, that the Philistine domination was
complete, and was passively accepted by the Hebrews. 4 The Philis-
tines are rulers over us ' say the men of Judah, who propose to betray
the champion to his enemies. As is so often the case with a nation of
separate clans, even the pressure of a formidable common enemy can-
not always heal their mutual jealousies. Ireland, in the face of the
Vikings in the ninth century, and of the English in the twelfth, offers

1 For a study (from a conservative standpoint) of the historicity of the Samson
narrative see Samson, eine UntersucTiung des Jiistoriscken Characters von Richt.
xiiir-xvi, von Dr. Edmund Kalt, Freiburg i. Br., 1913. This brochure contains a very
useful bibliography.

* A History of Civilization in Palestine, p. 54.

THE HfeTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 45

an instructive parallel. Only a chapter or two before the appearance
of Samson, we have the distracting episode of Abimelech : a chapter
or two later comes the story of the mas>acre of the Benjamites by the
other tribes : and whatever may l)e the true chronological relationship
of these narrative* to the historical setting of the Samson epic, they
at least indicate that there was a long period of inter-tribal disunion
that would make it ea>y for a well-organized military nation to gain
complete domination over the countrv.

But it was no mere military domination. The Philistines were
accompanied by their wive* and daughters and the attractiveness of
the latter in the eyes of Samson is a leading motive of his story. On
this side of the narrative, however, there is one point to be noticed.
There is no reason for branding the Philistines with the stigma of
having produced the mercenary traitress Delilah : indeed, whatever
indications there may be in her story point in an exactly opposite
direction. Had tradition called her a Philistine, like Samsoif s first
wife, the author of Judges would hardly have failed to make it clear.
She is described as a woman in the Valley of Sorek : which, if it be the
modern Wady es-Surar, as is generally agreed, was partly in Israelite
territory. Moreover* it would scarcely have been necessary for the
Philistine lords to have offered the gigantic bribe of 1,100 pieces of
silver each, to a woman of their own nation, that she might betray to
them the arch-enemy of her race : it would be much more likely that
they would use the persuasive argument of threatening her with the
fate of her unlucky predecessor. The name appears again as that
of a member of the tribe of Judah, in a genealogical fragment in
1 Chronicles iv. 19, preserved fay the Greek Version, but lost from the
Hebrew textus receptus. It is not too much to say that if the Delilah
episode be read carefully, the various steps become more natural and
intelligible when we picture the central figure as a tribeswoman of the
men of Judah, who in the previous chapter had attempted to antici-
pate her act of betrayal.

It is noteworthy that nowhere in the Samson story is there any
hint that there was a barrier of language between Hebrew and
Philistine. Samson and his Philistine friends at Tirnnah exchange
their rough jests without any difficulty ; Delilah, whatever her race,
converses with equal ease with the Philistine lords and with her
Hebrew husband. The same point is to be noticed throughout the
subsequent history, with the curious and significant exception of
the very last reference to the Philistines in the historical books.
Indeed, it has often been observed that the services of an interpreter
are but rarely called for in the Old Testament : although it is possible

*6 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

that such an intermediary was sometimes used without the fact being
specifically stated. 1 But'probably in ancient as in modern Palestine
even-body who had any position at all to maintain could speak several
languages. The officers of Hezekiah and Sennacherib, for instance,
could understand each the other's tongue, and could pass from one to
the other with the enviable ease of a modern Levantine polyglot.

The incident of Samson's hair has often been compared to the
purple hair of Nisus, plucked out by Scylla at the instigation of
Minos; and to the story of Pterelaos of Taphos and his golden hair
given him by Poseidon, which rendered him immortal. Both stories
are to be found in that endless mine, the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus.
The connexion of Minos with the former story is noteworthy. It has,
I believe, been suggested (but I have no note of the reference) that
the story of the virtue inherent in Samson's locks may have been
actually received by the Hebrews from Philistine sources. It may
be merely a coincidence that the name of g^m 011 ' 5 father, Manoah.
resembles the nanfe Minos.

Lastly, we notice in the Samson epic that as seen through Hebrew
eves the Philistines had already the three characteristics that marked
EEem out from the other nations round about. The adjective un-
circumcised 1 , obviously the current term of abuse in all generations,
already makes its appearance. Their peculiar government by ' lords *
also meets us, but as it happens no particular 'lord* is named, nor
does the Samson story give us any idea of their number. Thirdly, in
the final scene, we are introduced to the mysterious gagon 3 the chief
deity of the Philistine pantheon.

For how long the Philistine domination lasted we have no means
of knowing. There is no indication of the length of time supposed
to elapse between the death of Samson and the appearance on the
scene of Samuel Eli, the priest of the High Place at Shiloh, may
or may not have been contemporary with Samson: he appears
suddenly on the scene as a man in extreme old age * who had judged
Israel forty years', and vanishes almost immediately.

The next stage of the history shows us the disunited and mutually
hostile tribes of Israel gradually welding together under the pressure
of their formidable enemy, and slowly but surely, though with more
than one serious set-back, reversing the situation.

We begin with the unlucky battle in which for a time the Ark was
lost (1 Sam. iv). The topography of the battle is uncertain : the
Philistines pitched at a place quite unknown, Aphek, the Israelites

1 Thus, itis only by a foot-note, as it were, that we learn that Joseph employed an
interpreter in conversing with his brethren.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 47

at a spot of equally obncure topography, Ebcii-eer, where Samuel
afterwards set up a memorial pillar (vii. 1). The PhiliNtines were
the victors, and the I*raelites attempted to turn the battle by fetching
their national palladium from it* n>ting-place in Shiloh. The Philis-
tines were at first stricken with a superstitious fear ; but recovering
themselves they made a complete slaughter of the Israelites, and
captured the Ark itself. Their rallving-cry 'Be strong and be men,
that ye be not slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you" cor-
roborates, from the Philistine side, the evidence that the Philistines
were the masters of the Hebrews at the time.

Now begins that strange story of the wanderings of the Ark. It
would be natural to lay up the symbol of the deity of a vanquished
people in the temple of the chief god of the conquerors* : as Mesha
laid up his religious trophies before Chemosh, so the Ark was deposited
in the temple of Dagon at Ashdod a temple of which we hear down
to the time of the Maccabees (1 Mace. x. 84). But Dagon twice
falls prostrate before the Ark, the second time "being broken by
the fall. At the same time a plague of mice or rats spread over the
Philistine plain. There was a very similar plague over the same
district in 1904, and enormous damage was done to the growing
crops. Indeed, the peasants, whose fields were robbed almost as
though by the prophet JoeFs locusts, were reduced to tracking out
the rat-holes and collecting the grain that the animals had brought
down and stored : it was a curious sight to watch the women patiently
engaged in this weary work, and gradually filling bags with the
precious seed thus recovered. But in the Philistine experience
the plague of rats had a yet more serious consequence. Not only
did they *mar the land" 1 , but as we now know to be the natural
course of events, the parasites of the mice communicated to the
people the disease of bubonic plague. 1

The disease broke out first in Ashdod, and was naturally explained
as due to the presence of the Ark. They therefore dispatched it to
Gath, and of course the bearers carried the plague bacilli with them :
again it was sent to Ekron, and again the plague was carried thither ;

3 Some commentators (e. g. H. P. Smith in the International Critical Commentary)*
while recognizing that the disease was plague, have missed the essential significance
of the mice, and would remove them altogether as 'late redactional insertion 9 .
Although in the Hebrew received text, as reproduced in the English Bible, the
'mice' come in awkwardly as though a sudden afterthought, the Greek Version
makes them much more prominent throughout the narrative; and there is no
possible reason why any redactor (unless he had divined some of the most recent
discoveries in bacteriology) should have introduced mice into the story at all. The
distorted version of the plague which destroyed Sennacherib's army, recorded in
Herodotus U. 141, also introduces mice very conspicuously.

*S THE SCmVEICH LECTURES, 1911

and a* the Philistine*, even before they had secured their costly prize,
hml associate! it with outbreaks of pestilence in Egypt (1 Sam. iv. 8),
thev ta*ilv connected it with their own troubles. How they returned
it to Beth-Sterne*!^ and how the bacilli (carried probably by para-
site* on the kine, or perhaps on the coverings of the Ark) proved to
K? till virulent to the cost of the villagers who too rashly approached,
are tah too well known to need repetition.

It i* interesting that the Philistines sent back with the Ark votive
model* of their twofold plague, which yet was one, as their ancestors
hail been wont to do when, in search of healing from the ills of human
flc*h, they vwtcd the Dictaean Cave in the ancient homeland.

The following chtipter (vii) apparently represents a different strand
of tradition. According to this the Ark was suffered to remain in
Kiriath-Jearim no less than twenty years, until, probably, it was
brought up to Jerusalem at the beginning of the reign of David. 1
Samuel held a reconciliation service, as it might be called, in which
Israel renounced the various strange gods they had adopted. The
Philistines came up to plunder this peaceful assembly, but were
driven back by an appalling thunderstorm. The people gave chase,
and smote the invaders to the unknown place called Beth-Car, to
which reference has been made in the previous chapter ; and a great
memorial stone was set up at or near the spot where the Ark had
been captured. We are then told that the Philistines restored certain
cities, including Ekron and Gath (or according to the Greek text,
AAkelon and * Azob \ i. e. Gaza or Ashdod), to the Israelites, and
that they never again came up to invade Israel.

It is noticeable that the narrator, with all his desire to glorify
Samuel, avoids making a purely military leader of him, while
emphasizing his religious functions. The victory is ascribed more to
the thunderstorm, which is an answer to the * whole burnt offering *
offered by Samuel, than to military skill on the part of the Israelites
or of any leader. The writer's patriotic enthusiasm (and perhaps
some such record as Judges i. 18) have betrayed him into exaggeration
with regard to the ' restoration "* of cities that in fact had never
been Israelite. But with regard to his conclusion c that the Philistines
never again invaded Israel', it is quite possible to judge him too
harshly. If the Philistines were confined to the narrow strip of
territory from Joppa southward, the statement would be absurd : but
we have now seen that, at the time, the suzerainty of the Philistines

1 The data far the chronology of Saul's reign are notoriously insufficient. Note
that Eli's great-grandson was priest in Shiloh at the time of the battle of Michmash
(1 Sam. TOY. 3).

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 49

over the uhole of Palestine was complete, and that in all probability
they actually occupied the Northern coast, the plain of Esdraelon as far
as the Jordan, and even jwnetratwl up the fertile valleys that wind
through the Judaean mountains. This being so it may well be that
the incident here recorded was actually the last ca^e of aggression ; but
that in all the other caves in which the Philistines * came up to war"*
the purpose was defensive* to meet Israelite encroachments on their
territory. The passage therefore is not necessarily so * extravagant *
as some critics have made out.

However, there can be little doubt that the desire of the Hebrew
people for a king, which now began to express itself, was the natural
outcome of the growing sense of unity which under the pressure of the
Philistine domination was rapidly developing. A leader was urgently
needed who should be iree from the specifically religious duties to
which Samuel was entirely devoted ; it was hoped that one who could
thus give his whole attention to military matters might ultimately rid
the people of the yoke that daily became more and more intolerable.
Authorities differ as to how Samuel was affected by the popular
demand. In one version he indignantly condemned it as a revolt
against the theocracy of which he himself was at once Emperor and
Pope. In another version he raised no objection to the new
departure, definitely recognized it as a step towards delivery from
the Philistines (1 Sam. ix. 16), chose the king and received him
courteously, and declared to him the signs that testified to his
election. From this programme we learn incidentally that the
Philistines had a sort of mudlr or governor at a place called Gibeah
of God (probably to be identified with the modern village of Bam
Allah about twelve miles north of Jerusalem). 1 This fact underlines,
so to speak, what has already been said about the absence of Philistine
aggressions after the battle of Beth-Car. With an outpost so far
east as the spot indicated, the actual territory of the Philistines
included all the places where fighting took place.

Saul assumed the kingdom, and immediately the first Israelite
aggression took place: Jonathan slew the Philistine governor of Geba,
where, as at Gibeah, there seems to have been a Philistine mudir*

The Philistines, rightly considering this a sign of revolt, came up
to quell the insurrection. The Israelites were gathered together with
Saul in Michmash, 3 but when they saw the overpowering might of the

1 In the English version (1 Sam. x. 5) the word 2<JB, which in 1 Kings iv. 19 and
elsewhere means * a prefect or officer ', is translated, probably -wrongly, 'camp'.

2 There are some difficulties of interpretation and other critical complications in
the passage, on which see the standard commentators.

SO THE fCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

niOMu*. Cooping down upon them they hid themselves in the
am* *i which tht- waJitn- abounds. Saul raited anxiously for

tamu-i, and at 1*4 ventured himself to offer the necessary sacrifices :
the tLirauriAtwn, with which the stern old prophet expressed his
w*ntowit at this u>urpation of his priestly functions, was apparently
the iirvt rfnick that disturbed Saul's delicately poised mental
equilibrium, and paved the way for the insanity by which he was
afterward* afflicted.

Jonathan again came to the rescue. With his armour-bearer he
showed himself to the Philistines encamped at Michmash. They
called to him to 'come up and see something '-note again that
difference of language was no bar to intercourse and the two young
men, who had previously agreed to take such an invitation as an
omen, climbed up to the camp. In some way they succeeded in
throwing the camp into confusion, as Gideon had done with the
Midianites. Soon the Philistines broke into a panic, which a timely
earthquake intensified, and before long they were in flight, with the
armies of Israel in hot pursuit. It is a remarkable story, and still
more remarkable is the pendant the tabu put by Saul on food, which
had the natural result of making the victory less complete : the
unconscious violation of the tabu by Jonathan : the consequent silence
of the Divine oracle : his trial and condemnation : his redemption, no
doubt by the substitution of another life: the pouring out of the
blood when the tabu came to an end all these are pictures of ancient
religious custom and belief of the highest value.

The familiar story of the battle of Ephes-Dammim, with its central
incident the duel of David and Goliath is the next scene in the
drama. For the present, however, we pass it over: it is involved in
a host of difficulties. Whatever view may be taken of the story, as
we have it it is evident that neither the spirit nor the power of the
Philistines was broken by the rout at Michmash, but that they were
able to meet Israel again soon after David's introduction to the court
of Saul. David distinguished himself so as to arouse the jealousy of
Saul, now rapidly falling into the morbid mental state that clouded
his last days ; and to that jealousy was due the exile of David in the
wilderness.

. With a madman's cunning, Saul at first attempted to work David's
destruction by guile : he bribed him with the offer of his daughter's
hand to go and bring him proof that he had slain a hundred of the
uncircumcised the trick was not unlike that which in later years
David himself pkyed on Uriah the Hittite. David, however, was more
fortunate than his own victim, and fulfilled the task imposed on him.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 51

But Saul's jealousy still pursued him, and he became a complete
outlaw. His life during this period as narrated con*i*ts of a series of
episodes, more or less disconnected. On one occasion he goes to the
sanctuary at Nob, on the slope of the Mount of Olive.* (as we learn from
Lsa. x, 32), and takes the sword of Goliath thence to serve him as
a weapon : we are then surprised to find him fleeing with thi& equip-
ment to Gath, of all places but probably the two incidents should
not follow consecutively. At Gath he is recognized and to avoid
unpleasant consequences feigns insanity. This affliction would in
Semitic circles secure him a measure of inviolability the uncanny
manifestations of mental derangement or degeneracy being curiously
mixed up with notions of * holiness ". But ^jcMstu the dignified though
simple-minded lord of Gath, was not a Semite, and had no such
superstitions. He is almost modern in his protests *If you see a
madman, why do you bring him to me ? I want no madmen about
me, and I will not have him in my house ! ' l We almost hear an echo
of the sarcasms of Zakar-Baal.

All through the story of David's outlawry raids of the Philistines
run like a thread: and it must then, if never before, have been
impressed upon him that when he came into his kingdom his first
care must be to crush these troublesome neighbours finally and for
ever. Now we read of his band saving the threshing-floors of Keilah
from Philistine marauders : soon afterwards a Philistine raid breaks
off negotiations between Saul and the men of Ziph for the betrayal of
David.

But at last David, in despair of ever effecting a reconcilement with
the insane Hebrew king, threw in his lot with the Philistines. Once
more he comes to Gath or, rather, we have probably a second version
of the one incident, omitting the essential detail of the feigned mad-
ness. Here he was safe from Saul : but he did not stay very long.
Probably (as in the previous version of the story) he found Gath
uncomfortable as a place of residence, with his record of Philistine
slaughter. So in Oriental wise he dissembled, and, flattering the
king by pretending to be unworthy of living in the same city with
him, he persuaded him to purchase his vassalage by putting Ziklag at
his disposal. From this centre he raided various Bedawin camps,
and, presenting the booty to his new master, he pretended that he

1 The notion of a commentator, that Achish's protest was due to his being
already troubled with insanity in his family, deserves a place in the same cabinet
of curiosities with the speculations of the ancient blockhead who supposed that
when Our Lord wrote with His finger on the ground > v John viii. 6', He was
making a catalogue of the secret sins of the bystanders !

52 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

had been attru-king his own people. Thereby he gained the confi-
dence of AchMi, and no doubt acquired much serviceable informa-
tion about Philistine military methods and resources.

Mean w I ile the tragedy of Saul was working to its close. The Philis-
tine* wen? preparing for a final blow that would wipe off their recent
r*v*r*e*, Achish wished David, \\hom he blindly trusted, to accom-
pany him as leader of his body-guard ; but in this his wiser colleagues
overruled him. They had already learnt, in the battle of Michmash,
that the * Hebrews that were with the Philistines' were not to be
trusted when the battle went against their masters (1 Sam. xiv. 1).
So Achbh sent David away, with a dignified courtesy which contrasts
pleasingly with the duplicity, not to say treachery, of his protege. 1
David accordingly departed to his own quarters, and while the battle
of Gilboa was being won and lost he was kept busy in avenging the
raid which during his absence the Bedawin had very naturally made
on Ziklag.

The armour of the dead Saul was hung in the house of Ashtoreth,
and his body was fastened on the wall of Beth-Shan, the modern
Beisan a place close to the banks of the Jordan. This further
corroborates the conclusion already indicated as to the wide exten-
sion of Philistine territory. For they would hardly have "put the
trophy where they could not reasonably have expected to retain it. 2

For the seven years of David's reign in Hebron the Philistines gave
him no trouble. No doubt he continued to acknowledge himself as
vassal of Achish, or of the Philistine oligarchy at large. Meanwhile
Ish-baal (Ish-bosheth), Saul's son, guided and directed by Abner, set
up a kingdom across Jordan, with its centre at Mahanaim : and the
land of Ephraim remained subject to the Philistines. In the last
two years of Ish-baaTs life he extended his kingdom, doubtless under
Philistine suzerainty, to Ephraim as well : an arrangement terminated
by the defection of Abner to David and by his own assassination.
This event left the way open for David to enlarge his borders, and to
unite under his single sway the discordant elements of Judah and
Ephraim. The ever-vigilant foes, not being willing to tolerate so

1 No donbt there was a certain element of policy in Achish's hospitality : David
being the known rival of the Hebrew king, it probably seemed desirable to foment
the division between them. TOnckler (Ge*ch. I*r., p. 284) says (excathedra /) Was
ttber Dvrids Anfenthatt an seinem Hofe gesagt wird, ist Fabel'. This sort of
Begative credulity isjnst as bad science as the positive credulity which swallows
whole all the fancies of historical myth-makers.

a Unless, indeed, ire are to identify this Beth-Shan with the unknown * Shen %

^" Sam. vu. 12.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 5

large an increase in the strength of a Mibordinate, then came up
against him. 1

Three battles, disastrous* to the Philistines, are recorded as taking
place early in DavidV reign over the united kingdoms. But the
accounts of them are scanty and confused, and require careful
examination. The following are the outline accounts of them which
the author of the Book of Samuel transmit* :

A. T?ie Battle <tf Baal-Pennim.

'And when the Philistines heard that thev had anointed David
king over Israel, all the Philistine* went up to ueek David ; and
David heard of it, and went down to the hold.- Now the Philistines
had come and spread themselves in the valley of Rephaim. And
David inquired of Yahweh, saying. Shall I go up again>t the Philis-
tines ? Wilt thou deliver them into mine hand ? And Yahweh said
unto David, Go up : for I will certainly deliver the Philistines into
thine hand. And David came to Baal-Perazim, and David smote
them there ; and he said, Yahweh hath broken mine enemies before
me, like the breach of waters. Therefore he called the name of that
place Baal-Perazim. And they left their images there, and David and
his men took them away/ 2 "Samuel v. 17-21.

B. The Battle of Geba.

* And the Philistines came up yet again, and spread themselves in
the valley of Rephaim. And when David inquired of Yahweh, he
said, Thou shalt not go up: make a circuit behind them, and
come upon them over against the balsams. And it sliall be, when
thou hearest the sound of marching in the tops of the balsams, that
then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then is Yahweh gone out before thee
to smite the host of the" Philistines. And David did so, as Yahweh
commanded him ; and smote the Philistines from Geba until thou
come to Gezer/ 2 Samuel v. 22-25.

C. The Battle of ( r)

* And after this it came to pass, that David smote the Philistines,
and subdued them : and David took ( ) out of the hand of the
Philistines.' 2 Sam. viii. 1.

1 For a discussion of the obscure period of the dual reign of David and Ish-baal,
with special reference to the problem of the reconcilement of David's seven and
a half years with Ish-bosheth's two years, see the important article by Kamphausen,
Philisttr und Htbraer zur Zeit Davids, in Zefoch. f. d. alttest. Wmensck. .1885 ,
vi, p. 44.

* Hardly Adullam, as some commentators have supposed. Did the Adullam life
continue after David was anointed king on Hebron ?

54 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

The* outline may to some <*nall extentbe filled in from other sources.
Tb* priestly writer of Chronicles is careful to add to the account of
tht first battle that the idols of the Philistines, captured after the
rout ere burnt with tire (1 Chron. xiv. 8-12). The site of Baal-
Pero/iin i> unknown. It seems to be mentioned again in Isaiah xxviii. 21,
in connexion with Glbeon : perhaps this passage refers to the first two
battle** In the account of the second battle the Chronicler likewise
substitutes Gibeon for Geba (1 Chron. xiv. 13-16) : while in the third,
instead of an unintelligible expression in the version of Samuel, he
has * David took Gath and her towns out of the hand of the Philis-
tines * (xviii. I ).

Among these battles must probably be fitted some scraps of biography
that now find a place much later both in Samuel and in Chronicles. They
are cmfmtA and corrupt, but are to the effect that at certain specified
places, certain Philistine champions were slain by certain of the mighty
men of David,

The first is the familiar tale of David and Goliath, which we passed
over a while ago, and which cannot be dissociated from these fragments.
David is sent by his father to the battle-field of Ephes-Dammim, to
bring supplies to his elder brothers. His indignation is roused by
a gigantic Philistine champion named Goliath of Gath, who challenges
the Israelites to provide one who shall fight with him and decide the
battle by single combat. The champion is minutely described : he was
somewhere between nine and eleven feet high, with a helmet, a coat of
mail weighing 5,000 shekels, greaves and a javelin, all of bronze, as well
as an iron-pointed spear like a weaver's beam. How David, though
a youth unable to wear armour, goes against the giant, exchanges
taunting speeches with him, and brings him down with his sling, are
tales too familiar to rehearse (1 Sam. xvii).

The difficulties of the passage are many. The inconsistency of
David, already (ch. xvi. 21 ) the armour-bearer of Saul, being now totally
unknown to him, has been a crux to the harmonists of all generations :
though this difficulty is evaded by an important group of the Greek
MSS., which omit bodily verses xvii. 12-31, 55-xviii. 5 that is, every-
thing inconsistent with David's being already at court and known to
SauL The omitted verses are probably fragments of another parallel
narrative. But even then we are not quite free from troubles. The
whole machinery of the ordeal by duel recalls incidents of the Trojan
war, or the tale of the Horatii and Curiatii, rather than what we are
accustomed to look for in Semitic warfare; David's improbable flight
to Gath soon after the battle has already been commented upon ; and,
as will presently be seen, we possess another account of the battle of

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 55

Ephes-Dammim, which i> quite inconsistent with the Goliath story,
and, indeed, leaves no room for it.

The second fragmentary narration is unfortunately found in Samuel
only (2 Sam. xxi. 1 5-17). It reads And the Philistines had war again
with Israel; and David went down, and hi* servants with him, and fought
against the Philistines : and David waxed faint. And (a champion)
which was of the sons of Kapha, the weight of whose spear was 300
(shekels) of bronze in weight, he being girded with a new [word losfy
thought to have slain David. But Abishai the son of Zeruiah succoured
him and smote the Philistine and killed him. Then the men of David
sware unto him, saying, u Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle,
that thou quench not the lamp of Israel/" "

The rendering 4 a champion" is suggested for the unintelligible 133*
333, treated as a proper name * Ishbi-benob * in the English version.
As it stands it means * and they dwelt in Nob *, which clearly inafceb no
sense ; and the emendation that i* most current by the change of one
letter, turning Xob to Gob 9 and moving the phrase so as to follow
* and his servants with him * in the previous sentence is not altogether
satisfactory. For " Gob * itself is probably, as we shall see, corrupt ;
and it is hard to see how the sentence could have been transposed from
a place where it makes passable sense to a place where it makes com-
plete nonsense. The reading here suggested is irssrrr'X, literally * man
of the betweens ", apparently a technical term for a champion, which is
actually applied to .Goliath in 1 Samuel xvii. Though differing in detail,
and transmitted in a garbled form, the general resemblance of the
description of the equipment of this warrior to that of Goliath is too
striking to be overlooked ; and we are thus led to wonder whether this
may not be a version of the Goliath story in which the issue of the duel
was very nearly the reverse of that in the familiar narrative. One is
also tempted to ask whether in the "oath* of the men of David (for
which compare 2 Sam. xviii. 3) we are to see an explanation of David's
having stayed in Jerusalem while Joab was acting for the king in his
operations against the Ammonites, with the disastrous consequence of
the episode of Bath-Sheba. If this oath is to be literally understood,
this incident of the champion slain by David's nephew must belong to
the end of David"s operations against the Philistines, all of which seem
to have been directed by the king in person.

The third fragment appears in both 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles.
The Samuel version says * And it came to pass after this, that there
was again war with the Philistines at Gob : then Sibbecai the Husha-
thite slew Sapb. which was of the sons of Rapha. And there was again
wax with the Philistines at Gob ; and Elhanan_the son of Jaare-oregim

M THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

the Beth-fchemite >k*w Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear
wa like a waiver's beam" (2 Sam. xri. 13, 19).

In th* parallel account (1 Chron. xx. 4). Gezer is substituted for
Goh, Sippai for Saph, Jair for Jaare-oregim, and 'slew Lahmi.the
brother of Goliath m for the Beth-lehemite slew Goliath \

With regard to the first of these divergencies, it should be noticed
that the place-name 4 GoV is not mentioned elsewhere. Following
Cleraont-Gannemi I was formerly inclined to accept Gezer as the
correct nading the change would be easy, IB for ^3 but I now
>ee two formidable difficulties. In the first place, it is not likely that
the well-known place-name Gezer would be corrupted to a name
utterly unknown: in the second, the name 'Gob 1 is written 35 in
both places, without the mater lectioms which the emendation sug-
gested requires. Noting that in the text in Samuel the name Gob '
is in both places followed by a word beginning with the letter p,
I would now suggest that a second 3? has dropped out in both places,
and that for Gob we are to read sna, Geba. 1 The advantage of this
correction is, that it would make both the Samuel and Chronicles
versions right, and would show us where to fit the fragment under
discussion. For we can scarcely avoid connecting an incident, said in
one version to take place at Geba, and in another version at Gezer,
with a battle which is definitely stated to have begun in one of these
two places and finished in the other. The deaths of Saph and of
Goliath therefore took place in the second of the three battles
enumerated above (p. 53).

The other divergencies need not detain us so long. The question
of the spelling of the champion's name is scarcely important : yet it is
tempting to inquire whether the form in Chronicles, '3D, is not to
be preferred, and, further, whether It may not be that it actually finds
an echo to this day in the commonplace Arabic name Tell es-Sqfi,
commonly rendered *The clear mound', 2 whereby the most probable
rite of ancient Gath is now known. Jair for Jaare-oregim is certainly
right, the latter half of the name as given by Samuel being a ditto-
graphy of the word * weaver's beam * in the nest line ; on the other
hand, the Chronicler's evolution of Goliath's brother Lahmi out of the
name of Jair*s native place is obviously some scribe's attempt to get
rid of an evident harnionistic difficulty.

The fourth fragment follows the last in both places. 6 And there
was again war at Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on

1 The Greek and Pesbifta versions read Gath.

a But wa% meaning, if anything, *The mound of the dear one.* 'The dear
mound ' would be Et-tdl e*-Safi.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 37

every hand six fingers, and on evtry foot six toe-*, four mid twenty ia
number ; and he also was lx>rn to liaphn. Ami when lie defied Israel,
Jonathan the son of Shimei DttvidV brother slew him. These tour
were born to Raphn in Gath ; and they fell by the hand of David, and
by the hand of his servants/ The Chronicler's version i* substantially
identical.

Let us now try to dovetail these *eeiiiingly incoherent frag-
ments into a consistent narrative. Nearly .-ill of them will be found
to hang together with a logical connexion between them. We begin
with the story of Jesse sending David us a youth to his brothers, and
their surly reception of him, in tome campaign. This story, though, as
we have seen, it almost makes nonsense of the place w here it is found, is
so graphic and circumstantial that it cuimot lightly be thrown aside. It
is not improbable, however, that it was by hi** musical rather than his
military ability that he attracted attention on this occasion, and wa-s
brought to the notice of Saul and Jonathan { 1 Sam. x\ i. 14-18, xviii. 1),
At first he was received kindly, and made Saul's armour-bearer.

Then came the battle of Eplies-Doniiuini, the full account of which
is lost. But by combining 2 Samuel xxiii. 9 with 1 Chronicles xi. 13,
two mutilated but complementary passages, we can gain some idea of
what happened. The Philistines came up to battle at Ephes-Damuiim ;
the men of Israel fled ; but David, aided by Eleazer the son of Dodo
the Ahohite (whatever that may mean), held them fc in the valley
between Shocoh and Azekah " and fought till their hands clave to their
swords. They succeeded in turning the victory, and the people came
back c only to spoil'. Well might the maidens, after such an exhibi-
tion of valour, sing that * Saul had slain thousands but David had slain
myriads'. The folk-tale of a giant-killing shepherd-boy, coloured by
some actual incident of David's later campaigns, has been substituted
for the less picturesque story of the battle : a relic of the excised part
may possibly be seen in the verse inserted after 1 Samuel xix. 7 : And
there was war again : and David went out, and fought with the Philis-
tines, and slew them with a great slaughter ; and they fled before him."
And when the tribes of Israel came to David to make him king, they
remind him that even in Saul's lifetime it was he who used to lead
them out to war (2 Sam. v. 2).

The triumph-song of the women roused the jealousy of Saul, and he
drove David into exile. The other tales of Philistine routs, which
meet us in the lists of David's mighty men, appear to relate to the
time of the outlawry. Shaniraah's defence of the lentil-field, to which
reference has already been made, was of the same order as the repulse
of the raid on the threshing-floor of Keilah : the breaking through the

58 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Philistine camp at Rephaim by the three heroes, in quest of the Beth-
lehem water, is definitely assigned to the Adullam period. Finally
David took service in Gath, and became thoroughly acquainted with
that iinjxniant city.

When the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were united, the Philistines
came to break up his power ; and three engagements were fought, all
disastrous to the hereditary enemies of the Hebrews. The first was the
battle of Baal-Perazim, of which we have no particulars save the picture
of a hurried flight in which even the idols were left behind. The
tecond, that of Geba, is more interesting. The incident of the oracle
of the sacred trees is one of the many noteworthy landmarks in Old
Testament religion. The topography of the battle seems at first sight
difficult to follow : but it works out easily when one knows the con-
figuration of the ground. The valley or plain of Rephaim is usually
equated with the broad expanse that lies south-west of Jerusalem.
Geba was some four miles to the north of the city. What must have
happened was, that David's men circled behind the Philistine camp,
under cover, probably, of the hills to the west of the plain (now
crowned by the Greek Patriarch's summer residence Kat^mon);
that is, down the picturesque valley in which stands the Convent of
the Cxo*s. Then crossing into the Wady el-Werd by the site of the
modern village of Malhah, 1 they attacked the Philistines on the rear.
Finding their retreat (down the present Wady el-Werd and its
western continuation, the Wady es-Surar) cut off, the Philistines fled
northward, past Jerusalem, as far as the village of Geba, and then
rushed down the valley of Ai jalon, which opens out on the coast-plain
not far from Gezer. Some time in this battle or the subsequent rout
Sibfaecai (or Mebunni) slew Saph, and Elhanan slew Goliath.

Contrary to most modem commentators I assume that this raid
of the Philistines took place after (or perhaps during, which is not
improbable) David's successful siege of Jerusalem. If David was
still in Hebron at the time, I cannot conceive what the Philistines
were doing in the valley of Rephaim. They would have come up
one of the more southerly valleys to attack him.

Lastly took place the final and decisive victory which crushed
for ever the Philistine suzerainty. The union at last effected among
the tribes of Israel gave them a strength they had never had before ;
yet it is hard to understand the complete collapse of the people who
had been all-powerful but a few years previously. W. Max Muller

1 They must in this case have passed close by some ancient tumuli, which stand
west of Malbah : possibly the sacred balsam-trees were associated with these.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 59

attempts to account for it l by an unrecorded attack of the Egyptian
king, whereby he possessed himself of the Philkthie wetland:
arguing that in a list of J?he>honk*s conquests in his campaign

of fl''jL

~~ r

\

Fig. 2. Sketch-map to illustrate the Battle of Gehau

recorded in 1 Kings siv. 25 no Philistine city is mentioned, for the
simple reason that they must have been already in Egyptian hands.
On this theory also he accounts for the capture of Gezer (an extension
of the Egyptian territory) recorded in 1 Kings ix. 16.

und Europa, pp. 3S9, 390.

60 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

The nitc of the last battle i< successfully concealed under a hopeless
corruption of the text. We are told in Samuel that David took
Mftheg h*i-ammah out of the hand of the Philistines: a phrase that
nt&tfi* 4 bridle of the cubit* or *of the metropolis", but defies con-
vincing explanation or emendation. The old versions all presuppose
an identical or similar text : Chronicles has c Gath and her suburbs',
which is probably a guess at a reading which should be at least intelli-
gible. It cannot be right, for we find Gath still independent under
it^ king Achfeh at the beginning of Solomon's reign (1 Kings ii. 39). l
This however, does not forbid our supposing the decisive battle to
have taken place at or near Gath: a very likely place for David
to attack, a< he was no doubt familiar with its fortifications. There
certainly appears to have been a battle at Gath where the unnamed
polvdoctylou*. champion defied Israel and was slain by a nephew of
David. Perhaps he SWLS one and the same with the Gittite champion
whom the English version calls Ishbi-benob, and from whom David,
when hard pressed, was rescued likewise by one of his nephews. In
this incident, on the theory here put forward, is the historical basis
of the David and Goliath story. In this case 2 Samuel xxi. 2 (* these
four were born to "the giant" in Gath 1 ) would be an editorial note.

Before leaving this record of the champions of the Philistines
which we have thus endeavoured to put into order, we must notice
that, strictly speaking, they are not to be classed as Philistines at all.
The expression 6 son of Rapha\ translated fc giant "* in the English
version, implies rather that the family were of the remnant of the
Rephaites or Anakim, the tall aboriginal race which the Israelites on
their coming found established in Hebron and neighbouring villages,
Gath, Gaza, and Ashdod. According to Joshua xi. 21 they were driven
oat utterly from the Hebron district, but a remnant was left in the
Philistine towns, where no doubt they mingled with the western new-
comers. The tall stature attributed to these 6 champions'* a physical
feature never ascribed in the history to the Philistines themselves 2

1 It is jKU*i&fo that David showed kindness to Achish, in return for the kindness
he had received from him, and allowed him to continue in his kingdom under
vassalage. But this is perhaps hardly probable: and evidently the runaway
servants of Shimei thought that they would be out of their master's reach in Gath,
so that that town was most likely quite independent of Jerusalem.

a I may quote from The Excavation of Geser, voL i, p. 64-, the descriptions of the
only bones that have yet been found in Palestine which can be called c Philistine '
with reasonable probability. They 'are comparable with the types of ancient
Cretan bones described by Duckworth and Hawes, and with Cretan bones in the
Cambridge Museum. They represent a people of fairly tall stature (the man in
grave 3 was 5' 10", that in grave 3 was 6* 3}")- They were probably about or under
40 years of age. In all the femora were not pilastered and the tibiae not platy-

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 1iJ ;

fits in with this theory of the origin of the family. By Delilah
and Goliath the Philistine nation is judged : but there is no proof
that there was a drop of Philistine blood in either the one or the
other.

The commentators agree that the ancient p*olm incorporated in
Psalm Ix. (8-12) and cviii. (7-10) can be as old as David. If so,
it may well have been a paean of the victory over the Philistines and
the other neighbouring nations.

That the Philistine power was utterly broken is bhown by the
significant fact that in the distractions which vexed the later years
of David the revolt of Absalom and of Sheba they made no effort
to recover their lo.st ground. Quite the contrary : we are burprised
to find David's body-guard consisting of* Cherethites and Pdetibites ',
Cretans and Phili(s)tines : a Gittite called Obed-Edopi m houses the
ark when the ill-omened incident of llzza had interrupted the first
attempt to bring it to Jerusalem : and another Gittite, Ijfctai. by
name, was one of the few people who remained faithful to David
when Absalom had stolen the hearts of his followers. So their
ancient kinsmen the Shardanu appear, now as enemies, now as loyal
mercenaries of Egypt. And in the later history, except a few half-
hearted attempts like that in the time of Jehoram, the Philistines
took no decisive advantage of the internal dissensions between Judah
and Israel, or of their many struggles with the Syrians and other
foreign foes. From the time of David their power, and indeed their
very individuality, dwindle away with a rapidity difficult to parallel.
The contrast between the pre-Davidic and the post-Davidic Philistines
is one of the most extraordinary in human history.

But in Palestine the Philistines were, after all, foreigners: they
had come from their healthy maritime life to the fever-haunted and
sirocco-blasted land of Canaan. The climate of that country guards
it for its Semitic heirs, and Philistine and Crusader alike must submit
to the laws of human limitations.

The Philistine body-guard above referred to was perhaps organized
during David's stay in Ziklag. In the later history some traces of
the organization seem to survive. The 'Carries 1 , as they are now
significantly called, help Jehoiada to put down the usurping queen
Athaliah. In Ezekiel (xliv. 7 sqq.) there is a prophecy against

cnemic. The skulls were ellipsoidal, mesaticephalic, orthognathous, megaseme
(with wide orbits;* mesorrliine (with moderately wide nose), and microdont The
female skull in grave 4 was a little wider in proportion, and though the teeth were
moderately small, the incisors projected forward, though not enough to make the
lace prognathous. The lower teeth were also very oblique/

fjU THE SCHWEICH LECTUBES, 1911

certain uncircumcwed foreigners who are introduced, apparently in
some official capacity, into the Temple: and in Zephaniah i. 8, 9
* those that arts clothed with foreign apparel' and < those that leap
over the threshold" in the * day of the Lord's sacrifice ' are denounced.
Though suggestive, neither of these passages is as clear as we should
like: the possibility of there being some connexion between the
threshold rite in Zephaniah and the analogous rite in the Temple
of Adid'iil (1 Sam. v. 5) has often been noticed. It is an interesting
lability we cannot say more that there actually was a Philistine
body-guard round the king and his court at Jerusalem, and that
the Temple itself, built as we shall see after a Philistine model, was
protected by Philistine janissaries. This might explain the unex-
pected reappearance of the heathenish name of Sisera among the
Nethinim or Temple servitors recorded in Ezra ii. 58, Nehemiah vii. 55.

III. THEIR DECLINE AXD DISAPPEARANCE.

A few simple figures will show the comparative insignificance into
which the Philistines fell after their wars with David. In the first
book of Samuel, the name 'Philistine* or * Philistines ' occurs
125 times. In the second book it occurs only twenty-four times,
and some of these are reminiscent passages, referring to earlier inci-
dents. In the two books of the Kings together the name occurs only
six times.

Achish was still *King of Gath\ as we have already seen, at the
beginning of Solomon's reign, and the coastland strip was still
outside Hebrew territory. Gezer was presented to Solomon's wife
as a marriage portion. After the partition of the kingdom, Nadab
son of Jeroboam I besieged Gibbethon, a now unknown Philistine
village, where he was killed by his successor Baasha* The siege
was apparently renewed at the end of Baasha's own reign, but why
this village was made a centre of attack is a question as obscure
as its topography. Ahaziah sent to consult the Oracle of Ekron.
The Shunammite woman who had entertained Elisha sojourned during
the seven yeant' famine in the land of the Philistines a testimony
to the superior fertility of that part of the country. Turning to
the records of the southern kingdom, we learn from the Chronicler
that certain of the Philistines brought presents and silver for tribute
to Jehoshaphat : but that under his son Jehoram they revolted and
carried away his substance. In the parallel version in Kings the
revolt is localized in the insignificant town of Libnah. The great
king Uzziah, on the other hand, broke the walls of Gath which
had probably been already weakened by the raid of Hazael of Syria

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 63

(2 Kings xSL 18) as well a* the walls of Jabneh and of A>hdod,
and established cities of hi* own in Philistine territory. This 5s
the last we hear of the important city of Gath in history : henceforth
it is omitted from the enumerations of Philistine cities in prophetic
denunciations of the race. In the time of Ahaz there neems to have
been a revival of the old spirit among the beaten people. Profiting
by the Edomite raid which already harassed Judah, they took
some cities from Southern Judah, including Beth-jJiemesh, Aijalon,
Gederoth, Shoeho, Timnath. and Giinzo, which are not elsewhere
reckoned as Philistine property ( Chron. xxviii. 18) ; certainly the
first of these was a Hebrew village eten at the time of the greatest
extension of Philistine power. This * Philistine revival 1 seem*, to
have inspired Isaiah in a denunciation of Ephraim (Iba. ix. 13), but
whether the invasion of the northern kingdom there threatened ever
took place is not recorded. Probably not, as Hezekiah once more
reversed the situation, smiting the Philibtines as fur as Gaza
(2 Kings xv'iii. 8).

At this point we glean home welcome detail* of history from the
annals of the Assyrian kings. Hadad-Xirari III (812-783) enumerates
the Philistines among the Palestinian states conquered by him about
803 B.C., but enters into no particulars. Tiglath-Pileser III, however,
(745-727) gives us fuller details. Rezon (in the Hebrew RezZn) of
Syria, and Pekah of Samaria were in league, whereas Ahaz of
Jerusalem had become a vassal of the king of Assyria. The Philis-
tines had attached themselves to the Syrian league, so that in 734 B.C.
Tiglath-Pileser came up with the special purpose of sacking Gaza.
Hanunu, the king of Gaza, fled to Sebako, king of Egypt ; but he
afterwards returned and, having made submission, was received
with favour, 1

Some four yeare earlier Mitinti, king of Ashkelon, had revolted,
trusting to the support of Rezon. But the death of Rezon so
terrified the king that he fell sick and died possibly he poisoned
himself, knowing what punishment would be in store for him at the
hands of the ferocious Assyrian. His son Hukipti, who reigned in
his stead, hastened to make submission.

1 * The town of over the land Beth-Omri ... I cast its whole extent

under the rule of Assyria : I put my officials as lieutenants over it. Hanunu of
Gaza fled before my arms, and escaped to Egypt. Gaza I plundered, its posses-
sions and its gods . . . and I put my royal image (r ( in his palace. I laid the
service of the gods of his land under the service of Asshur. I laid tribute upon

him As a bird he flew hither (made submission) and I set him again to his

place.' KeilingchriftlicheEibliothek, ii, pp. 32, 33; Schroder, KtUiiuichnfttn*, p. 56.
See also Rost, Keilinschr. Tiglath-P'dtstrs, p. 78.

64 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Alxwt 713 another Philistine city comes into prominence. This
is AritttaL the king of which, Azuri, refused to pay tribute and
endeavoured to stir up the neighbouring princes to revolt. Sargon,
king of Assyria (722-705), came down, expelled Azuri, and established
in hi*. teml his brother Ahiniiti. An attempt was made by the
Philistine* Sargotf* scribe calls them Hittites to substitute one
Yainani, who had no claim to the throne. But this bold usurper
fled to the land of Meluhha in X. Arabia when Sargon was on his
way to the city. 1 These operations of Sargon against Ashdod are
referral to in a note of time in Isaiah xx. 1.

The next king, Sennacherib (705-681), had trouble with the
remnant of the Philistines. Mitintfs son Rukipti had been succeeded
by his <on Sarludari, but it seems as though this ruler had been
deposed, and a person called Zidka reigned in his stead. Sennacherib
found conspiracy in Zidka, and brought the gods of his father's house,
himself, and his family into exile to Assyria, restoring Sarludari to his
former throne, while of course retaining the suzerainty. In this
operation he took the cities of Beth-Dagon, Joppa, Bene-Berak, and
Azuri, which belonged to Zidka. These names still survive in the
villages of Beit Dejan, Ibrak, and Vazur, in the neighbourhood of
Jaffa.

At the same time the Ekronites had revolted against the
Assyrian. Their king, Padi, had remained a loyal vassal to his
overlord, but his turbulent subjects had put him in fetters and sent
him to Hezekiah, king of Judah, who cast him into prison. The
Ekronites summoned assistance from North Arabia and Egypt, and
met Sennacherib in El-Tekeh. Here they were defeated, and
Sennacherib marched against Ekron, slaying and impaling the chief
officers. Padi was rescued from Jerusalem, his deliverance being no
doubt part of the tribute paid by Hezekiah (2 Kings xviii. 14).

1 * Azuri, king of Ashdod, devised in his heart to bring no more tribute, and sent
an invitation to the kings of his neighbourhood to hostility against Asshur. On
account of the misdeeds he wrought, I removed him from the lordship of the people
of his land and put his brother Afcimiti in lordship over them. But evil-plotting
Hittites were hostile to his lordship and set over themselves Yamani, who had no
claim to the throne, who like them had no respect for my lordship. In my fury

I did not send the whole body of my troops lied merely the body-guard, who

follows me wherever I go, to Ashdod. But Yamani fled as I approached to the
border of Egypt, which lies beside Meluljha, and was seen no more. I besieged
and plundered Ashdod, Gath, and Ashdodimmu [' The port of Ashdod," DTI intflK,
or, "Gath of the Ashdodites," according to some interpreters], and carried off as
booty their goods, women, sons and daughters, property, the palace treasures, and
the people of the land. I re-peopled those towns anew . . . and put my lieutenants
over them and counted them to the people of Assyria.' KM. BibL ii, pp. 66, 67.
IfAT*. p. 71.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 65

Sennacherib then cut off some of the territory of Judoh and divided
it among his vakils, MitSnti, king of AshdrxL Padi the restored
king of Ekron, and Zilbel, king of Gaza. 1

Sennacherib was assassinated in 6ttl,and his son Ksarhaddon(681-
<>68) reigned in his stead. In the li.sts of kings in subjection to this
monarch we find Mitinti, king of Ashkelon (the A>syrian records
seem to confute A.shkelon and Ashdod), and Zilbel, king of Gaza, of
whom we have heard before. Padi lias disappeared from Ekron, and
to him has succeeded a king with the old Philistine name of Ikausu
(= Achish). On the other hand a king with the Semitic name of
Ahimilki (Ahimelech) is king of Ashdod. All these kings survived
into the reign of Assurbanipal, who be^an to reign in 668.-

According to Jeremiah xlvii. 1 (not the Gre^k Version) c Pharaoh
smote Gaza* in the time of that prophet. This mot likely was
Xeeho, on his way northward when Josiali, with fatal consequences to
himself, tried to check him. Herodotus is >upposeJ to refer to this
when he says (ii. 159) that Necho took a great city of Syria called
*Kadytw', which elsewhere (iii. 5) he describes as a city in his
opinion not smaller than Sardis. It is a possible, but not a convincing,

1 ' Menahem of the town of Samaria, Ethba'al of Sidnn, Mitinti of Ashdod [and
a number of others" all the kings of the West brought rich presents . . and kissed
my feet And Zidka, the king of Ashkelon, who had not submitted to my yoke, the
irods of his house, himself, his wife, his sons, his daughters, his brothers, the seed
-of his house, I dragged off and brought them to Assyria. Sarludari, the son of
Kukipti, their former king, I set again as king over the j>eople of Ashkelon, took
tribute and submission from him, and he became obedient to me. In the course of
my expedition, I besieged Beth-Dagon, Joppa, Bene-Barka, Azuri, the towns of
'Zidka, which had not promptly submitted to me : I plundered them and dragged
booty away from them. The principal men of Amkarruna {Ekron'; who had cast
Padi, who by the right and oath of Assyria was the king, into fetters and delivered
him up to Hezekiah of Judah, who had shut him in prison their heart feared.
The kings of the land of Egypt sent archers, chariots, and horses of the king of
Mcluhha, a countless army, and came to help them. Their army stood against me
before the town El-Tekeh, they raised their weapons. Trusting in Asshur, my
Lord, I fought with them and subdued them ; I took the chiefs of the chariots and
the son of one of the kings of Egypt, and the chief of the chariots of the king of
Meluhha prisoners with my own hand in the m'Vt : I besieged El-Tekeh and
Timnath, and plundered them and took away their booty. Then I turned before
Ekron, the chief men who had done evil I slew and hung their bodies on poles
round the city : the inhabitants who had done evil I led out as prisoners : with the
rest, who had done no evil, I made peace. Padi their king I led from Jerusalem
and put him again on the throne of his lordship. I laid the tribute of ray lordship
upon him. Of Hezekiah ... I besieged forty-six fortified towns . . . his towns which
I had plundered, I took from his land and gave them to Mitinti, king of Ashdod,
Padi, king of Ekron, and Zilbel, king of Gaza, and I cut his land short. To the
former tribute I added the tribute due to my lordship and laid it upon them.*
K. B. ii, pp. 90-95.

2 K. B, ii, pp. 148, 149, and 338-311.

66 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

hypothe>:9. that Kadytis may represent some form of the name of

Gaza. 1

HITC the Awvrion records leave us. We have, however, one more
Biblical reft rem*e, in the last paragraph of the book of Neherniah, which
i* of very great importance (xiii. 23, 4). The walls of Jerusalem had
been restored ; the law published and proclaimed ; all the steps had
iN&n taken to e&tablish an exclusive theocratic state in accordance with
the prierfly legislation; when the leader was dismayed to discover
certain Jews who had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of
Moab, the very communities that had put so many obstacles in the
wav of the work of restoration. 2 Not only so, but there were already
children ; and as is usual in such cases of mixed marriage, these
children &poke the language of their mothers only. Nehemiah
indulged in a passionate display of temper, treating the culprits with
personal violence, and probably he compelled them to put away their
wives a* Ezra did in a similar case. But the interest for us is not in
Xehemiah's outburst, but in his reference to the speech of the children.
They spoke half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the
Jews* language. In spite of Sennacherib's transportations and
deportations ; in spite of the long and exhausting siege of twenty-
nine years which the city (according to Herodotus ii. 157) sustained
in the following century at the hands of Psammetichus ; yefc the
ancient tongue of the Philistines lingered still in Ashdod, the town
which probably retained exotic characteristics the longest. The
distinction which Strabo (XVI. ii. 1) draws between the Ta&loi and
the 'A&Snoi (* Jews, Idumaeans, Gazaeans, and Azotii' being the four
minor races of Syria which he enumerates) may possibly be founded
on a reminiscence of these linguistic survivals. No doubt the language
was by now much contaminated with Semitic words and idioms, but
btill it possessed sufficient individuality to be unintelligible without
special study. It had of course lost all political importance, so that
it was not as in the days of Samson and Jonathan, when every
Hebrew of position was obliged to know something of the tongue of
the powerful rivals of his people: it was now a despised fatais, much
as are the ancient Celtic languages in the eyes of the average Saxon-
In the chatter of these little half-breeds the stern Jewish puritan wa&
perhaps privileged to hear the last accents of the speech of Minos,,
whose written records still e mock us, undeciphered \

* See Meyer's Hvtory of the C% of Gaza, p. 38. Noordtzij, 2>e Filistijnen,
p. 171, identifies it with Kadesh, which is reasonable.

a Neh. fr. 7. See also Ps, Ixxxiii, which, according to the most likely view, was-
composed during the anxieties attending the restoration of Jerusalem.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILISTINES 67

It is true that some critics have explained tin* Speech of Aahdod"
as being the tongue of Sennacherib's colonists. If *o, however,
Nehemiah (himself a returned exile from a neighbouring empire to
Sennacherib's) would probably have had some understanding of it and
of its origin, and would have described it differently. The Semitic
peech of the children of the Ammonite and Moabite mothers does
not seem to have caused him so much vexation.

In Gaza, too, Philistine tradition .still survived. Down to the
time of the Maccabeaii revolt there remained here a temple of
Dagon, destroyed by Jonathan Maccabaeus (1 Mace. x. 83, $4; ; xi. 4).
But these traditional survivals of religious peculiarities are mere
isolated phenomena : apart from them the absorption of Philistia in
the ocean of Semitic humanity is &o complete that it* people ceases to
have an independent history. It were profitless to trace the story of
Philistia further, through the campaigns* of Alexander, the wars of
the Maccabees and the Seleucids, the Rouion domination, and the
complex later developments : the record is no longer the history of
a people ; it is that of a country.

Nevertheless, the tradition of the Philibtiues still lives, and will
continue to live so long as the land which they dominated three
thousand years ago continues to be called fc Palestine *, and so long as
its peasant parents continue to tell their children their tale** of the
Fenish. One accustomed to the current English pronunciation of
the name of the Pliot'iticians might for a moment be misled into*
supposing that these were the people meant : but the equation is
philologically impossible. There can be no doubt that this people of
tradition, supposed to have wrought strange and wonderful deeds in
the land, to have hewn out its great artificial ca\es and built its*
castles and even the churches and monasteries whose fa^t-decaying
ruins dots its landscape that this people is none other than the
mighty nation of the Philistines.

CHAPTER III

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES

THE country of the Philistines is definitely limited, in Joshua xiii. 2,
between the Shlhor or * Biver of Egypt \ the present Wady el-Arlsh,
on the Egyptian frontier, which joins the sea at Rhinocolura and

* the borders of Ekron northward, which is counted to the Canaanites \
Westward it was bounded by the Mediterranean Sea : eastward by the
foothills of the Judean mountains. From Deuteronomy ii. 23 we learn
that this territory had previously been in the possession of a tribe
allied Jvvim, of whom we know nothing but the name : from the
passage in Joshua just quoted it would appear that a remnant of
these aborigines still remained crowded down to the south. They
may possibly have l)een of the same stock as the neolithic pre-Semitic
{jeople whose remains were found at Gezer. No doubt, as in the
majority of cases of the kind, they survived as a substratum of the
population in the rest of their ancient territory as well, engaged in
the hard manual labour to which the wily Gibeonites were con-
demned.

We also learn from Joshua (xi. 21) that there was a Rephaite or

* Anakim 1 remnant left in some of the chief cities of the Philistine
territory, which must have been of considerable importance, to judge
from the stories of giant champions analysed on a previous page.
How far the alliance of these formidable aborigines (which probably
represent a pre-Canaanite immigration, later than the insignificant
\4vcim) enabled the southern Philistines to hold their ground so
much longer than the northern Zakkala is an interesting question
the answer to which, however, could be nothing more than
speculative.

Though no ancient authority definitely states it, there can hardly
be any doubt that the repulse of the great attack on Egypt, in the
days of Ramessu III, was the event which led to the permanent
settlement of the Cretan tribes on the coasfcland. It is possible,
indeed, that they already occupied the country as a military base for
their operations against Egypt: the description, in the Medinet Habu
temple, of the advance of the invaders through the lands of the

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES 69

Hittitcs and North Syrians make> thin at least not improbable.
However the exact detail* of chronology work out, we cannot dis-
sociate the invasion of Egypt from the contemporaneous settlement
by foreigners on the sea-coa*t.

Israel was already, as we learn from the stela of Merneptah,
established in the pronu>ed land; and the Hebrew tribes had
already been reinforced by the contingent of Egyptian serfs (possibly
the enslaved descendants of the Sedan in invader* known to hibtory
as the Hyksos) and Kenites, whose tmditions became the received
version of Hebrew orlginex. The tribe of Dan, .situated on the sea-
coast, was driven inland, and forced to establish itself elsewhere :
but as we have seen, the whole length of the shore was occupied bv
the intruders, even north of Joppa. Wen-Amon has chronicled for us
the settlement of Zakkala at Dor : that Sisera taloaged to this tribe is
also highly probable : and the remarkable developments displayed by
the Phoenicians which distinguished them from all other Semites
developments to be noted in the following chapter make it no
longer possible to doubt that a very large Philistine or Zakkala
element entered into the composition of that people.

In the earlier part of the history, as we liave already indicated, the
empire of the Philistines was widely spread over the country. As is
well known, the name Palestine is merely a corruption of PhUMa ;
and \\hen Zephaniah or one of his editors calls Canaan * the land ot
the Philistines' (ii. 4s) he is expressing little more than what was at
one time a fact. Their domination over the Hebrews is insisted on
in both Judges and Samuel : the early kings of the Hebrews are
elected with the specific purpose of freeing the people from the
foreign yoke : a governor is established in a town close to Jerusalem :
even at Beth-Shan, at the inner end of the plain Esdraelon, which
once swarmed with the chariots of Sisera, the Philistines were
able to fix SauPs body as a trophy: and the course of the history
shows that they were there established in sufficient strength and with
sufficient permanence to make the recovery of the trophy difficult.

The name of Beth-Dagon, the house of their chief god, is found
among the towns enumerated to the northern coast-dwellers of the
tribe of Asher (Joshua xix. 27) ; and there was a similarly named and
better known town in the land of the southern Philistines ; but these
names, as we shall see in the following chapter, are older than the
Philistine settlement. * The stronghold above Jericho called Dagon
(mentioned in Josephus, Ant. xiii. 8. 1, Wars, i. &. 8) is no doubt
the same as Dok (now c Ain ed-Duk) where Simon was murdered
(1 Mace. xvi. 15) : probably the form of the name in Josephus is.

70 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

nn errnr. Then* i* a modem Beit Dejan near Xablus, which marks
* thin! place of the same name, not recorded in history.

The Northern trite of the foreigner* must have become early
absorb*! bv their Semitic neighbours. The Southern people, however,
eted on their rich coast-plain and established in their powerful
metropolitan cities were longer able to maintain their ethnic inde-
pendence. The wars of David drove them back on the coast, and
reduced them to A subordinate position ; and, as the names of the
kings recorfed in the Assyrian records show, they rapidly became
*mitized an time went on. As we have seen in the last chapter,
however, their national traditions fought a long fight against absorp-
tion and oblivion. The pride of the Philistines their persistent
refusal to submit to Hebrew prejudices, such as the tabu against
mating flesh with the blood and forbidden meats was as offensive
fo Deuteit>-Zechariah (ix. 7) as is the pride of the Irish or Welsh
nationalist to the average Englishman. Though in the later history
we hear so little about them, they must still have been troublesome
neighbours ; otherwise there would not be such a constant chain of
prophetic denunciations. Amos first, then Isaiah, Zephaniah, Joel,
and the later prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zecbariah all pronounce
woes upon them. One of EzekiePs strongest denunciations of the
wrruptions of his own people well expresses the national hatred
oven the daughters of the Philistines are ashamed at contemplating
them (Ezek. xvL 27). The son of Sirach says that 'his heart
ahhorreth them that sit upon the mountains of Samaria, and them
that dwelt among the Philistines' (Ecclus. 1. 26). Except for the
naturalized Philistines in David's entourage, there is but one lull in
the storm of war tetween the two nations throughout the Old Testa-
ment. This is in the charming poem, Psalm Ixxxvii, \vritten apparently
under some one of the later kings. The psalmist pictures Yahweh
enthroned upon His best-loved seat, the holy mountains of Zion, and
reading, as it were, a census-roll of His people. This one was born in
Egypt or Babylon that one in Philistia or Tyre yet all own Zion
as their common Mother. The psalm is a miniature edition of the
Book of Jonah : the poet's large-hearted universalism looks forward
to an abolition of national jealousies.

Their cities all existed from pre-Philistine days. They are all,
except the Beth-Dagons, mentioned in the Tell el-Amarna cor-
respondence, and were then already communities of importance : how
much farther back their history may go it is impossible to tell. Like
the Hebrews, who appear to have added only one city Samaria to
those which they inherited in the Promised Land, the Philistines

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES 71

were not city builders. Indeed we hardly would exjietl this of the
4 Peoples of the Sea\ Ziklag, somewhere in the *with of the Philistine
territory, but not yet identified satisfactorily, may liave been a new
foundation: this however, rt*ts merely upon the vague circumstance
that it lias been impossible to find a satisfactory Semitic etymology
for the name, which conceivably echoes the name of the Ztikkala. If
so, we understand better how the wMtfarn sept of the Philistines conies
to be specifically called * Cheneihiti's " or 4 Cretan* \ On the other
hand, we elsewhere find the Zakkala in the north.

The five metropolitan cities of the Philistines were Gaza, Ashkelon,
Gath, Ashdod, and Ekron. The first-mentioned is the only one of
the five that still retains anything of its former iuqwrtonct*. It is
a modern, well-watered, and populous town, standing on the ancient
site, and in the form Ghuzzeh retaining the ancient name. It is
prominent in the Samson epic. \Ve have already noticed the revolt
of its leader, Hanunu, against the king of Assyria a revolt that led
to the battle of Raphia (710 B. r.), the first struggle between Egypt
and Assyria. From Amos i. 6 we learn that Gaza was the centre of
a slave-trade, which added bitterness to the relations l>etween the
Philistines and their Israelite neighbours. In 332 B.C. the city was
besieged for two months by Alexander the Great. Its later history
but slightly concerns us, though we may mention its total destruction
by Alexander Jannaeus. It recovered even from this catastrophe, and
we find it in the second and third centuries A.D. as the centre of
worship of a deity j>eculiar to itself, called Alarna, the ritual of
whose service recalls in some respects that of the rites of Dagon.
This cult, indeed, was probably the last relic of the Philistines, apart
from the vague modern traditions to which we have already referred.

The city was surrounded by a wall, and watch-towers were erected
at a distance from it, to give warning as early as possible of the
approach of an enemy ( Kings xviii. 8). 1 A neighbouring harbour
town, called Matou/za Fd^s, was of considerable importance and for
a time was the site of a bishopric.

Asltkelon was the only city of the five that stood on the sea-
coast, though other maritime cities, such as Joppa, were (at least
from time to time) also in Philistine hands. Its harbour, though
inadequate for modem use, was sufficient for the small ships of
antiquity. Samson visited Ashkelon to seize the wager he was
obliged to pay after his riddle had been solved. 2 It is, however, from

1 So a sentry-station was established on a hill some way S. of Gezer : see my
Excavation of Gezer^ vol. il, p. 365.

2 It has been suggested that this took place not at Ashkelon, but at a small site

72 TUB SCIIWEICII LECTURES, 1911

much lati-r timts-Maccabean, early Arab, and CniMider-tliat the
chk'f hWorical instance of the city dates. These lie outside pur
prt-t'ht H.III* Wt- need not do more than mention the etymological
fitu-iilatiou* of StqJwnub of Byzantium, who teUs us that this city
iL tbuiidisd bv Askalo>, brother of Tanlalon and son of Hymenaios ;
and the ^tatunent of Benjamin of Tudela that Ezra re-founded
AnhU'litti der the name Bcncbrah. 1

&', reasonably identified with the enonnoiib mound known a*
lull t Jsftfi ut the embouchure of the Valley of Elah, had a different
hMoiy from the rot. It seems in the time of the greatest extension
of the" PbilUiue power to have been the principal city of the five : at
fatt the application to its ruler Achish of the title melek, 'king'
(mtht-r than the technical term *eren, applied normally to the * lords '
of the Philistines), if not a mere inadvertence, suggests that at least
lie vttofriHiux inter pares. He has, however, to bow to the wishes of
his colleagues in the matter of David's alliance with him. In David's
lament over Saul and Jonathan, Gath and Ashkelon are the two-
prominent cities specially mentioned; and (probably through the
influence of that popular* lay) c tell it not in Gath ' became a current
catchword, which we meet once again in Micah i. 10. It is not
infrequently used as such among ourselves ; but in Hebrew it has
a further aid to popularity in an alliteration, as though one should
tiay * god not in Gath \

"But as we have already noticed, the name drops out from all
references to the Philistines in the later literature: the Pentapolis
becomes a Tetrapolis, and the hegemony passes over to Ashdod,
which in time becomes the last typical Philistine city. This cannot
be explained, however, by a total destruction of the citj T of Gath.
For the excavations carried on by the Palestine Exploration Fund in
1900 at Tell es-Safi showed that the site had been continuously
occupied from very early times to the days of a modern village,
whobe hoi&es and extensive graveyards seal up the secrets of the
greater part of this important mound from the curiosity of the
explorer. The true expknation is, that from the time of its conquest
by Uzziah, Gath was reckoned a city of Judah by the Hebrew
prophets. In the gradual shrinking of the Philistine border it
would be one of the first to fall into Hebrew hands.

A destruction of Gath probably the sacking by Uzziah was still

Sn the T&Uey of Elali called Khnrtet (= rain) 'Askalan. This is certainly nearer
to Timnath, but there are here no traceable remains older than the Roman period.
1 A description of the remains at Ashkelon, with a plan, will be found in the
'Jnarttriy Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for January 1913.

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES 73

fresh in memory when Amos propln^ieil, and wo* uswl by him as an
illustration to enforce his denunciation of Samaria (vi. 2) ; in his iirst
chapter we already find Gath omittal from the list of Philistine cities;
and the reference immediately afterwards to A the remnant of the
Philistines* (i. 8) suggests that that jnrople bid shortly before suffered
loss. In iii- 9 the words "pubhVh in the pdace* at A>hdod"
may possibly IK* an adaptation of the proverbial catchword already
mentioned, modified to suit the altered circuin.stances. It likewise
is assonantal in Hebrew.

Sargon, it is true, shortly after Uzziah's time, calls the city c Gath
of the A^hdodites n (if this be the correct translation of the phrase);
but no doubt it was a matter of indifference in the eyes of the great
king which of two trumpery communities claimed the possession
of a town, so long as he himself had a satisfying share of the
plunder.

It is unfortunate that the city had such a commonplace name. Its
meaning, c winepress,* was applicable to many sites, and it was
evidently used for more places than one. This makes the reconstruc-
tion of the history of Gath rather difficult. Thus the Gath fortified
by Rehoboam (8 Chron. xi. 8) can hardly be the Philistine city of that
name ; and certain other places huch as Gath-hepher, Gath-rimmon,
and Moresheth-gath, inti>t he carefully distinguished therefrom. The
same word appears in the Gettoemane of the New Testament.

Aslidody the city to which the ark was first taken, is now repre-
sented by an insignificant village, whose only object of interest is
the ruin of a large Saracenic Man : but ruins of more important
buildings seem to have been seen here by seventeenth-century
travellers. 1 Yet it must have been a city of special importance in
the Pentapolis. Like Gaza, it had its * palaces 1 (Amos iii. 9). As
we have seen, Ashdod longest preserved the Philistine national
tradition. 'The speech of Ashdod * lasted down to the time of
Nehemiah. The temple of Dagon stood there till destroyed by
the Maccabees (1 Mace. x. 83, 84). But the altars and gods' of
the city, destroyed by Judas a few years before (1 Mace. v. 68), were
perhaps objects rather of Hellenic cult, which at this date was well
established in Western Palestine.

The great siege of Ashdod by Psammeticus, already referred to, is
unknown to us except from Herodotus. It seems almost incredibly
protracted, and probably there is something wrong with Herodotus*
figures. Jeremiah's references to the remnant of Ashdod (sxv. 20)
and ZephaniaK's emphasis on a siege which shall drive out Ashdod at
1 See Sepp, Jerusalem und dn* heifye Land, vol. ii, p. o9.

74 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

the noonday (ii. 4) i. e. which shall last half a day only axe
plausibly supposed to imply allusion to this event. A small inlet
an the iicighbonring coastline served Ashdod for a harbour : it is
now callwl Mtnet r/-AWWj, *the harbour of the fortress' : a tradition
of some fortification of the harbour is thus preserved, as well as
the Greek name At/An/, which has been transformed into the Arabic
El'Mtncht the initial A having been mistaken for the Arabic
urtit'lu.

EkwRi since the time of Robinson, has always been equated to the
ullage of 'Akir, now the site of a flourishing Jewish colony, whose
red roofs are conspicuous on the seaward side of the Jerusalem
railway soon after leaving Ramleh. But there ar? no remains of
any ancient occupation here commensurate with the importance of
the place. There are a few local traditions in 'Akir, but they are
quite vague. Bauer (Mltthellungen d. deutsch. Pal. Verein$> 1899,
p. 43) describes a visit he paid to the old mosque, the one stone
building in the fellah village, erected on its highest point. There
is a forecourt and portico with two rows of pillars. The thresholds
are of marble. An old sheikh told him that the mosque was as old
as the time of Abraham ; but many such tales are told in Palestine
of comparatively modern buildings. Ekron, if the place of the
ancient oracle of Baal-zebub were really at "Akir, has vanished
utterly, leaving scarcely a potsherd behind. This is not what usually
happens to ancient Palestine cities. With some hesitation I venture
on the following suggestions.

To me there seems to be a confusion between two places of the
same name. In Joshua xiii. 1-3, where the land not possessed
by Joshua is detailed, we find mention made of the region of the
Philistines and of the little southern tribe of the Geshurites, to * the
border of Ekron-Saphonah, zclrich is counted to the Canaanites\ and
also the five lords of the Philistines, among which by contrast are
enumerated the Ekronites. This expression * Ekron-Saphonah * is
correctly translated * Ekron northward' in the English Bible; but
it can also mean * Northern Ekron \ which to me seems here to give
a more intelligible sense.

Again, in Joshua xv. 11 we find the border of the territory of Judah
as running * unto the side of Ekron-Saphonah '; an expression which
I take to mean that this city, though adjoining the territory of
Judah, was actually beyond its border. If so, it would be in the
tribe of Dan ; and in Joshua six. 43 we actually find an Ekron
enumerated among the Danite towns. Here, as there is no ambiguity,
the qualifying adjective * Northern * is omitted. The Southern Ekron

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES 75

would then Ixslong to the tribe of Judah, in the theoretical wheme
elaborated in the book of Joshua ; and we find it duly mentioned,
between Mareshah and A>hdod.

Again, the story of the rout after the battle of Ephe<-Dnmniim
<1 Sam. xvii. 52-54;) is suggestive. The pursuit went 'by the way
to the two gates, to Gath and to Ekron *. 'Akin the u*u:il site given
for Ekron, cannot be spoken of a gate, in the sense that Gath., com-
manding as it does the mouth of the valley of Elah, can l>e **> termed ;
and a chase of the Philistino prolonged through Philistine tcrrifon/
for such a long distance as from Gnth to *Akir fc not very pnrfiable.
We seem io find the other gate at H sul>s5diary outlet of the Valley of
Elah, to the south of Gath, where stands st village called Dhikerin.
And Dhikerin lies exactly in a straight line between Beit Jibrin and
*Esdud 9 the modern representatives of Marshall and Ashdod.

Written in English letters, * Dhikerin " is not unlike * Ekron "* in
general appearance. But philologically there can be no direct con-
nexion between them, and my arguments in favour of the identification
here suggested rest on grounds different from the superficial similarity
of name. The single letter k in English represents two entirely different
sounds in Hebrew and Arabic; one of these (2) appears in *Dhikerin\
the other (p) in Ekron. as in 'AJeir. These letters can be treated as
interchangeable in one case only. As in English, so in Greek, one sound
and one character represent these two letters : and if for a while
SL district had become thoroughly Hellenized, the Greek K might have
been (so to speak) as a * bridge 1 for the passing of one sound into the
other. When the Semitic speech reasserted itself, it might have
taken up the name with the wrong k. There is thus a possibility
that a different word has l)ecome substituted for a half-forgotten and
wholly misunderstood Hebrew name. But no stress can be laid upon
this possible accident.

Dhikerin presents obvious signs of antiquity. Great artificial caves
and huge cisterns are cut in the rock, testifying to its former impor-
tance, and it has never been finally identified with any other ancient
site, though some of the earlier explorers have thought to find here no
less a place than Gath itself. The Talmuds have nothing to say
about it save that the name is derived from trun *male^ because
the women there all tear male children. 1 Clermont-Ganneau (Recueil
*Tarch. orient, iv. 54;) suggests a connexion between this place-name
and that of the Zakkala.

Let us now look back for a moment to the story of the wanderings
of the Ark. Suppose that the Gittites, when the plague broke out
1 Neubauer/<?x7- d. Talm. p. 71.

TIIK hCWVEICH LKCTURKS, 1911

iK tin nu *tut the Ark, licit to 'Akir. hut to Dhikeriu which w
i nearer m.fl more couvfnicnt we have then an immediate
answr to Ati 1niow difficulty. Why did the Philistines expect
tia? ark tu ? anywhere near Beth-SliemeJi at all? We must
ivimmli'i' that they wen.- not merely tning to get rid of the ark:
fhe% *ew n the look-out for a sign that the pestilence was a mani-
festation nf the wnith of the God of the Hebrews. They must
thuvfoiv h,m' expected the Ark to return whence it had come, to
tlit; sthctujirv at Shiloh. of who.se existence and importance they could
not Iw\e !** ignorant. This was the natural goal of the sacred
symbol* north of the great Canaunite wedge that centred in Jerusalem
anil st'pirutui the northern Israelites from their brethren in the
A mth. I'Voin Shiloh the Ark had been taken : Shiloh was the chief
centre of Hebrew religious life at the time : and to Shiloh the Ark
>luiuld I* expected to find its way back. 1 Therefore, if it was at
the time in 'Akir, it ought to have gone by the northern valley route,
into the Valley of Aijalon, so striking into the road for Shiloh some
ten mite* north of Jerusalem. If from *Akir it went southward it
would be shunted off south of the Canaanites into the southern
territory, where no specially important bhrine of the period is recorded.
From 'Akir, therefore, it should not go within miles of Beth-Shemesh.
But from Dhifcerin, the only way toward Shiloh, avoiding Jerusalem,
is by a valley route that leads straight to Beth-Shemesh and perforce
passes that town.

Farther evidence is given us by the story of the march of Sen-
nacherib. That monarch was engaged in reducing places easily
identified a* the modern Jaffa, Yazur, Ibn Berak, and Beit Dejan,
when the Ekronites leagued themselves with the North Arabians
and the Egyptians. Sennacherib met the allies at El-Tekeh, a place
unfortunately not identified : it presumably was near the Northern
Ekron, as the two places are mentioned together as border towns in
Dan, Joshua xix. 40. This Northern Ekron, we may agree, might
well be represented by 'Akir, whose poverty in antiquities accords
with the apparent insignificance of the Danite town. Close to * Akir
is a village in the plain, called Zernukah, a name which may possibly
echo the name of El-Tekeh. In any case Sennacherib was victorious
and then went straight to Timnath, which he reduced, after which
lie proceeded to attack Ekron. This order of proceedings is incon-

1 Meyer, (Jack. d. Alterthvmti i, p. 358, suggests from Jer. vii. 14, that Shiloh
was destroyed. But the space of time between Samuel and Jeremiah is so long,
that many unrecorded events might have taken place in the meanwhile : and,.
indeed, Shiloh is still an important sanctuary in 1 Sam. xiv. 3.

THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES

77

sistent with c Akir as the Mfce of Ekron. Sennacherib's
progress agaiitet the >outh we .^houM exj>eet to proceed steadily
southward, involving an attack on 'Akir l>efore the reduction of
Timnath. Ekron mutt therefore have been south from Tibnuh,
which fits the condition?* of the site now suggested.

Fig S. Sketch-map of Philistia,

The denunciations of Ekron in the prophetic books help us very
little in the solution of the problem. But there is a suggestive hint
in the opening verses of 2 Kings. Ahaziah having met with an
accident sent to inquire of Baal-zebub c lord of flies \ the god of
Ekron, as to his prospects of recovery. When we iind that less
than a couple of miles from Dhikerin there is a village bearing the
name of Delr edh-DJnibban, *the convent of the flies' 1 , we feel some

78 THE SCHWEICH LECTUKES, 1911

justification in asking, can it be that Baal-zebub still rules hi*
ancient lordship :

The land of the Philistines, dominated by these five cities, has
been &o often described that it is needless to waste space in an account
of it. Briefly, we may say that whoever held that part of the country
wiih at an enormous advantage. With the possible exception of the
plain of Ehdraelon, it is the most fertile land in Western Palestine.
Though there are few perennial streams, water can be found wherever
one chooses to dig for it. Through it runs the great trade-route
from Egypt by Damascus to Babylon. The mart of Gaza is the
natural rendezvous of all who have commerce with Arabia. The
neaporis of Southern Palestine are all commanded, as are the valleys
which are the doorways to the Hinterland : so that the coast dwellers
can engage in commerce on their own account, while at the same time
they can control the progress and civilization among the aliens in the
interior. When we stand on some eminence that commands this rich
strip of territory we find it easy to understand the bitterness with
which through the centuries the Hebrews regarded the Philistines.

CHAPTER IV
THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES

I. THEIR LANGUAGE:.

OF the language of the Philistines we are profoundly ignonmt.
An inscription in their tongue, written in an intelligible script, would
be one of the greatest rewards that an explorer of Palestine could
look for. As yet, the only materials we have for a .study of the
Philibtine language are a few proper names, and posMly s>nie words,
apparently non-Semitic, embedded here and there in the Hebrew of
the Old Testament. Thus, our scanty information is entirely drawn
from foreign sources. We are exactly in the .same portion as ;t
student of some obscure Oriental language would be. if his onlv
materials were the names of natives as reported in En^li^h news-
papers. Now, we are all familiar with the barbarous and meaningless
abbreviation fi Abdul \ applied with various depreciatory epithets to
a certain ex-potentate. Some time ago a friend called my attention
to a paragraph in, I think, a Manchester paper, docribing how
a certain Arab * named Sam Seddon* had been prosecuted for *ome
offence: though the * Arabian Nights' is almost an English classic,
the reporter had failed to recognize the common name Shemsed-Dml
If we were obliged to reconstruct the Arabic language from materials
of this kind, we could hardly expect to get very far; but in at-
tempting to recover something of the Philistine language we are no
better off.

The one common noun which we know with tolerable certainty ii>
$eren 9 the regular word in the Hebrew text for the * lords ' by which
the Philistines were governed: a word very reasonably compared with
the Greek TiJpaiTos. 1 This, however, does not lead us very far. It
happens that no satisfactory Indo-European etymology has been
found for rvpavvos, so that it may be a word altogether foreign to
the Indo-European family. In any case, one word could liardly
decide the relationship of the Philistine language any more than

1 The * Lords of the Philistines' are, however, in the Greek Version called
<raTpdwm; but in Judges (except iii. 3), Codex Vaticanus and allied MSS. have
s, a rendering also found sometimes in Josephus.

hO THE SCinVEICH LECTURES, 1911

could 4 benvaT (sir !) decide the relationship of Pictish in the hands
of Pir Walter Scott's amateur philologists.

The word Mrcn is once usc*l (1 Kings viL 30) as a technical term
for wine bronze objects, part of the 'bases' made for the temple
( bed-Axle*?). This is probably a different word with different
etymological connexions. The word m'konah in the list cited
hJlow, is found in the same verse.

Kenan, in his so-called Hbtoirt du peuple <TIsral> has collected
a li-t of words which he suggests may have been imported into
I Icbrw from Philistine sources. That there should be such borrowing
i> a priori not improbable : we have already shown that the leaders
among Hebrew speakers must have understood the Philistine tongue
down to the time of David at least. But Kenan's list is far from
It is as follows :

parbar or par var, fc a suburb*: compare peribolus.
m*konah, something with movable wheels: compare machina.
m'kherah, fc a sword * : compare /tdxatpa,
caphtor, *a crown, chaplet 1 : compare capital.
pilegtish, * a concubine 1 : compare pellex.

A further comparison of the name of Araunah the Jebusite, on
whose threshing-floor the plague was stayed (and therefore 'the
place in Jerusalem from which pestilential vapours arose'!), with
the neuter plural form Arerna, need hardly be taken seriously.

But since Kenan wrote, the discovery of the inscription on the
Black Stone of the Forum has shown us what Latin was like, as near
as we can get to the date of the Philistines, and gives us a warning
against attempts to interpret supposed Philistine words by comparison
with Classical Latin. And, even if the above comparisons be sound,
the borrowing, as Noordtzij * justly remarks, might as well have taken
place the other way ; as is known to have happened in several cases
which he quotes.

There is a word rite or snip meaning a * helmet', the etymology of
which is uncertain. 2 It may possibly be a Philistine word : 'the
random use of 5 and p suggests that they are attempts to represent
a foreign initial guttural (cf. ante, p. 75). Both forms are used in
1 Samuel xvii, the one ('2) to denote the helmet of the foreigner
Goliath, the other ('p) that of the Hebrew Saul. No stress can,
however, be laid on this distinction. The form 'p is used of the
helmets of the foreigners named in Ezekiel xxiii. 24, while 'a is
ur*ed of those of Uzziah's Hebrew army, % Chronicles xxvi. 14.

p. 84. 2 C

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 81

Of the place-names mentioned in the Old Testament there is not
one, with the possible exception of Ziklag, which can be referred to
the Philistine language. All are either obviously Semitic* or in any
case (being mentioned in the Tell el-Aimurna letters) are older than
the Philistine settlement. Hitzig has made ingenious attempts to
explain some of them by various Indo-European words, but these are
not successful.

The persons known to us are as follows :

(1) Abimekch, the king who had dealings with Abraham. A Semitic

name.

(2) Ajuzzath, Counsellor of No. (lj: Semitic name.

(3) Phicol* General of No. (1). Not explained as Semitic: po>sibly

a current Philistine name adopted by the narrator.

(4) Badyra., king of Dor, in Wen-Amon's report. Probably not

Semitic.

(5) Warati, a merchant, mentioned by Wen-Amon.

(6) Slakamariii a merchant, mentioned by Wen-Amon.

(7) Dagon, chief god of the Philistines.

(8) Delilah, probably not Philistine. See ante, p. 45.

(9) Sisera, king of Harosheth. See ante, p. 41, and compare

Benesasira on the tablet of Keftian names.

(10) Achish or Elcoak^ apparently the standard Philistine name, like

'John' among ourselves. It seems to reappear in the old
Aegean home in the familiar form Anchlsets. It occurs twice
in the tablet of Keftian names (ante, p. 10) and in the
Assyrian tablets it appears in the form Ikawnt?

(11) J/oocA, father of Achish, king of Gath. Unexplained and

probably Philistine.

(12) Ittai, David's faithful Gittite friend, perhaps Philistine.

(18) Obed-Edom, a Gittite who sheltered the Ark : a pure Semitic
name.

(14) Goliath, a Rephaite, and therefore not Philistine.

(15) Saph) a Rephaite, and therefore not Philistine.

(16) Zogg-i, a person signing as witness an Assyrian contract tablet

of the middle of the seventh century B. r. found at Gezer.
The name is not explained, and may be Philistine.

1 Max Miiller in his account of the school-tablet (ante, p. 10) compares the
Assyrian form Ikaum and the Greek 'A-yxw, and infers that the true pronuncia-
tion of the name was something like Ekosh.

* But in the last edition ofKAT. p. 437, it is noticed that this name can possibly
be read Ikasamsu or Ikasaxnsu.

M THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

(17-26) The ten Philistine kings mentioned on the Assyrian tablets,
who without exception bear Semitic names. Sarludari is an
Afevrian name, which may possibly have been adopted by its
bearer its a compliment to his master.

This list is so meagre that it is scarcely worth discussing. It will
1* oljserved that at the outside not more than eight of these names
can be considered native Philistine.

Down to about the time of Solomon the Philistines preserved their
linguistic individuality. A basalt statuette of one Pet-auset was
found somewhere in the Delta, 1 in which he is described as an
interpreter %? ^^ D *^ 3 A *~* 'for Canaan and

r ifm ft*w* ft WWVA <d> *- Ds^

PAi/Mia*. There would be no point in mentioning the two places
if they had a common language. Ashdod, we have seen, preserved
a patois down to the time of Nehemiah ; but it is clear that the
Philistines had become semitized by the time of the operations of the
Assyrian kings. It is likely that the Rephaite element in the
population was the leaven through which the Philistines became
finally assimilated in language and other customs to the surrounding
J^emitic tribes, as soon as their supremacy had been destroyed by
David's wars. The Hephaites, of course, were primarily a pre-Semitic
people ; but probably they had themselves already become thoroughly
semitized by Amorite influence before the Philistines appeared on the
scene.

We liave, besides, a number of documents which, when they have
l>een deciphered, may help us in reconstructing the * speech of
Ashdod*. The close relationship of the Etruscans to the Philistines
suggests that the Etruscan inscriptions may some time be found to
have a bearing on the problem. It is also not inconceivable that some
of the obscure languages of Asia Minor, specimens of which are pre-
served for us in the Hittite, Mitannian, Lycian, and Carian inscriptions
may have light to contribute. The inscriptions of Crete, in the
various Minoan scripts, and the Eteocretan inscriptions of Praesos 2
may also prove of importance in the investigation. Two other
alleged fragments of the * Keftian ' language are at our service : the
list of names already quoted on p. 10, which suggestively contains
AkaSou and Bene*asira: and a magical formula in a medical MS. of
the time of Thutmose III, published by Birch in 1871, 3 which contains
1 See fte description by Chassinat, Bulletin d* rinst. franc, tfarch. au Caire, i.

* See Conway in the Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. vffi, p. 125, for
an exhaustive analysis of these inscriptions.
8 ZtiUckr.f, agypt. Spraehe (18T1), p. 61.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 88

inter alia the following copied here- from a corrected version pub-
lished by Ebers. 1

1Z S> JWVW "\ A.W.
^fl o J e.
snt lit ';m\v in <ld-nf k f ti w

s u t w k p w : v m

nt r k

6 Conjuration in the Jww language which people call Keftiu
senjitiukapuwaimantirek* or something similar. This is not more
intelligible than such formulae usually are. Mr. Alton calls my atten-
tion to the tempting resemblance of the last letters totrke, turke,
drke, a verb (?) common in the Etruscan inscriptions.

There is one document of conspicuous importance for our present
purpose, although it is as yet impossible to read it. This is the
famous disk of terra-cotta found in the excavation of the Cretan
palace of Phaestos, and dated to the period known as Middle Minoan
III that is to say, about 1600 B.C. It is a roughly circular tablet of
terra cotta, 15-8-16-5 cm. in diameter. On each face is a spiral band
of four coils, indicated by a roughly drawn meandering line ; and an
inscription, in some form of picture-writing, has been impressed on
this band, one by one, from dies, probably resembling those used by
bookbinders. I suppose it is the oldest example of printing with
movable types in the world. On one face of the disk, which I call
Face I, there are 119 signs ; on the other face, here called Face II,
there are 123. They are divided into what appear to be word-groups,
30 in number on Face I and 31 on Face II, by lines cutting across the
spiral bands at right angles. These word-groups contain from two to
seven characters each. There are forty-five different characters
employed. It is likely, therefore, from the largeness of this number
that we have to deal with a syllabary rather than an alphabet.

I have discussed this inscription in a paper contributed to the
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 2 to which I must refer the
reader for the full investigation. Its special importance for our
present purpose is based upon the fact that the most frequently used
character, a man's head with a plumed head-dress, has from the

* Zwttchr. der D. M. G. xxxi, pp. 431, 439.

* Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy , vol. xxx, section C, p. 3&.

G*

84 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

moment of its first discovery been recognized as identical in type with
the plumed head-dresses of the Philistine captives pictured at Medinet
Habu. This character appears only at the beginnings of words, from
which I infer that it is not a phonetic sign, but a determinative.,
most probably denoting personal names. Assuming this, it next
appears that Face II consists of a list of personal names. Represent-

The Phaestos Disk (Face I).

ing each character by a letter, which is to be regarded as a mere
algebraic symbol and not a phonetic sign, we may write the inscription
on the disk in this form :

Face /(Fig, 4 A).

M&& shw Mufc XJ7S % pfe taxi /ihtao;

Xufi? hdsw Mqvs sqya n$8gw pz<r nla dwjxf M3a

nvhf nft wh x nvhf smft ho-w h/3h hfrS X nvhf

wox<rh Mdwfh

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 85

Face II (Fig. 4 s) : written as a list of names.

1. Mftaer &f n8h nnm

2. MfWF Sj3h s#f

3. Mfdrr(^) kqw

4. Mfrrw arA

5. HQfy XK MsiyAiir pa M^kq

Fig. 4 B. The Phaestos Disk (Face II).

6. Msswu^ If Mfkq MsijXfcr pa Mfkq
^r kqf

8. M^ta CTW Xey

9. M^sswu^ ta Aey

There is just one type of ancient document which shows such a
* sediment \ so to speak, of proper names at the end. This is a contract
tablet, which ends with a list of witnesses, and in the paper above

86 TOE fCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

referred to I have put forward the conjecture that the disk is of this
nature. In Fact* I, although not one word of the inscription can be
deciphered, it will be found that, applying the clue of the proper
names, everything fits exactly in its place, assuming the ordinary
forniul'i of a contract such as we find it in cuneiform documents.

The first two words would give us the name and title of the pre-
>iding magistrate : then comes the name of one of the contracting
parties ufc x 7 ? 5 : then come six words or word-groups, quite unin-
telligible, but not improbably stating what this person undertakes to
do : then follows what would be the name of the other contracting
party.

Next come some words which ought to give some such essential
detail as the date of the contract. And we find among these words
just what we want, a proper name srsa, denoting the officer who was
eponymous of the year.

The last thirteen words we might expect to be a detailed inventory
of the transaction, whatever its nature may have been. It is there-
fore satisfactory to notice that they arrange themselves neatly, just
as thev stand, in three parallel columns, having obvious mutual
relations: thus

nvhf
X-nvhf
X-nvhf -jroxo-h Mdwfh

n-ft n-/3h
h-sw h-/3h

which table not only confirms the conclusions arrived at, but illus-
trates a rule that may also be inferred from the list of witnesses on
Face II. Words are declined by prefixes , s, n, h, x and suffixes
w, ; and words in apposition Ttave the same prefix. See the third
column of the above table, and the titles of witnesses 1, &. We
have a word h in several forms: s-h-w, n-/3h, h-h, s-/3h-
Further, , prefixed to the 'name of the magistrate' and all the
names of witnesses, probably means 'before, in the presence of.
The name which follows that of the two witnesses 5 and 6 is
probably that of their father, and this assumed it follows that
the prefix s probably has a genitive sense.

There remains one important point. At the bottom of certain
characters there is a sloping line running to the left. This is always
at the end of a word-group : the two apparent exceptions shown in
some drawings of the disk (in word-groups 6 and %8 on Face II) being
seemingly cracks in the surface of the disk. The letters marked are
underlined in the transcript given above. I suggest with regard to

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 87

these marks that they arc' iijeaut to -x|jirt* a modification of the
phonetic value of the character, too J3ght to require a different letter
to express it, but too marked to allow it to be neglected altogether.
And obvioiirJy the nm>t likely modification of the kind would be the
elision of the vowel of a final open &* liable. The mark would thus
be exactly like the rirama of the DevaiiSgar! alphabet. 1 When we
examine the text, we find that it is only in certain words that this
mark occurs. It is found in ,3h, however declined, except when the
suffixes v, , are pn*ent. It is found in the word nvhf, however
declined, and appears in the two similar words phtar and Mta/r. It
is found in the personal name kq (in the formula pi Mkq). There
are only one or two of the eighteen example* of its use outside these
groups, and probably if we had some more examples of the nrript, or
a longer text, these would be found to fit likewise into ^ries. This
stroke would therefore be a device to expros a final closed byllable.
Thus, if it was desired to write the name of the god Dagon^ it would
be written on this theory, let us say, DA-GO X A, with a stroke
underneath the last symbol to elide its vowel. The consequences
that may follow if this assumption should at any time be proved,
and the culture which the objects represented by the various signs
indicate, are subjects for discussion in Liter sections of this chapter.
For further details of the analysis of the disk I must refer to my
Royal Irish Academy paper above quoted : I have dwelt on it here,
because ifj as is most probable, the plumed head-dress shows that in
this disk we have to deal with * proto-Philistines ', we must look to
this document and others of the same kind, with which excavators
of the future may be rewarded, to tell us something of the language
of the people with whom we have to deal.

II. THEIE ORGAXIXATIOX.
A. Political

From the time when the Philistines first appear in their Palestinian
territorv they are governed by Lord*, sera mm, each of whom has
domination in one of the five chief cities, but who act in council
together for the common good of the nation. They seem, indeed, to
engage personally in duties which an Oriental monarch would certainly
delegate to a messenger. The}* negotiate with Delilah. They con-
vene the great triumph-feast to which Samson put so disastrous an

1 1 find that this comparison has been anticipated in an article in Harper's Magazine
(European Edition, vol. Ixi, p. 187% which I have read since writing the above.
The rest of the article, I regret to say, does not convince me.

88 THE SCHWEICH UECTURES, 1911

end. There is a democratic instinct manifested by the men of Ashdod
and Ekron, who peremptorily * summoned ' the council of lords to
aihirte them what to do on the outbreak of plague : just as the
merchants of the Zakkala obliged even a forceful ruler like Zakar-
Baal to make an unsatisfactory compromise in the matter of
Wen-Amon, and in much later times the people of Ekron deposed
and imprisoned a ruler who persisted in the unpopular course of
submisssion to Assyria. Achzsh makes arrangements with David,
which his colleagues overrule. Of the methods of election of these
officers we know absolutely nothing. From the Assyrian documents
we hear of a series of rulers over Ashdod, father and son, but this
docs not necessarily prove that the hereditary principle was recognized.
Such a political organization was quite unlike that of the nations
round about : but the government of the Etruscans, who, as we have
seen, were probably a related race, presents some analogy. There is
a considerable similarity between the lucumones of Etruria and the
Philistine seranhn.

Nowhere do we read of a king of the Philistines. 1 To infer, as
has actually been done, from 1 Kings iv. 1 ('Solomon ruled over all
the kingdoms from the River unto the land of the Philistines ') that
their territory was organized as a kingdom, displays a sad lack of
a sense of humour. When Hebrew writers speak of *a king of Gath'
(1 Sam. xxvii. 2), * him that holdeth the sceptre from Ashkelon *
(Amos L 8), * all the kings of the land of the Philistines * ( Jer. xxv. 20),
c the king [perishing] from Gaza * (Zedbu ix. 5), they obviously are
merely offering a Hebrew word or periphrasis as a translation of the
native Philistine title. The same is true of the analogous expressions
in the Assyrian tablets. The case of the Etruscan * kings' seems
exactly similar, though there appears to have been an Achish-like
king in Clusium.

In Gibeah, and probably in other towns as well, a resident officer,
like a Turkish wwdir, was maintained at the time of their greatest
power.

It is possible that, if we had before us all the documents relating to
the history of the Philistines, we might be able to divide them into
clans, corresponding perhaps in some degree to the threefold division
of the Egyptian monuments Zakkala, Washasha, and Pulasati, i.e. as
we have tried to show already, Cretans, Rhodians, and Carians. The
continually recurring phrase *Cherethites and Pdethites' suggests
some twofold division. Ezekiel xxv. 16 ('Behold, I will stretch out
my hand upon the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethites ') may
1 Except Abimelech, Gen. xxvi. 1. Exceptio probat regulam.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 89

or may not imply a similar division. The rejx>rt of the young
Egyptian (1 Sam. x\x. 1\ implies that the name * Cherethitt* \ if it
had a specific meaning apart from * Philistines \ denoted the dwellers
in the extreme south of Philistine territory : and we have already
made passing note of the occurrence of the name Zlkfag* a possible
echo of the Zakkala, in that part of the country. The almost
accidental allusion to Carians in the history of the kings must not be
overlooked. But our data are so uleuder that very little am be built
upon them. All we can *ay is that the origin of the Philistines
makes it improbable that they were a single undivided tribe, and that
the scanty hints which the history affords render it still more unlikely*

Nor can we necessarily infer that the peculiar government by
a council of the lords of five cities implies thut they were divided
into five tribes. For though there -*eems to have been an actual
division of the territory into districts each of them under the
hegemony of one of these cities, the limits are rather indefinite ;
and to judge from the scanty materials at our disposal, seem to
have varied from time to time. The recurrence of the phrase *[such
a city] and the border thereof 1 seems to indicate a definite division
of the country into provinces governed each by one of the cities ; and
this is confirmed by David's speech to Achish, 2 * Give me a place in
one of the cities in the country (mm *ns? r.racX for why should thy
servant dwell in the royal city (ra^csn T3?2) with thee ? * A similar
polity is traceable in Etruria.

Of the division of the minor cities of the Philistine territory among
the Pentapolis perhaps Pentarchy would be a more correct term to
use we know very little. In the time of David^s exile Ziklag was
under the control of the king of Gath. Sargon, according to one
interpretation of his inscription, supposes Gath itself to belong to
Ashdod. We may compare *Gazara that bordereth on Azotus*
(1 Mace. xiv. 3-4), though they are about sixteen miles apart, and each
only just visible on the others horizon. Rather curiously, Joppa
and the neighbouring villages depended, according to Sennacherib,
on AsKkehn,

Besides these towns we hear of certain unwalled villages (1 Sam.
vi. 18) which are not specified by name.

B, Military.

Certain functionaries called sarim meet us from time to time in the
history (1 Sam. xviiL 30, xxix. 3, 9). It is the sarim whose protest

1 See Judg. L 18, 1 Sam. v. 6, 2 Kings xviii. 8.
a 1 Sam. xxvii. 5.

90 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

prevents David from joining in the battle of Gilboa. The word is, of
owixve, a commonplace Semitic term, and is applied in Deborah's Song
to the princes of Ksachar, and by Zephaniah to those of Jerusalem.
Among the Philistine* the officials denoted by this word were no
iloubt military captains.

It ii obvious throughout the whole history, from the days of the
Mfdinet Htibu sculptures onwards, that the military forces of the
Philistines were well organized. In J. Samuel xiii. 5 we read of
AUMX) chariots and 6,000 horsemen, which, even if the numbers
are not to be taken literally, indicates a considerable wealth in
war equipment. Elsewhere (ib. sxix. 2) we hear of * hundreds and
thousands', which may indicate a system of division into centuries
and regiments. Of their methods of lighting we have no certain
information : Judges i. 19 emphasizes their corps of war-chariots : in
the account of the battle of Gilboa the archers are specially alluded
to. The Medinet Habu sculptures and the description of the equip-
ment of the champions are analysed in the following section.

C. Domestic.

On the subject of family life among the Philistines nothing is
known. The high-minded sense of propriety attributed to Abimelech
in the patriarchal narratives has already been touched upon. Samson's
relations with his Timnathite wife can hardly be made to bear undue
stress : a Semitk marriage of the sadlka type is pictured by the story-
teller. The wife remains in her father's house and is visited by her
husband from time to time. Men and women apparently mingle freely
in the temple of Dagon at Gaza. No further information is vouch-
safed u&

III. THEIR RELIGION.

Of the religion of the Philistines we know just enough to whet
a curiosity that for the present seeks satisfaction in vain. The only
hints given us in the Old Testament history are as follows :

(1) The closing scene of Samson's career took place in a temple of
Dagon at Gaza, which must have been a large structure, as different
as possible from the native High Places of Palestine.

(2) In this temple sacrifices were offered at festivals conducted by
the * Lords ' of the Philistines ( Judg. xvi. 23). It is not unreasonable
to suppose that Samson was destined to be offered in sacrifice at the
great feast of rejoicing there described. This was probably an annual
festival, occurring at a fixed time of the year, and not a special cele-
bration of the capture of Samson : because an interval of some months,
during which Samson's shorn hair grew again, must have taken place

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 91

between the two events. We are reminded of the Athenian
with Saimon in the r*le of the fapuaKvs. Human sacrifices were offera!
in the temple of Mama at Gaza down to the fourth century A. i,, as we
learn from a passage presently to !>e quoted from Marcus the Deacon.

(3) There was also a temple of Dagon at Ashdod, which indicates
that the deity was a universal god of the Philistines, not a local
divinity like the innumerable Semitic Ba'alim. Here there were
priests, and here a rite of * leaping on (or rather stepping over) the
threshold ' was observed. A sculptured image of the god stood in this
temple.

(4) There was somewhere a temple of Ashtaroth (Samuel) or of
Dagon (Chronicles) where the trophies of Saul were suspended. It is
not expressly said that this temple wa< in Beth-shan, to the wall
of which the body of Saul was fastened.

(5) The Philistines were struck with terror when the Ark of Yahweh
was brought among them. Therefore they believed in (a) the exis-
tence and (b) the extra- territorial jurisdiction of the Hebrew deity.
This suggests a wider conception of the limitations of divine power
than was current among the contemporary Semites.

(6) Small portable images (D % :W) were worn by the Philistines and
carried as amulets into battle (2 Sam. v. 21). This practice lasted till
quite late (2 Mace. xii. 40).

(7) News of a victory was brought to the image-houses, probably
because they were places of public resort, where they could be proclaimed
(1 Sam. xxii. 9).

(8) At Ekron there was an oracle of Baal-zehuh, consulted by the
Israelite king Ahaziah ( Kings i. 2).

Let us clear the ground by first disposing of the last-named deity.
This one reference is the only mention of him in the Old Testament,
and indeed he is not alluded to elsewhere in Jewish literature. He
must, however, have had a very prominent position in old Palestinian
life, as otherwise the use of the name in the Gospels to denote the
* Prince of the Devils ' (Matt. xii. 24, &c.) would be inexplicable. A hint
in Isaiah ii. 6 shows us that the Philistines, like the Etruscans, were
proverbial for skill in soothsaying, and it is not unlikely that the
shrine of Baal-zebub should have been the site of their principal
oracle. If so, we can Ije sure that Ahaziah was not the only Israelite
who consulted this deity on occasion, and it is easy to understand that
post-exilic reformers would develop and propagate the secondary
application of his name in order to break the tradition of such
illegitimate practices. It is, however, obvious that the Philistines
who worked the oracle of Baal-zebub simply entered into an old

9* THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Canaanite inheritance. This is clear from the Semitic etymology
of the name. When they took over the town of Ekron and made it
one of their chief cities they naturally took over what was probably
the most profitable source of emolument that the town contained.
The local divinity had already established his lordship over the flies
when the Philibtines came on the scene.

This was no contemptible or insignificant lordship. A man who
has passed a summer and autumn among the house-flies, sand-flies,
gnats mosquitoes, and all the other winged pests of the Shephelah will
not feel any necessity to emend the text so as to give the Ba'al of Ekron
a *loftv house" or *the Planet Saturn' or anything else more worthy
of divinity 1 ; or to subscribe to Winckler's arbitrary judgement : *Natih>
Uch nicht Miegenba'al, sondern Ba'al von Zebub, worunter man sich
cine Qertlichkeit in Ekron vorzustellen hat, etwa den Hugel auf dem
der Teuipel stand * (Getckickte Israel*, p. 24). The Greek Version
fends no countenance to such euhemerisms, for it simply reads r< BiaA.
/Aiiar. Josephus avoids the use of the word Baal, and says fi he sent
to the Hy '(Ant. ix. 2. 1). The evidence of a form with final I is,
however, sufficiently strong to be taken seriously. Although the
vocalization is a difficulty, the old explanation seems to me the best,
namely, that the by-form is a wilful perversion, designed to suggest
sebely 'dung." 1 The Muslim argot which turns kiyamah (Anastasis
= the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) into kumamah (dung-heap)
is a modern example of the same kind of bitter wit.

The Lord of Hies is hardly a fly-averter, like the Zeus airtpvios of
Pliny and other writers, with whom he is frequently compared. In fact,
what evidence there is would rather indicate that the original con-
ception was a god in the bodily form of the vermin, the notion of an
averter being a later development : that, for instance, Apollo Sminiheus
has succeeded to a primitive mouse-god, who very likely gave oracles
through the movements of mice. That Baal-zebub gave oracles by
his flies is at least probable. A passage of lamblichus (apud Photius,
ed. Bekker, p. 75) referring to Babylonian divinations has often been
quoted in this connexion; but I think that probably mice rather
than flies are there in question. Lenormant (La divination chez les
Chaldten*, p. 95) refers to an omen-tablet from which auguries are
drawn from the behaviour or peculiarities of flies, but unfortunately
the tablet in question is too broken to give any continuous sense. 2

1 Neither wiH he feel any necessity to picture John the Baptist feeding on locust-
pods instead of locusts, which the feUahin still eat with apparent relish.

For Babylonian omens derived from Tarious insects see Hunger, Babylonische
Tieromina in Mitt, rordtra*. Ge**U. (1909), 3.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 93

A curious parallel may Jje cited from Scot land. In the ammnt of
the parish of Kirkmiehael, Banff shire, i* a description (Statistical
Account r>f Scotland, vu3. xjj, p. 464) of the holy well of St. Michael,
which wa* tiiippox*! to have healing projierties :

c Many a patient have it.s waters restored to health and many
more have attested the efficacies of tLeir virtues. But as the pre-
siding power is sometimes capricious and apt to desert his charge,
it now [A.D. 1794] lies neglected, choked with weeds* unhonoured,
and unfrequented. In better days it was not *o; for the winged
guardian, under tJie semblance of a $y, was never aliment from his
duty. If the sober matron wished to know the issue of her husband's
ailment, or the love-sick nymph that of her languishing swain, the* r
visited the well of St. Michael. Every iiiovement of the symjjsithetic
fly was regarded in silent awe; antl as he appeared cheerful or
dejected, the anxious votaries drew their presages; their breasts
vibrated with correspondent emotions-. Like the Dalai Lama of
Thibet, or the King of Great Britain, whom a fiction of the English
law supposes never to die, the guardian flv of the well of St. Michael
was believed to be exempted from the laws of mortality. To the
eye of ignorance he might sometimes appear dead* but, agreeably
to the Druidic system, it was only a transmigration into a .similar
form, which made little alteration in the real identity.'

In a foot-note the writer of the foregoing account describes having
heard an old man lamenting the neglect into which the well had
fallen, and saying that if the infirmities of years permitted he would
have cleared it out and fi as in the days of youth enjoyed the pleasure
of seeing the guardian fly\ Let us suppose the old man to have
been eighty years of age : this brings the practice of consulting the
fly-oracle of Kirkinichael down to the twenties of the eighteenth
century, and probably even later.

Leaving out Baal-zebub, therefore, we have a female deity, called
Asktaroih (AStoreth) in the passage relating to the temple of Beth-
shan, and a male deity called Dagon, ascribed to the Philistines. We
may incidentally recall what was said in the first chapter as to the
possibility of the obscure name Beth-Car enshrining the name of an
eponymous Carian deity : it seems at least as likely as the meaning
of the name in Hebrew, * house of a lamb.' Later we shall glance
at the evidence which the Greek writers preserve as to the peculiar
cults of the Philistine cities in post-Philistine times, which no doubt
preserved reminiscences of the old worship. In the meanwhile let us
concentrate our attention on the two deities named above.

I, ASHTOBETH. At first sight we are tempted to suppose that the
Philistines, who otherwise succeeded in preserving their originality,
had from the first completely succumbed to Semitic influences in the

94f THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

province of religion. * A* immigrants \ says Winckler in his Geschichte
Israels, * they naturally adopted the civilization of the land they seized,
and with it the cultus also. 7 And certainly Ashtaroth or Ashtoreth
wa* par excellence the characteristic Semitic deity, and worshippers
of this goddess might well be said to have become completely
beimtized.

But there is evidence that makes it doubtful whether the assimila-
tion had been more than partial. We begin by noting that Herodotus x
tpisciallv mentions the temple of fj Qvpavia 'A^oSinj as standing at
Ashkelon, and he tells us that it was the oldest of all the temples
dedicated to this divinity, older even than that in Cyprus, as the
Cvprians themselves admitted: also that the Scythians plundered
the temple and were in consequence afflicted by the goddess with
a hereditary vovvos ftf&cia.* The remarkable inscription found at
Debs in which one Damon of Ashkelon dedicates an altar to his
tutelary divinities, brilliantly confirms the statement of Herodotus.
It runs:

All OYPIOJI KAl ACTAPTHI TTAAAlCTlNHl
KAI A<i>POAlTHI OYPANIA1 GEOiC ETTHKOOIC
AAMCON AHMHTP10Y ACKAAOONITHC
CO)8EIC ATTO TTEIPATO)N

EYXHN

OY 0EMITON AE TTPOCAfEIN
AITEION YIKON BOOC 9HAEIAC

*To Zeus, sender of fair winds, and Astarte of Palestine, and
Aphrodite Urania, to the divinities that hearken, Damon son of
Demetrios of Ashkelon, saved from pirates, makes this vow. It is not
lawful to offer in sacrifice an animal of the goat or pig species, or
a cow. 1 J

i LI05.

a Some have compared with this the outbreak of disease consequent on the
capture of the Ark. But the two are entirely independent. The Scythian disease,
whatever it may have been, was not bubonic plague, and the Philistine disease
was not a hereditary curse. CThe Scythian disease is much more like the cess
noindtn or * childbirth pangs 9 with which the men of Ulster were periodically
afflicted In consequence of the curse of Macha, according to the Irish legend of
the Ttiin Bv Cuailnge. This is supposed to be a distorted tradition of the custom of
the rwrcufe, a theory which only adds difficulties to the original obscurity of the
myth.)

3 Clermont-Ganneau, discussing this inscription (J.ead. des Inscriptions, 1909;,
acutely points out that afyciar, iuriv are neuter adjectives, depending on some such
word as {yov, so that all animals of these species are forbidden : whereas female
animals of the cow kind alone are forbidden, so that bulls are lawful. Such limita-
tions of the admissible sacrificial animals are well known in analogous inscriptions :

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 95

The Palestinian A>tarte is here d^tiiiguished from the Aphrodite
of Ashkelon ; and though there olniously was much confusion Ijetwecn
them, the distinction was real. From Lucian l we learn that there
were two goddes>e^ whom he keeps carefully apart, and who indeed
were distinguished by their bodily form. The goddess of Hiexnpolis,
of whose worship he give?, us such a lurid description, was in human
form : the goddess of Phoenicia, whom he calls Dcrketo (a Greek
corruption of the Semitic Atargatis, rrBTTOl, had the tail of a fish,
like a mermaid.

The name of this goddess, as written in Sidonian inscriptions, was
long ago explained as a compound of T.JJ and nny, 'Atar and 'Ate.
These are two well-established divine names ; the former is a variant
of 'Ashtart, but the latter is more obscure : it is possibly of Lydian
origin. 3 In Syriac and Talmudic writings the compound name
appears as Tar'atha.

The fish-tailed goddess was already antiquated when Lucian wrote.
He saw a representation of her in Phoenicia (op. cit. 14), which
seemed to him unwonted. No doubt he was correct in keeping the
two apart ; but it is also clear that they had become inextricably
entangled with one another by his time. The figure of the goddess
of Hierapolis was adorned with a cestux or girdle, an ornament
peculiar to Urania ( 32), who, as we learn from Herodotus, was
regarded as the goddess of Ashkelon. There was another point
of contact between the two goddesses sacred fish were kept at their
shrines. The fish-pond of Hierapoli.s is described by Lucian
( 4?5j 46) as being very deep, with an altar in the middle to which
people swam out daily, and with many fishes in it, some of krge size
one of these being decorated with a golden ornament on its fin.

To account for the mermaid shape of the Ashkelonite goddess
a storv was told of which the fullest version is preserved for us by
Diodorus Siculus (ii. 4). c In Syria is a city called Ashkelon, and not
far from it is a great deep lake full of fishes ; and beside it is a shrine
of a famous goddess whom the Syrians called Derketo: and she has
the face of a woman, and otherwise the entire body of a fish, for
some reason such as this : the natives most skilful in legend fable
that Aphrodite being offended by the aforesaid goddess inspired

the triple prohibition in this case probably corresponds to the triple dedication, the
purpose being to secure that none of the three deities in joint ownership of the altar
shall be offended by a sacrifice unlawful in his or her worship. Other inscriptions
are quoted in the same article showing- a considerable intercourse between the
Ashkelonites and the island of Delos.

i Delka Syria, l.

3 See a careful discussion in Baethgen, Beitr. 71 ff.

96 THE SCHWEICH LECTUBES^ 1911

her with furious love for a certain youth among those sacrificing:
and that Derketo, uniting with the Syrian, bore a daughter, and
being ashamed at the fault, caused the youth to disappear and
exposed the child in certain desert and stony places : and cast herself
in shame and grief into the lake. The form of her body was changed
into a fihh : wherefore the Syrians even yet abstain from eating this
creature, and honour fishes as gods. 1 The legend is told to the same
efftct by Pausanias (IL xxx. 3).

This legend is or* great importance, for it helps us to detect the
Philistine element in the Ashkelonite Atargatis. An essentially
identical legend was told in Crete, the heroine being Britomartis or
Dictynna, According to Callimachus' Hymn to Artemis Britomartis
wa.s a nymph of Gortyna beloved of Artemis, whom Minos, inflamed
with love, chased over the mountains of Crete. The nymph now
hid herself in the forests, now in the low-lying meadows ; till at last,
when for nine months she had been chased over crags, and Minos was
on the point of seizing her, she leaped into the sea from the high
rocks of the Dictaean mountain. But she sprang into fishers' nets
(durva) which saved her ; and hence the Cydonians called the nymph
Dictynna, and the mountain from which she had leaped called they
Dictaean; and they set up altars to her and perform sacrifices.

The myth of the Atargatis of Ashkelon fits very badly on to the
Syrian deity. She was the very last being to be troubled with shame
at the events recorded by Diodonis Siculus : she had no special
connexion with the sea, except in so far as fishes, on account of their
extreme fertility, might be taken as typical of the departments of
life over which she presided. There can surely be little question
that the coyness of the Cretan nymph, her leap into the sea, and
her deliverance by means of something relating to fishes, has been
transferred to the Ashkelonite divinity by the immigrants. The
Atargatis myth is more primitive than that of Britomartis: the
union from which Britomartis was fleeing has actually taken place,
and the metamorphosis into a fish is of the crudest kind ; the ruder
Carians of the mainland might well have preserved an earlier phase of
the myth which the cultured Cretans had in a measure refined.

The cult of Britomartis was evidently very ancient. Her temple
was said to have been built by Daedalus, The name is alleged to
mean uirgo dulcig * ; and as Hesychius and the Etymologicon Magnum
give us respectively yAtwo/ and fyadov as meanings of Ppirti or

1 *

* Crefces Dianam rdigiosissuiie venerantur, ^ptBofi&p-npf gentiliter nominantes
quod sermone nostro sonat uii^inem dulcem.' Solinus, Polyhistor. ch. xvi.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 97

the explanation 5* very likely correct. The name of the barley drink,
fBpvros or ,3^'ror, may po--5bIy have some connexion with this word. See
also the end of the quotation from Stephanus of Byzantium, ante p. IS.
Athenaeus (viii. 37) gives u< an amusing piece of etymology on the
authority of Antipater of Tar-us, to the effect that one Gatis wa*
a queen of Syria who was #o fond of hMi that *he allowed no one to
eat fish without inviting her to the feast in fact, that no one could eat
arcp Tdrtbos : and that the common j>eople thought her name was

* Atergatis n on account of thi> formula, and so abstained from fish
altogether. He further quote* from the Histon/ of Aria by Mnaseus
to the effect that Atargatis was originally a tyrannous queen who
forbade the ute of fish to her subject >, becau>e she heiself was H>
extravagantly fond of this article of diet that >he wanted it all for
herself; and therefore a custom still prevails to offer gold or silver
fish, or real fish, well cooked, which the priest* of the goddess eat.
Another tale is told by Xanthus and repeated by Athenaeus in the
same place, that Atargatis was taken prisoner by Mopsus king of
Lydia, and with her son *Ix&vs (* fish ") cast into the lake near Ashkelon
(Zv TT? Ttpl 'Ao-fcoAwra At/"??) because of her pride, and was eaten by
fishes.

Indeed, the Syrian avoidance of fish as an article of food is a
commonplace of classical writers. A collection of passages on the
subject will be found in Selden, De Dlis Syris, II. iii,

Luciaii further tells us ( 4) that the temple at Sidon was said
to be a temple of Astarte ; but that one of the priests had informed
him that it was really dedicated to Europa, sister of Cadmus. This
daughter of King Agenor the Phoenicians honoured with a temple

* when she had vanished ' (rci} T* aQaiys iycyorcc), and related the
legend about her that Zeus, enamoured of her, chased her, in the
form of a bull, to Crete.

Here then we have distinctly a legend to the effect that a certain
temple of the Syrian goddess was really dedicated to a deity who had
fled from an unwelcome lover, and who was directly connected with
Crete. In fact, we have here a confused version of the Britomartis
legend on the Syrian coast. And when we turn to the Metamorphoses
of Antoninus Liberalis, ch. 80, we find a version of the Britomartis
story that is closely akin to the tale told by the Sidonian priest to
Lucian. We read there that c of Cassiepeia and Phoenix son of
Agenor was born Canne: and that Zeus uniting with the latter
begat Britomartis. She, fleeing from the converse of men, wished to
be a perpetual virgin. And first she came to Argos from Phoenicia,
with Buze, and Melite, and Maera, and Anchiroe, daughters of

98 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Erasinos; and thereafter she went up to Cephallenia from Argos;
and the Cephallenians call her Laphria; and they erected a temple
to her as to a deity. Thereafter she went to Crete, and Minos seeing
her and being enamoured of her, pursued her; but she took refuge
among fishermen, and they caused her to hide in the nets, and from
this the Cretans call her Dictynna, and offer sacrifices to her. And
fleeing from Minos, Britomartis reached Aegina in a ship, with
a fisherman Andromedes, and he laid hands on her, being desirous
to unite with her; but Britomartis, having stepped from the ship,
fled to a grove where there is now her temple, and there she
vanished (tyerero fyavi'is) ; and they called her Aphaea, and in the
temple of Artemis the Aeginetans called the place where Britomartis
vanished Aphae, and offered sacrifices as to a deity.' The relation-
ship to Agenor, the love-chase, and the curious reference to
* vanishing" can scarcely be a mere coincidence. Lucian, though care-
less of detail and no doubt writing from memory, from the report
of a priest who being a Syrian was not improbably inaccurate, has
yet preserved enough of the Britomartis legend as told in Sidon to
enable us to identify it under the guise of the story of Europa.

To the same Cretan-Carian family of legends probably belongs the
sea-monster group of tales which centre in Joppa and its neighbour-
hood. The chief among them is the story of Perseus the Lycian
hero and Andromeda ; and a passage in Pliny seems to couple this
legend with that of Derketo. 1 Some such story as this may have
suggested to the author of the Book of Jonah the machinery of his
sublime allegory ; and no doubt underlies the mediaeval legends of
St. George and the Dragon, localized in the neighbouring town of
Lydd. We can scarcely avoid seeing in these tales literary parallels
to the beautiful designs which the Cretan artists evolved from the
curling tentacles of the octopus.

We are now, I think, in a position to detect a process of evolution in
these tangled tales. We begin with a community dwelling somewhere
on the sea-coast, probably at the low cultural level of the tribes who
heaped the piles of midden refuse on the coasts of Eastern Denmark.
These evolved, from the porpoises and other sea-monsters that came
under their observation, the conception of a mermaid sea-goddess who
sent them their food ; and no doubt prayers and charms and magical
formulae were uttered in her name to ensure that the creeks should
he filled with fish. The sacredness of fish to the goddess would

1 * lope Phoenicum, antiquior terranim immdatione, ut ferant. Insidet collem
praeiacente saxo, in qoo tunculorum Andromedae uestigia ostendunt ; colitur illie
febutosa <Der)ceto.* flirt. Nat. v. xiii. 69.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 99

follow as a matter of course, and would }>e uio-t naturally < sprite*!
by a prohibition a^rain^t eating certain specified kinds. 1 AIM!
aetiological myth** would of course be developed to arcouut for her
fish-tail shape. The Dirtyoua legtud, with a Y*>lk*ctynolt>gie con-
necting the name of the nymph with a fishing-lift, i> one version ;
the legend afterwards attached to Atargatis is another.

When tlie Carian-Cretan league, after their repulse from Kgypt,
settled on the Palestine cwt, they <f course brought their legends
with them. In their new home they found a Boha Dca all powerful,
to whom inter alia fish were sacred, and with her they confuted their
own Virgo Dulris, patroness of fishermen. They built her temples
a thing unheard-of before in Palestine and told of hvr the *ame
tales that in their old home they had told of Britomartki They
transferred the scene of the tragedy from the eastern headland of
Crete to the Ai/ii'i? of Ashkelon, and they fashioned the legend into the
form in which it ultimately reached the ears of Diodorus Siculus

To the legend of Atargatis Diodorus adds that the exposed child was
tended and fed by doves till it was a year old, when it was found by
one Simma, who being childless adopted it, and named it Scmlramls,
a name derived from the word for '"dove" 1 in the Syrian language.
In after years *he became the famous Babylonian queen: and the
Syrians all honour doves as divine in consequence. The etymology
is of the same order as Justin's derivation of *Sidon" from
*a Phoenician word meaning "fish: the tale was no doubt told
primarily to account for the sacredness of doves to the Syrian goddess.
The goddess of Ashkelon was likewise patroness of cloves, and this
"bird frequently figures on coins of the city.

II. DAGOX was evidently the head of the pantheon of the Philistines,
after their settlement in Palestine, We hear of his temple at Gaza,
Ashdod, and, possibly, according to one version of the story of the
death of Said, at Beth-Shan. 2 Jerome in commenting on 'Bel
boweth down, Nebo stoopeth \ in Isaiah xlvi. 1 (where some versions of
the Greek have Dagon for Aifto), says Dagon is the idol of Ashkelon,
Gaza, and the other cities of the Philistines. 3 The important temple

1 Possibly some apparently irrational prohibition of a palatable species is at the
base of the half-humorous stories of the greedy queen.

8 Assuming the trophy to have been exposed in the same town as the body which
is nowhere stated then even if it were actually hung: in the temple of * Ashtarcth *
<i. e. Atargatis-Britomartis), there was probably a temple of Dagon also in the town,
to give rise to the parallel tradition.

8 * Nabo autera et ipsum idolum est quod interpretatur prophitla et dttiinatlo*
quam post Euangelii uerftatem in toto orbe conticuisse significat. Siue, iuxta
LXX, Dagon, qui tamen in Hebraico non habetur. Et est idolum Ascalonis,
Gazae, et reliquarum urbiuzn Philisthiim.'

H2

100 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

of Gaza 5s mirrored for us in the graphic story of the death of
Samson, as we shall see in the following section.

In the temple of Ashdod there was an image of the god
a thing probably unknown in the rude early Canaanite shrines.
Jo<*phu* (War*^v. 9. 4) calls it a foavor, which possibly preserves
a true tradition that the figure was of wood. Some interesting
though obscure particulars are given us regarding it in 1 Samuel v. 1-5.
The Ark, captured at Aphek, was laid up two nights in the temple.
Hie first night the image of Dagon fell on its face before the Ark,
and was replaced by *the priests of Dagon '; the only reference we
have to .specifically religious functionaries among the Philistines.
The second night he was fallen again, and the head of the figure and
the palms of its hands were broken off' and lay on the threshold.

The account of the abasement of Dagon is of considerable impor-
tance with regard to the question of the form under which he was
repit-scnted. The current idea is that he was of merman form, the
upper half man, the lower half fish. This theory is by modern
writers derived from the mediaeval Jewish commentators: Rabbi
Levi, in the third century, said that Dagon was in the figure of
a man: the first statement of his half-fish form, so far as extant
authorities go, is made by David Kimhi, who writes, *They say that
Dagon had the shape of a fish from his navel downwards, because
he is called Dagon [rr = fish] and upwards from his navel the form
of a man, as it is said " both the palms of his hands were cut off
on the threshold "V Abarbanel appears to make the god even more
monstrous by supposing that it was the upper end which was the
fishy part. But the idea must have been considerably older than
Kimhi. As we shall see presently, it underlies one of the readings
of the Greek translation: and the attempts at etymology in the
Onomastica 1 show clearly that the idea arose out of the accident
that y\ means *a fish\ while the story in 1 Samuel v requires us
to picture the god with hands ; coupled with vague recollections of
the bodily form of the Atargatis of Ashkelon.

If we examine the passage, we note, first, that he had a head and
hands, so that he must have been at least partly human. Next we
observe that exactly the same phrase is used in describing both falls
of the idol. The first time it was unbroken, and the priests could

1 Awyir & l^ios If Kfonj ( Vatican Onamasticon, ed. Lagarde, p. 215) : 'Dagon
piscis tristitiae* (Jerome, Liter interpret, hebraic. nominum, ed. Lagaide, p. 62).
The analysis suggested is pam. It reminds one of Stephanus of Byzantium's
StOiy about Ashdod : "Aferros- iroAw na^atffritnjs. ravrqv txriffey cis TW
r, ml avi* rijs ywaucus aflroS'Afas 6v<5/za0-er,

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINE? 101

put it in its place again. The second time it was fallen again, but
the projecting parts of it were broken off*. In other words the f5r^t
fall of the statue wa< just as bad as the second, except that it was*
not broken : there is no statement made that on the hecond occasion
the image, whatever its form, tnappetl acro>s in the middle. In both
cases it fell as a tehctt\ being smashed the second time just a* might
happen to a china vase ; this would imply that what was left standing
and intact was not so much any part of the statue itself, as the
pedestal or some other accessory.

The difficulty lies in the words which follow the account of the
fracture of the statue rip -.wr: p-^ ^. In the English version
these are rendered * only [the "tump of] Dagon wa> left \ The words
in brackets, for which the Hebrew gives no warrant, are inserted
as a makeshift to make some kind of sense of the passage. Wellhausen
ingeniously suggehted omission of the ; at the end of nn, supposing that
it had been inserted by dittography before the initial : of the following
word. This would make the word mean * only hi* tish was left \ But
this assumes the thesis to be proved.

When we turn to the Greek Version we find that it represents
a much fuller text. It reads thus : KOL *e<aAjj Aayur jcai apdorepa
ra lyvri x. L P&v oirov d^^cra ~l ra e/ATrpoar&a aptac^et? SCOOTO*.* nal
a/z<>orpoi ol KaftTToi T&V \ip&v airrov TteTrrcuKOTes (~i TO Trpd^u^oi'j srA^r
% jjdxis Aay^z; vTreXetyfa]. The passage in brackets has no equivalent
in the Hebrew text : it suggests that a line has been lost from the
archetype of the extant Hebrew Version. 1 If with some MSS. we
omit the first \cip&v (which makes no satisfactory sense with *x"?)
this lost line would imply that Dagorfs^rf were also fallen on the
threshold (apafytQ = Hebrew jnscn). This does not accord with the
*fish-tair hypothesis. But, on the other hand, it shows that the fish-
tail conception is considerably older than Kim hi, for x<ty*' must in
the first instance have been inserted by a glossator obsessed with it.

And what are we to make of TA?jr ?y pa\t? in:\i$dr] ? 4 The
backbone of Dagon was left** is as meaningless as the traditional
Hebrew, if not worse. But when we look back at the Hebrew we
begin to wonder whether we may not here be on the track of another
Philistine word the technical term for, let us say, the pedestal or
console on which the image stood; or, it may be, some symbol
associated with it. Wellhausen (Text d. Buck. Sam. p. 59) has

1 Probably two adjacent lines ended thus :

jnecn

and the homoeoteleuton caused the scribe's eye to wander.

102 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

put forward the suggestion that />u\t* really depends on pi 'only'.
But the translators would presumably have understood this simple
wottl they have indeed rendered it correctly, by wXiJjf. We need
a teconil 2*1 to account for />ax i5 an< ^ suc ^3 I submit, must have stood
in the Hebrew text. Some word like (let us say) np*% especially
if unintelligible to a late Hebrew copyist, would certainly drop out
fcooner or later from the collocation pn npi \n. It would be very
natural for the original author to use such a word, for the sake of
the paronomasia : and it would fully account for p&xis, which in this
ease is not the Greek word at all, but a transliteration of an unknown
word in the Hebrew original. The word apaQed, immediately before,
which has given much trouble to the copyists of the Greek text (see
the numerous variants in Holmes and Parsons), is an example of
an even easier word in the Hebrew being transferred to the Greek
untranslated.

Further we are told that the priests and those who entered the
house of Dagon an indication that the temple was open to ordinary
worshippers did not tread on the threshold of the temple in Ashdod,
in consequence, it was said, of this catastrophe ; but, as the Greek
translators add 'overstepping they overstepped it' (yTTepfiaivovTes
ixepfiairwtri). That the explanation was fitted to a much more
ancient rite we need not doubt: the various rites and observances
relating to thresholds are widespread and this prohibition is no
isolated phenomenon. 1 It is not certain whether the threshold of
the Ashdod temple only was thus reverently regarded, or whether
the other Dagon temples had similar observances: the latter is
probable, though evidently the writer of Samuel supposed that the
former was the case. The possible connexion between the Ashdod
prohibition and the * leaping on (preferably over) the threshold' of
Zephaniah i. 9, has already been noted.

We must, however, face the fact that Dagon cannot be considered
as exclusively a Philistine deity, even though the Semitic etymologies
which have been sought for his name are open to question. There
are n * fish', as already mentioned, and ?n 'corn'. Philo Byblios
favoured the second of these. The inscription of Eshmunazar, king
of Sidon, is well known to refer to Joppa and Dor as ]n ptf, which
seems at first sight to mean * the land of Dagon '. But more probably
this is simply a reference to that fertile region as the land of corn'.
However we have, through Philo, references associating Dagon with
the Phoenicians. In the Sanchuniathon cosmogony reported in the

1 On the whole subject see H. C. Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, or tlie
ofRdigic** R&es (Edinburgh, 1896).

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 10S

fragments of Pliilo we have an account of his birth from Ouranos
and Ge. 1 with his brethren EIos and Kruno* and Baetylos; he is
equated to 2;Y<*,;" *corn", which is apparently personified ; and by
virtue of this equation he is identified with a Ztvs 'Aptrfdos. All
this is very nebulous: and not more definite is the curious note
re&pecting the gods Taautos, Krono*, Dagon and the ret bring
symbolized by sacred letters.- If these pa^ages mean anything at
all, they imply that the people who taught the Phoenicians the use
of letters (and possibly al>o of baetylic stones) also imported to them
the knowledge of the god Dagon. But stories which csttifeibly reach
us at third hand afford a rather unsafe apparatus critical

In Palestine itself there is clear evidence of the prepuce of Dagon
before the coming of the Philistine?*. A certain Dagan-takala con-
tributed two letters :i to the Tell el-Amania correspondence. By
ill-luck they do not mention the place of which he was apparently
the chieftain, nor do they tell as anything else to the point : the one
letter is merely a protestation of loyalty, the other the usual petition
for deliverance from the Aramaean invaders. ' Dagan * is not here
preceded by the usual determinative prefix of divinity ; but neither
is the name so preceded in the references to the town of Beth-Dagon
in the inscriptions of Sennacherib.

This name, Beth-Dagon, appears in several Palestinian villages.
They are not mentioned in the Tell el- Amarna correspondence ; and
we might fairly infer that they were Philistine foundations but for the
fact that the name appears in the Hut of Asiatic towns conquered by
Hamessu III at Medinet Habu a list probably copied from an earlier
list of Ramessu II. There seems no possibility of escaping the con-

clusionthatbyJ^^^^ij^^^Y^k^ Bt >"
Dkn, which appears in this list, is meant one of the towns called

Beth-Dagon. 4

Of these villages, one was in the tribe of Asher, another in
Judah. The southern village described by Jerome 5 as of large size,

1 TevvSrat 5i TOI/'T^ d5eX^ CK rSv vpocifnjpevav ij ical teAijfc? Fiy, *ot &a rl xaAAo? air'
auTffj tt>rjfflv fK&fffar TTJV Apuvvpov -y^r. o 5i Tovnw varqp u fyiffros & ffw/i^oXj 6qptKV
TAeim}0ay aajnpb&ii t y x*s *** ^vffias ol muta? lT\ffoy. DapaXo^fcT c o Ov/rarof r^v
rov trorpas dp^v aycTcu vpus yapa* ity &Be\<prp Tqv, teai voiftrat < aur^s vtufas reffffapas,
"HXox riv teal Kpovov al BazniXor ical Aa-yav & fffrt "Siriav *at "ArXayTO. Frag. Philo
Byblios 13, Midler, Fragmm. iii, p. 567.

2 npu & TOVTW 0cos TOOITTOS fUfnjffapcvos rbv ovpayuv TO.V faSsv teas, KpCrov re mi
Aayuvos lead rtav X.oivoav, Stcnsvvffi- revs lepovs <rrX* x a -P aie "3P as * $* P- 569 -

3 Winckler, 315, 216 ; Kmidtzon, 317, 318.

4 See Max MuUer, Egyptian Rtuarefot, i. 49, {date 68.
* Desitu et nommibtu locontm, ed. Lagarde, p. 138.

104 THE SCHWE1CH LECTURES, 1911

*OB in his time called Caferdago, between DIospolis and Jamnia
(Lydd and Yebnah). Jerome^s village is probably to be identified
with a ruin known as Dajun, close by the present village of Beit
Dejan; the latter has pre.served the old name and is built on a
mound which is possibly the old site.

Moreover, the name Dagan appears in Mesopotamia : there seems
no longer to be any doubt that a certain group of cuneiform signs,
relating to a deity, is to be read Da-gan. In Babylonia it enters
into the composition of proper names of about 2400 B. r. : a king
dated 214v5 B.C. was Idin-Dagan and he had a son Isme-Dagan : a seal-
cvlinder exists of a certain Dagan-abi son of Ibni-Dagan. In Assyria
we find it in the name of Dagan-bllu-usur, eponym of the year
879 B,C. : and the name is several times coupled with that of Ami 1
in cosmogonies and in invocations of various Assyrian kings. The
name disappears after the ninth century : the late reference to Dagon
in the Hebrew version of Tobit, chap, i 2 , speaking of Sennacherib
being killed wj?n JOT *osb \hmh oaw* nyca fi at the hour when he
went in to pray to his idol Dagon *, is not of any special importance.

The fragments of Berossos relate how originally the people of
Babylon lix'ed like animals, without order: but a being named
Cannes rose out of the Erythraean sea, with a complete fish-body,
and a man's head under the fish-head, and human feet and voice.
This being was a culture-hero, teaching the knowledge of the arts,
writing, building, city-dwelling, agriculture, &c., to men: he rose
from the sea by day, and returned to it at sunset.

Other fragments of Berossos tell us that Cannes was followed by
similar beings, who appeared from time to time under certain of the
antediluvian kings. There were in all seven, the second and probably
the following four being called Annedotos, and the last being called
Odakon Q&Juuw or 'QddK&v). The last resembles * Dagon' in out-
ward form : but the elaborate discussion of Hrozn^ 3 has shown that
the comparison between the two cannot stand: that the -ow of
'&c<fx&>r is a mere termination : that the names Cannes and Odakon
(not however Annedotos, so far as has yet been discovered) have their
prototypes in Sumerian, and cannot be equated to the Babylonian
and Assyrian Dagan, The sole evidence for the fish-form of Dagan
therefore disappears. The statements of Damascius (de Principiis,

1 See Jensen, Kotmttlogie der Babylonitr, pp. 449-456, and Paton's article * Dagan '
in Hastings 1 * Encyclopedia ofRttigion and Ethics.

* Ed. Neabauer, p. 20, xlvii.

s Suneritckrbabyioxitcke Myiktn ton dm Gotte Xinrag (Mitth. der voideras. Gesell.
(1908), S.,

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES HNS

c. 123) about a Babylonian divine pair, *AJ\ * anr '
to the problem : as Rev. I\ Boylan and Mr. Alton have bath {jointed
out to me, the A is a mistake for an A in both cases and the behsgs
referred to are evidently Lahinu and Lahamu,

That Dagan and the pre-Phili>tine Dagon of Palestine are one and
the same being can scarcely be questioned. Hrozny (up. rit. p. 1ft})
points out that the difference of the vowel :$ no difficulty, especially
as the name appears once in Assyrian as an element in a proper name
in the form Daguna. But we may perhaps ask if the po**t-PhiK>tine
deity was identical with the pre-Philihtine god, and * farther there
may not have been a conflation analogous to that which lia< taken
place between Britomartis and Atargatis.

It is relevant to notice here in passing that the Philistine religion
never had any attraction for the reactionary king* of the Hebrews.
Only in a rather vague pa^ge (Judges, x. 6) i< there any indication
of the influence of Philistine worship on that of the Israelites EUe-
where we read of altars built to the abomination of the Zidonians, of
Moab, of the Ammonites, but never of the Philistines. The solitary
exception is the consultation of the Ekronite oracle, which, as we have
seen, was not Philistine at all. In spite of the Kfinitization of the
Philistines during the latter part of the Hebrew monarchy, their
cult still remained too exotic to attract the Semitic temperament.

Now strange though it may seem, there is a possibility that the
Philistines brought with them from their we>tern home a god whose
name was similar to Dagon. We have not found any trace of him in
or around Crete : the decipherment of the Minoan tablets may possibly
tell us something about this in the future. But the Etruscans, kins-
men of the Philistines, had a myth of a certain Tages, who apj>eared
suddenly 2 from the earth in the guise of a boy, and who, its they
related, was their instructor in the arts of soothsaying. This took place
*when an Etruscan named Tarchon was ploughing near Tarquiuii* 1
names which immediately recall the Tarklnt^ Tarpon-demo-^ and
similar names of Asia Minor. 3 Festus (sub roce) describes Tages as
a * genii filius, nepos louis \ As the Etruscans rejected the letter D,

1 Tow 5e fiapftapuv toticaai BajBuAuwot plv rty jUi'ar rSir Z\wv tlftxyv crr/^ rrapitrai &'o
5e votftv 1av6i icai 'Araatlv, TW fiiv 'Avaffixv avSpa r^s TaiB't TOWTS TCLVT^V 5 pijTfpa
BtSaf ovopafrvrcs If Sjy fWi'vyevrj veuda ^fW^BTJvcj. ri/v ManT/JV avrur ctpuu rlv
Kuffftav IK rory Strotv ap^feT vapayvptvov. "Ex 5c rStv avrv a\X^v 7War Tr/x^A^iV,
xcu Aax ov ' ET^o S Tpinjy e* roav airSv, Rtcaapi] KCU. 'Atrstcpuv* i Srv jtrfaBai rpefs '
xal "IXXivor al *Ad'. ToS 5e *Aov ai Aavmj* vluv -^fvtff&at TUV B\or s Cr ^ijfuwp^lv f
ipaoiv.

3 Cf. the sudden appearanc^es of Britomartis in Aegina, Pausanias, IL xxx. 3.

9 See Cic. d* Dithtatfane, ii. 23.

106 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Tilths w i-lo*cly comparable to a name beginning with Dag- ; and
in<lti.fl tin- -iv termination is probably not part of the Etruscan name,
but a nominative termination added by the foreign writers who have
repnrK<l tin* storv. If the Philistines brought such a deity with them
ih their Syrian home, they might well have identified him with the
god Ztogvw, whom they found there before them.

It i* difficult otherwise to explain how Dagan, whose worship seems
f o have been on the whole of secondary importance, should have
ztcquired Mich supreme importance among the foreigners.

But after all, the Canaanite Dagon and the hypothetical Philistine
Dag- may have been one the latter having been borrowed by the
*proto-PhiIistines\ as we may for convenience call them, at some
remote period. The intercourse which led to the adoption of clay
tablets as writing materials by the Cretans at the beginning of the
middle Minoan period, and to the adoption of certain details of legal
procedure (if there be any value in the conjectures given in this book
regarding the Pha&stos disk) may well have led to the borrowing of
the god of one nation by the other.

The Etymologicon Magnum calls Dagon or rather BTjrayow, sub-
stituting the place Beth-Dagon for the name of the god 6 Kpo'vos

After the collapse of the Philistine power in David's time, we hear
nothing more about Dagon except the vague guesses of etymologists
and mytliographers. The temple, and presumably the worship of
the deity, under the old name, lasted down to the time of the
Maccabees in Ashdod (1 Mace. x. 83, 84). But in Gaza the case was
different Here powerful Hellenic influences introduced numerous
foreign deities, which, however, there is every reason to believe were
grafted on to the old local gods and numlna. Josephns tells us of
a temple of Apollo ; but our leading source is the life of Porphyrius,
bx*hop of Gaza at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth
century, written by his friend the deacon Marcus.

This valuable little work gives us a picture of the last struggle of
heathenism, of which Gaza was the storm-centre. The descriptions
are terse but vivid. We see Porphyrius, after his appointment to
the bishopric, making his way painfully from Diospolis (Lydd)
because the heathen living in the villages on the way erected barriers
to prevent his passing, and annoyed him by burning substances that
gave forth fetid odours. After they had arrived, a drought fell in
the same year, which the heathen ascribed to the wrath of Mama
their god, on account of the coming of Porphyrius. For two months
no rain fell, notwithstanding their prayers to Marna ( c whom they say

THE CULTt'RK OF THE PHILISTINES 107

i,* Zcai") in hi.-, capacity of lord of rain. There was a place of prayer
outside the city, and the whole of the heathen population frequented
this for intercession to the inVuw rwr ojx^r. This place was no
doubt a sanctuary with an ancient tradition ; most probably to be
identified with the Aldioma, or place of Zeus Aldemioe. This
according to the Etymologicon Magnum, was the name of the chief
god of Gaza, and a god of fertility ; probably therefore identical with
Mariuu 1 We hear of the same sanctuary in the Talmud : near Gaza
was a place called Vend or c ltloza (nrfesr, also written r>D and n"^K)
outside the city where an idol was worshipped.- In the sequel we
learn that Porphyrius took from the Aldioma the stones with which
he built the church erected by him on the site of the Marneion.

Near modern Gaza is a hill, crowned by the shrine of a Muslim
saint called Sheikh Jfuntar. As usual, this true believer has succeeded
to the honours of a pagan divinity. Muntar means *a watch tower **;
but possibly the name is a corruption of Mania or [Britojmartis.

The name Marna is capable of being rendered in Aramaic,
Mar-na, 3 * Our Lord," and not improbably this is its actual meaning.
If so* it is probably an illustration of the widespread dislike to, or
actual prohibition of, the mention of the real name of a divinity. 4
At some time a hesitation to name the god who can hardly be other
than Dagon had arisen : the respectful expression * Our Lord ' had
by frequent use become practically the personal name of the divinity,
and had assumed a Greek form 'Madras, with a temple called the
Mapmor, the chief temple of Gaza.

It is likely that Gaza at the time claimed to be a sacred city : the
rigidness of the tabu against carrying a dead body into it suggests
that such an act would pollute it. The Christians had serious
trouble, soon after the coming of Porphyrius, on account of the case
of one Barochus, a zealous young Christian, who was set upon by
heathen outside the city and beaten, as was thought, to death. His
friends happening to find him lying unconscious, wished to carry him

1 Aldemios was probably another name of Mama. The Etymolofficon Jfaynum
gives US 'Aspics $ 'AA&wj Zfis [is] to Ta& TIJS 2i/wos Ttjuaixu' mpa TO dX&uW, ra
aiaiv u vi rj?s av^raK ray xapmir.Etym. Jftzpn. ed. Gaisfbrd, col. Jtt. >.

* Neubauer, Geoff, d. Talmud. With Yerld compare 'Ain Yrrdth, the name of
a spring outside the important city of Gezer.

s It is probably a mere coincidence that there was a river-god of the same name
at Ephesus, mentioned on coins of that city of the time of Domitian ' AVAPNAC
or E4>ECION AUPNAC), as well as in an inscription from an aqueduct at Ephesus,
now in the British Museum. See Roscher, Lexiron, s. v.

* The word Jfar, ' Lord,* is used in the modern Syrian church as a titie of respect
for saints and bishops. A pagan name 2HHO (= in* ns, *Mar has given')
illustrates its application to divinity.

108 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

home; but only suet-ceded in doing so with the greatest difficulty,
owing to the uproar cau^^ed by their carrying the apparent corpse into
the city.

Stirred by events of this kind, Porphyrius determined to invoke the
civil power to aid him in his struggle with heathendom, and sending
Marcus to Constantinople obtained an order for the closing of the
temple* of Gaza. As usual, however, in the East, the official
responsible for the carrying out of the order did so with one hand,
allowing the other hand to be * greased" to undo the work sur-
reptitiouslv. In other words, Hilarios, the adjutant sent to carry out
the order, "and especially charged to close the Marneion and to put
a stop to the consultation of the oracle, while appearing to execute
the duty committed to him, secretly took bribes to permit the rites
of heathen religion to be carried on as before. Porphyrius therefore
went in person to Constantinople ; interviewed the empress Eudoxia ;
obtained her favour bv the prophecy of the birth of a son to her,
which was fulfilled by the birth of Theodosius ; and obtained her
intercession with the emperor to secure the closing of the temples.
So Porphyrius returned with his suite, and was received at Gaza with
jubilation on the part of the Christians, and corresponding depression
on that of the Pagans.

Some valuable hints are preserved to us by Marcus of the nature of
the worship thus destroyed. A few excerpts from his work may be
here given.

"As we entered the city, about the place called the Four Ways,
there was standing a marble pillar, which they said was Aphrodite ;
and it was above a stone altar, and the form of the pillar was that of
an undraped woman, ex "* 77 ?? ^ a avxnP ^atro'/zez-a, 1 and they all
of the city used to honour the pillar, especially the women, lighting
lanipb and burning incense. For they used to say of her that she
used to answer in a dream those who wished to enter into matrimony ;
and telling falsehoods they used to deceive one another.' The worship
of this statue evidently retained some of the most lurid details of the
High Place worship. This statue was the first to be destroyed by
a miracle, Marcus says, on the exhibition of the Cross. He is probably
mindful of the prostration of Dagon on the Ark being brought into
his presence.

Ten days afterwards Cynegius, the emperors messenger, arrived
with a band of soldiers, to destroy the temples, of which there were
eight of the Sun, Aphrodite, Apollo, Kore (Persephone), Hekate,

1 The fish-tail has now disappeared.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 1(>9

the Heroeion, the Tychaion or temple of the Luck (n\i;) of the city,
and the Manieion, or temple of the Crete-born Zeus, the most
honourable of all the temple*, which ha** already bt-en mentioned.
Besides these there were a countlev numlxrr of minor deities in the
houses and the villages. The destroying party fii%t made it* way to
the Marneion. The priests-, however, had been forewarned, and
blocked the doors of the inner chamber with great stone.-. In the
inner chamber or adytum they stored the sacral furniture of the
temple and the images of the god. and then fled by other exits, of
which it was said there were several, o|x.-ning out of the tuhta of the
temple in various directions. Baffled therefore for the time, the
destroying party made their way to the other temples which they
demolished; Porphyrius, like another Joshua, laying under an

anathema anv of the Christians who should take to himself anv

.

plunder from the treasuries. This* work occupied ten days and the
question of the fate of the Marneion was then discussed. Some were
for razing it, some for burning it, others again wished to preserve it
and after purifying it, to dedicate it for Christian worship. Porphyrius
therefore proclaimed a fast with prayer for Divine guidance in the
difficulty. The Divine guidance came in strange wise ; and though it
has nothing to do with the Philistines, the story is so curious that it
is well worth relating exactly as Marcus himself tells it. As the
people, fasting and praying, were assembled in the church, a child of
seven years, standing with hii> mother, suddenly cried out in the
Syrian tongue, * Burn the temple to the ground : for many hateful
things have taken place in it, especially human sacrifices. And in
this manner burn ye it. Bring liquid pitch and sulphur and lard,
and mix them together and smear the brazen doors therewith, and lay
fire to them, and so the whole temple will burn ; it is impossible any
other way. And leave the outer part (ruv effiSrcpoz*) with the enclosing
wall (ircplfioXos). And after it is burnt, cleanse the place and there
build a holy church. I witness to you before God, that it may not
be otherwise : for it is not I who speak, but Christ that speaketh in
me.' And when they all heard they wondered, and glorified God.
And this portent came to the ears of the holy bishop (Porphyrius),
who stretching his hands to heaven gave glory to God and said,
4 Glory to Thee, Holy Father, who hast hidden from the wise and
prudent, and hast revealed even these things to babes." When the
people were dismissed from the church he summoned the child and
his mother to him in the bishop^s house, and setting the child apart
he said to the woman, 'I adjure thee by the Sou of the Living God to
say if it was on thy suggestion or of some other known to thee that

110 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

thy hon fcpoke a-, be did concerning the Marneion.' The woman said,
*l"deliver myself to the dread and awful judgement-seat of Christ, if
I had fort-knowledge of anv of those things that my son spoke this
day. But if it seem tit to thee, behold the boy, take him and
examine him with threats, and if be said these things on the
suggt^tion of any, he will confess it in fear ; if he says nothing
el*; it will be clear that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. 1 So
to make a long story short, the boy was brought in, and the bishop
bade him speak and say who had put these words in his mouth
Iwandishing a whip as he spoke. The poor bewildered child kept
silence, even though "We who were around him 1 Marcus speaks as
an eye-witness repeated the questions likewise with threats. At last
the child opened his mouth and made exactly the same utterance as
before, but this time in Greek a language of which, as appeared on
inquiry from the mother, he was ignorant. This settled the matter,
and sealed the fate of the Marneion. The bishop gave three pieces
of money to the mother, but the child, seeing them in her hand, said
in the Syrian tongue, * Take it not, mother, sell not thou the gift of
God for money ! ' So the woman returned the money, saying to the
bishop, * Pray for me and ray son, and recommend us to God. 1 And
the bishop dismissed them in peace. It is a strange coincidence that
the first and last events in the recorded history of Philistia have
a mantic prodigy as their central incident !

The reference to human sacrifices is for our immediate purpose the
most noteworthy point in this remarkable story. The sequel was
equally remarkable. The method approved by the oracle was applied,
and immediately the whole temple, which on the first occasion had
resisted their assaults, was wrapped in flames. It burnt for many
days, during which there was a good deal of looting of treasures ; in
the course of this at least one fatal accident occurred. At the same
time a house-to-house search for idols, books of sorcery, and the like
relics of heathenism, was effected, and anything of the kind discovered
was destroyed.

When the plan of the new church came to be discussed some were
for rebuilding it after the fashion of the old temple ; others for
making a complete break with heathen tradition by erecting a building
entirely different. The latter counsel ultimately prevailed. Important
for us is thejferf of the dispute, because, a propos thereof Marcus has
given us a few words of description which tell us something of what
the building was like. It was cylindrical, with two porticoes, one inside
the other ; in the middle like a ciborium (the canopy above an altar)
'puffed out' (i. e. presumably domed) but stretched upwards ( = stilted),

THE CUL1THE OF THE PHILISTINES 111

and it had other things fit for idols and suited io the horrible and
lawless concomitants of idolatry, 1

This clearly takes us far away from the incgttron plan of the old
Dagoii temple. We ha\e to do with a }N,'ritylt* circular buildi2i<j,
not unlike the Roman Pantheon* but with a ttilted dome aid >nr-
rounded by two row* of columns (^ee the ^ketch, p. Ii24. The
4 other things * suitable for idol-worship were presumably the adyta
of which we have already heard, which mu*t have been either n,<cu*es
in the wall or else underground chamber*. The apparently
exits made use of by the priests *et*m to favour the latter hyp
Not improbably they were ancient sacred caves. I picture the temple
to myself as resembling the Dome of the Rock at Jcnisileiu, <u!fcsti-
tuting the double portico for the aihle that runs round that building,

In clearing off the ashes and f/t'im of the Marneiou, Porpluriu*
came upon certain marbles or a 'marble incrustation" uo 'pdjwf?
which the Marna-Tvorshippers considered holy and not to be trodden
upon, especially by women. We are of course reminded of the
threshold of Dagon at Ashdod, but as we have no information as to
the part of the temple to which the marbles belonged, ve cannot >ay
if there was any very close analogy. Porphyries we are told, ptucfl
the street with these sacred stones, so that not only men. but " "A omen,
dogs, pigs, and beasts ' should be compelled to tread UJKMI them a
proceeding which we learn caased more pain to the idolater*, than even
the destruction of their temple. * But yet to this day \ says Marcus
* most of them, especially the women, will not tread on the marbles."

On coins of Gaza of the time of Hadrian a different temple i>
represented, with an ordinary distyle front. This type bears the
inscription GAZA MARNA, with figures of a male and female
divinity, presumably Marna and Tyche. The coin is evidence that
the distyle temple the old megaron type survived in Gaza till
this time, and it is not improbable that the Maxneion destroyed
by Porphyrius was built immediately afterwards. The resemblance
to the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem may be more than merely
superficial. This structure was built on the ruins of Hadrian's
temple of Jupiter, the Dodecapylon, which he erected over the sacred
Rock, when he made his determined effort to paganize the Holy City.
We have no description of this building, which was already in ruins
in A. D. 333 ; but its situation seems to require a round or symmetri-
cally polygonal structure, and the name dodecapylon suggests a twelve-

fit ffcv

avrov ij* cbra^ufrflTo? mBoipimr jroi aiarcra/upo? <ts vJ.cs, \ty & rat dX.\o TLVO. a TO
et20Xo($ tvptvtv, cv^cra Se vp

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

building. The Dome of the Rock (an octagon) may well have
been built after this model ; and the Pantheon, which has also been
compared with the building indicated by the account of Marcus, is
likewise of the time of Hadrian. The Marneion, therefore, might
have been exuied under the auspices of that enthusiastic builder, or
at hurt after the model of other buildings which he had left behind

fur. 5. Com* of Gaza and Afrhkelon : 1. Coin of Gam showing- Temple of
Mania. -. Coin of Gaza bearing the figure and name of lo, and a debased Phoeni-
cian Jf. the symbolic initial of Mania. 1 3. Coin of Gaza bearing the figure and
name of Minos. 4. Coin of Gaza bearing the initial of Mama. 5. Coin of
Aalikelozij with the sacred fishpond. 6. Coin of Ashkelon, with figure of
AsUrte. 7. Com of Ashkelon, with figure bearing- a dove: below, a sea-
monster. 8. Coin of Ashkelon, with figure of a dove.

him in Palestine. This would give a date for the break with the
tradition of the old building. The sacred marbles might well have
been some stones preserved from the old structure, and on that account
of peculiar sanctity.

The rest of the acts of Porphyrius do not concern us, though we
may note that there was a well in the courtyard of the Marneion,

1 Tor* opopaiupfvov o &TIV evBtla ap&% pia /cat rpeis ir^jiot lir f 081771 . . . irapcc Tafaiois
TOV AI&'S. Damascius.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 113

as we learn from the account of a miracle performed by him soon
after the erection of the church.

Jerome, in his Life ofHilarlon? narrate* sundry miraculous events,
especially a remarkable victory in the circus by u Christum comJwtant,
in which even the pagans were complied to acknowledge -1/tfnww
victus a Chrhto. Epiphanius of Const an tia in his Ancoratw*^ p. 109, a
enumerating a number of {>er-ons who have been deified, speaks of
Manias the slave of Asterio* of Crete a* having so t>een honoured in
Gaza. Here again the persistent Cretan tradition appears, but what
the value or even the meaning of this particular form of it may be
we cannot say. Mr. Alton ha** ingeniously sugyoted to me that
Epiphanios saw and misunderstood a dedicatory inscription from the
old sanctuary inscribed MAPNAt ACTERlCOi KPHTAfENHi.

Outside Gaza there is scarcely any hint of Mania-worship. The
name is used as an expletive in Lampridius's Life of Alexander Sererux :
and Waddington s reports an inscription from Kanata (Kerak), built
into a modern wall, and reading AN NHA[O]C KAMACANOY EHOHCE
All MAPNAi TOh KYPIOJu But Annelos veiy likely was a native
of Gaza. A well-known statue found many years ago near Gaza, and
now in the Imperial Ottoman Museum at Constantinople, has been
supposed to represent Mama ; but there is no evidence of this. The
eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope found a similar statue at Ashkelon,
but destroyed it.

Certain heathenized Jews of Con^tantia adored as deities Marthus
(or Marthys) and Marthana, the daughters of a certain false prophet
of the time of Trajan, by name Elzai * : but this is hardly more than
a coincidence.

In Ashkelon, also, there was a special deity in late Pagan times.
This was ' Ao-jcATfzridff \cca?Tov\o$ 9 once referred to by Marinus, writing
in the fifth century A. D. 3 It may be that this is the deity spoken of
in the Talmud, which mentions a temple of Saripa (vsf^s) at Ashkelon,
evidently a form of Serapis. 6 But we know nothing of * Asclepius the
lion-holder * but his name. Probably the name of the town suggested
a dedication to the similarly sounding Asclepius, just as it suggested
the word AC4>AAHC on the coins of the city. Asclepius does not
appear, so far as I can find, on any coins of Ashkelon. Mars, Neptune,

i Ed. Migne, xxiii. 27.

* Ed. Migne, xliii. 209 : xt l&apvas Sov\os 'Aortpiw rov E-PTJTOS mpa Ta^atois.

3 InscriptioTis, in Le Bas, Voyage arcMologigwe en Grtce . . .

4 Epiphanius, Contra Haerw. I. xix.

5 *AXXd KOL Mdfpror TafcTov vprovaa xal 'A.ffK\ijTiuv Acorrouxo*' ' AvKaXwATrpr rod
evavS/xnp a\Xov 'ApaBfas wo\vrijajToy fledy. Marinus, Ylfa Prodi, ch. 19.

Hildesheimer, Beitnige stir Geoff. Paltistina*, p. 3.

I

1U THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

the genius of the city, and Aphrodite Urania, are the deities generally
found on the coins : once or twice the latter is represented standing
on lions. 1 On other coins an erection is represented which may be
the AtfjLiyj or fish-pond for which the sanctuary was famous (see fig. 5,

p. HZ).

IV. THEIR PI-ACE IN HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION

A people, or rather a group of peoples, the remnant the de-
generate remnant if you will of a great civilization, settled on the
Palestine coast. They found before them a servile aboriginal popu-
lation ready to their use, who could relieve them of the necessary
but unaccustomed labour of extracting life and wealth from the
prolific soil They were thus free to cultivate the commercial facilities
which were already established in the land they made their own.
Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod had harbours which opened the way
to trade by sea. The great land route from Egypt to Babylon
passed right through the heart of the country from end to end
Gaza was from the beginning the principal mart for northern Arabia:
in the expressive words of Principal G. A. Smith, we hear the jingling
of shekels in the very name of Ashkelon. Corn and wine were pro-
duced abundantly within their favoured territory, even in years when
the rest of the country suffered famine ; an active slave-trade (one
of the most lucrative sources of wealth) centred in Philistia, as we
learn from the bitter denunciation of Amos. Small wonder then
that the lords of the Philistines could offer an enormous bribe to
a wretched woman to betray her husband. Small wonder that the
Philistines were the carriers and controllers of the arts of civilization
in Palestine.

The settlement of the Philistines in Palestine falls in that period
of fog, as we may call it, when the iron culture succeeds the bronze
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Hecent excavations have given us
a clear-cut picture of the development of civilization during the
bronze age ; that wonderful history which was sketched in its barest
outline in the course of Chapter L Then a cloud seems to settle
down on the world, through which we can dimly perceive scenes of
turmoil, and the shifting of nations. When the mist rolls away it is
as though a new world is before us. We see new powers on earth,
new gods in heaven : new styles of architecture, new methods of
warfare : the alphabet has been invented, and above all, iron has
become the metal of which the chief implements are made. Crete
and the great days of Egypt belong to the past : the glorious days
of classical Greece are the goal before us.

1 See De Saulcy, Numwnatique de In Terre Saints.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 115

The chief interest of the Philistines lies in thi>, that their history
falls almost entirely within thi* period of obscurity, when the iron
age of Europe was in it> birth-throe^. They and their kin, the
Zakkala in the eit^t and TurMia in the west bridge the gap between
the old world and the new. It is owing to them that the remi-
niscences of the clays of Crete were handed across a couple of
troubled centurio, to form the ba<is of new civilization* in Greece,
in Italy, and in the East.

Our materials for estimating the culture of the Philistines and
their place in civilization are the following- : (1) The Phae-tot Disk;
(2) The Medinet Habu sculptures ; () The results of excavation
in Philistia ; (4) Scattered Biblical reference*.

(1) On the Phaesto* Disk are forty-Jive character*. Of some of
these it is not very easy to determine the Mgnificatiou, but others
have some value as indicating the nature of the civilization of those
who invented its script, and it* analogues.

The writing, running from right to left, is in the Mime direction
as the Carian inscriptions, but not as the Minoan linear tablets.

Tihepltnned head-dress of the sign here called M has been referred to
as being the link which connects this disk with Garia on the one
hand and with the Philistines on the other. A. J, Reinaeh (Revue
archtologique, Ser. V, vol. xv, pp. 26, 27) publishes Sardinian statuettes
showing the same form of head-dress. The Sardinians being probably
a later stage in the history of one branch of the sea-peoples, it is
natural that they should show an analogous equipment.

The sign a, a man running, shows the simple waist-band which
forms the sole body-covering of the Keftian envoys.

The sign &, a captive with arms bound behind, has no more
covering than a girdle. The symbol is appears to represent a hand-
cuff or fetter. Perhaps Samson was secured with some such fastening.

The sign c from its small size appears to represent a child. He
is clad in a tunic fitting closely to the body and reaching barely to
the hips. No doubt, as often in Egypt ancient and modern, in some
of the remoter parts of Palestine and among the Bedawin, young
children went naked.

Fig. d represents a woman. She has long flowing hair, and seems
to be wearing a single garment not unlike ihefostan of the modem
Palestinian peasant, the upper part of which, however, has been
dropped down over the lower so as to expose the body from the
girdle upwards. Hall, in a recent article in the Journal of Hellenic
Studies, shows that the figure has Mycenaean analogies.

116

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Fig. r, with the shaved head, perhaps represents a slave. A figure-
of-eight (an ownership mark in tatu) is represented on the cheek. 1

o

8

"Syfifcjr*

^

t *. 3

Pi^

J-5

*,

Fig. f may represent a sandalled foot; fig. g may possibly repre-
sent a closed hand; but both are doubtful. Figs, h and i possibly
represent a breast and membrum muliebre respectively, though the

1 Compare the scarified lines still to be seen on the faces of negroes who have
slavery within recent years in the Turkish empire.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 117

former may be a Phrygian cap. The interpretation of the* four
signs is too uncertain to allow us to attach any weiyht to them.

In figs, j and k we may po*slbli/ see the ;*ncred doves and in / the
sacred fish. But this cannot be pressed. The rain's head (>,
the hoof (p), the horn (9), and the hkle (*v) nil indicate a pastoral life.
The symbols f, w, r, &:, .n y are drawn iroin the plant world, and
it must be noticed that those who developed the >cript of the Di*k
showed an unusual appreciation of plant-shape*. It is quite remark-
able to find >ueh a variety of floral symbols.

The sign ,3 is probably a >ection of a river, suggestive of water.

The sign 6 is very remarkable. It is almost certainly a represen-
tation of a domed hoifee, such as is imitated in the Lycian tombs.
It may be the prototype of one of the * palace* of A^hdcd*! The
sign f is a pillar with a square capital. The curious sign *? may
represent some kind of key.

Very important is the ship, fig. 7?. It is one more link with the
Medinet Habu sculptures, in which, as we shall t*e, an identical ship
makes its appearance.

The bow and arrow, figs, x, A, are especially interesting. Keinach
(op. cit. p. 35) ingeniously points out that it is a true picture of the
bow of the Lycian Pandarus, made of two horns of the wild goat
fixed and bound on a piece of wood.

aypiau . . .

TOV Kepa K

Kal TO. fj.v ao-Kijffas Kpao6o$ -ijpap*
xav fi f c8 AeiTJi'as xjp V(r *'Q 1 ' cttQ

Iliad, iv. 105-11.

The curved poignard (/D) has also Lycian and Carian analogies
(Keinach, op. cit. p. 35). The axe (^), square (o-), plane (-), signet-ring
(^r), and leather-cutter's knife ($), the latter perforated with a hole
in the butt for suspension, all show the specializing of tools which is
a characteristic of civilization.

Of especial importance is the round shield with bosses (f). It
is not Cretan : the Cretan shield is a long oval. But the Sherdanian
warriors at Medinet Habu bear the round bossed shield, and Reinach
(op. cit. p. 30) figures an Etruscan statuette which bears an identical
protection.

The other signs (TT, sr, r, x and F) are not sufficiently clear to
identify (T may be an astragalus, used in games, and ^ may be an
adze). But enough will have been said to show that quite apart

118 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

from it* literary value, the Phaestos Disk is of very considerable
importance iis a'document in the history of Aegean civilization.

(2) We now turn to the sculptures on the temple of Medinet Habu.
Here we have precious illustrations of costumes, vehicles, and arms.

Fig. 7. Wagons of the Pulasati.

Fig. 8. The Head-dress of the Fulasati.

The Pulasati wear a plumed head-dress, the plumes being fitted
into an elaborately embroidered band encircling the temples, and
secured by a chin-strap passing in front of the ears. The other tribes
wear similar head-dresses, except the Shekelesh, who have a cap.
The Zakkala are represented as beardless. Their sole body-costume
is the waistband, though some of them seem to have bracelets or
armlets, and bands or straps crossing the upper part of the body.
The women have the close-fitting fusion-, the children are naked.

The land contingent travel in wagons, of a square box-like shape,
some with framed, some with wickerwork sides. They have two
solid wheels, secured to the a*le by a linch-pin; and are drawn

THE CULTURE OF THE

119

.1

<

I
I

3
"3f

I

zs
a

P

CJ

s 1

120 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

by four oxen alweast. The sea-contingent travel in ships which show
a marked resemblance to that of the Phaestos Disk. The keel is
curved (more so at Medinet Habu than at Phaestos) and both bow
and stem rise high above the deck, with ornamental finials. A rudder-
oar projects from the stem ; and at Medinet Habu (not at Phaestos)
a mast rises from the middle of the boat, with a yard and a lug-sail.
The ships are fitted with oars, which in the summary Phaestos
hieroglyphic are not shown.

The warriors in the coalition are armed with a sword and with the
long Carian spear ; they have also daggers and javelins for throwing,
and cany circular shields.

A number of enamelled tablets, once forming part of the decoration
of the temple, have been described, 1 and these add some further
valuable details. They show prisoners in full costume, not the summary
fighting costume. A number of these do not concern us, being Semitic
or North African; but a Shekeksk, a Philistine, and one of the
Turtiha are represented, if Daressy's identifications are to be accepted.
Unfortunately there is no explanatory inscription with the figures.

The Shekebsh has a yellow-coloured skin, a small pointed beard,
not meeting the lower lip. His hair is combed backward, in a way
remarkably similar to the hair of the woman in the Phaestos disk
(or he wears a crimped head-dress). He is apparelled in a gown, black
with yellow circles above, green below, with vertical folds; over
this is a waistband divided into coloured squares by bands of green.
On his breast he wears an amulet, in the shape of a ring suspended
round his neck by a cord. A sort of torque [or a chain] surrounds
his neck, and his hands are secured in a handcuff.

The Philistine is more fully bearded: he has likewise a yellow-
coloured skin. The top of the tablet is unfortunately broken, so
only the suggestion of the plumed head-dress is to be seen. He wears
a long white robe with short sleeves, quatrefoil ornament embroidered
upon it, and with some lines surrounding the neck ; over this is
a waistband extending from the knees up to the breast, with elaborate
embroidery upon it : a tassel hangs in the middle. On the arms are
bracelets. The face of this prisoner is of a much more refined cast
than any of the others.

The supposed Turisha has a red skin : his costume resembles that
of the Philistine, but it is less elaborately embroidered. Three long
ornamental tassels hang from the waistband.

(3) In a country like Palestine, frequently plundered and possessing

1 Dansssy, 'Plaquettes <?maill(*es de Medinet Habu,' in Annales du Service des
Antiqwtb d* Pj%ypfe, vol. xi, p. 49.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 121

a climate that does not permit of the prt'servatioji of fre-etK* and
similar ancient records e cannot hope to find anything like the rich
documentation that Egypt offer* UN on the <uhjeet of commerce.
Some suggestive facts may, however, be learnt from finds made Sn
recent excavations, more especially jxittcry with coloured decoration.
This will be found described in the section on pottery in my JEmtvatkm
ofGezer, vol. ii, pp. 128-241.

Fig. 10. A Bird, as painted ou an Amorite and a Philistine Vase respectively.

Putting aside details, for which I may refer the reader to that
work, it may be said that the periods, into which the history
down to the fall of the Hebrew monarchy is divided, are five in
number ; to these have been given the names pie-Semitic, and First
to Fourth Semitic. The Second Semitic, which I have dated 1800-
1400 B.C., the time which ends in the Tell el-Amania period, shows
Egyptian and Cypriote influence in its pottery, and here for the first
time painted ornament becomes prominent. The figures are outlined
in broad brush strokes, and the spaces are filled in afterwards, wholly

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

or partly, with strokes in another colour. The subjects are animals,
birds, fishes, and geometrical patterns generally, and there can be
little doubt that they are crude local imitations of models of I^ate
Minoan warp, directly imported into the country. The Third Semitic,
1400-1000 B.C., includes the time of the Philistine supremacy: and
though I have dated the beginning of the period rather earlier
than the time of their arrival, the peculiar technique of painted
pottery that distinguishes it need not be dated so early, and may well
linve been introduced by them, as it certainly comes to an abrupt end
about the time of their fall. In this there is a degeneration observable
as compared with the best work of the Second Semitic ware. The
design* had in fact become 4 hieratic \ and the fine broad lines in
*eu*ral colours had given place to thin-line monochrome patterns,
which will be found illustrated in the book referred to.

Hie Philistines thus, in this particular art, show an inferiority to
their Semitic predecessors. The reason is simple : they were removed
farther in time from the parent designs. But the sudden substitution
of the fine-line technique of the Third Semitic period for the broad-line
technique of the Second, while the general plan of the designs remains
the same, can be most easily accounted for by the assumption that
the art passed from one race to another. And the sudden disappearance
of the fine-line technique coincides so completely with the subjugation
of the Philistines, that we can hardly hebitate to call painted ware
displaying the peculiar Third Semitic characters * Philistine'. This
may be a valuable help for future exploration.

The five graves found at Gezer, of which a fully illustrated detailed
description will be found in Excavation of Gezer, vol. i, pp. 289-300,
were so absolutely different from native Palestinian graves of any
period that unless they were those of Philistines or some other foreign
tribe they would be inexplicable. They were oblong rectangular
receptacles sunk in the ground and covered with large slabs. Each
contained a single body stretched out (not crouched, as in the Canaanite
interments), the head, with one exception, turned to the east. Orna-
ments and food-deposits were placed around. The mouth-plate
found on some of the skeletons was an important link with Cretan
tradition, and the graves, as a whole, show decided kinship with the
shaft-graves of Knossos or Mycenae, although naturally the art-centre
has shifted to Cyprus, which was the origin of such of the deposits as
had no Egyp tian analogies. The bones from these tombs presented
analogies with Cretan bones (see p. 60 ante) ; but of course five skeletons
are quite insufficient as a basis for anthropological deductions.

With further excavation the debt of Palestinian civilization to the

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 123

Philistines will probably be found to be even greater than the fore-
going paragraphs would suggest. Briefly, the imprison which the
daily study of objects found in excavation has made on the present
writer is, that from about 1400-1200 u.r. onwards to about bOO s.r.
Western Palestine was the >cene of a struggle between the Aegean
and Egyptian civilizations, with a .slight mingling of Mesopotaniiaii
influence, and that the local tribes took a merely passive interest in
the conflict and made no contribution whatever to its development.

(4) The Biblical and other literary sources point to the same
conclusion.

Let us take as an illustration the art of Architecture. It i> notable
that the only Palestine temples we read about in the Old Testament,
until the building of Solomon's temple, are the houses of the Philistine
deities. 1 Yahweh has a simple tent ; the Canaanite deities have to
be content with their primitive High Places open areas of ground
with rude pillar-stones. But Gaza, Ashdod, and Beth-Shan have
their temples, and most likely the place called Beth-Car and some of
the Beth-Dagons derived their Semitic names from some conspicuous
temples of gods of the Philistine pantheon.

We can deduce something as to the architecture of the Gaza
temple from the account of its destruction by Samson (Judges xvi).
There were two groups of spectators a large crowd (the figure SOCO
need not be taken literally) on the roof, and the lords and their
attendants inside. If Samson was also inside, those on the roof
could not have seen him, for no Tiypaethrum of any probable size
would have allowed any considerable number to enjoy the sport.
Samson must therefore have been outside the temple ; and it follows
that the lords and their attendants must have been, not in an enclosed
naos, but under an open portico. That is to say, the structure must
have been a building of the megaron type. When Samson rested
just where we should expect, at the edge of the grateful shade of the
portico, where he could the more quickly recover his strength but
would be at a respectful distance from the Philistine notables he
seized the wooden pillars of the portico, which probably tapered

1 Except the temple at Shechem 'Judges viii. 33 ix. 46 . The events described
as taking place there certainly postulate a covered building. This, however, is
perhaps no real exception : it may have originally been a Philistine structure.
It was dedicated to a certain Baal- or ELBerith. But ' the Lord of the Covenant*
is a strange name for a local fatal -. can it be that Berith is a corruption of B/MTO-
[/u/mff] ? The Book of Judges was probably written about the sixth century B. c. :
by then the temple was most likely a ruin, and the memory of its dedication might
easily hare become obscured. The curious expression in Ezekiel, commented upon
on p. 6 anfe, might be similarly explained : by the ordinary canons of criticism the
difficult original reading is to be preferred to the easy emendation there quoted.

12*

THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

downwards in the Mycenean style. He pushed them off their bases
by * bowing himself with all his might \ and, the portico being distyle
und having thus no other support, he brought the whole structure
down. Only a Jtiegurvn plan will satisfy all the conditions of the story.
Buildings Mich as this must have been familiar to David in Gath,
and perhaps the sight of them suggested to his mind the idea of
erecting a more worthy temple to his own Deity, as soon as he came
snto his kingdom. And when the work was carried out by Solomon,
we see that the same model was followed.

-30 ;- k -20

Fig. 1 1 . Sketch-plans and Elevations of the Marneion at Gaza and of Solomon's
Temple (accessory buildings ofeitted). The dimensions of the latter are figured
in cubits : the former is not to scale.

The description in 1 Kings vi, vii is not an architect's specification,
and it has numerous technical terms hard to understand. Many
attempts have been made to design a building which should conform
to this account, helped out by the not always trustworthy Josephus.
The mutual incompatibility of these restorations (to say nothing of
their prima facie architectural improbability) is sufficient to deter the
presgut-writer from attempting to add to their number. The main

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 125

lines of the description are, however, clear enough to ,4u>w with what
kind of building we have to deal. We need not attempt to assign
a place to the subsidiary external buildings in three stories their
winding stairs and other appurtenances, erected against the outsitle
of the main structure. But we note that the latter wa* oblong, 60
cubits long, SO cubits high, and 20 cubits broad. The*e figure* show
a classical sense of proportion for which we look in vain in any ancient
building that excavation has revealed in Palestine. A portico in
front, of the breadth of the house, was 20 cubits broad and 30 cubits
deep. Here again the dimensions are proportioned. The portico
was distyle, like that in the temple of Gaza : the two pillars were
called by names which show that they were xor masseboth *the
stablisher' and * strength in if are very suitable names for pillars
that have to bear the responsibility of keeping up a heavy portico.
These pillars had shafts 18 cubits long, and capitals 5 cubits high
a total length of 23 cubits, which leaves, when subtracted from the
height of the building, 7 cubits, a margin that is just about sufficient
for the entablature above and the plinth below. At the opposite end
of the building *the oracle ' or *the most holy place ** corresponds
exactly to the opisthodomos. It was 20 cubits square, which left
a naos, measuring 30 cubits by 20, in the middle of the building : the

* forty cubits * of 1 Kings vi. 16 evidently includes the portico.

With regard to the ordinary domestic architecture of the Philis-
tines, it must be admitted that the excavations which have been made
in Philistine towns do not lead us to infer that they were on the
whole much better housed than their Semitic neighbours. Amos, it
it true, speaks of the 4 palaces ' of Gaza and Ashdod (i. 8, iii. 9) ; but
this is rather a favourite word (n wwt) of the prophet's, and he finds

* palaces * in other towns as well. To a rough herdsman many build-
ings would look palatial, which when viewed from another standpoint
would hardly make the same impression.

One of the Philistine tombs at Gezer contained a small knife of iron ;
and this leads us at once to a discussion of fundamental importance.

Inserted into the account of the battle of Michmash there is a very
remarkable passage (1 Sam. xiii. 19-28). It is corrupt, and so*e
parts of it cannot be translated, but the meaning of it seems to be
something like this : * Now there was no smith found throughout all
the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, " Lest the Hebrews make
them sword or spear." But all the Israelites went down to the
Philistines to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his
axe and his ox-goad (?).' The next verse is too corrupt to translate,
and then the passage proceeds : c In the day of battle there was neither

126 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

word nor spear in the hand of any of the people, except with Saul

and Jonathan themselves."

This is sometimes referred to as a * disarmament , but there is no
hint of anvthing of the kind. It simply says that the Philistines kept
the monoiwlv of the iron trade in their own hands, and naturally
restricted the sale of weapons of offence to the Hebrews, just as
modern civilized nations have regulations against importing firearms
among subject or backed communities. The Hebrews were just
emerging from the bronze age culture. Iron agricultural implements
which seem slightly to precede iron war-weapons, had been introduced
among them ' ; but the novelty of iron had not worn off by the time
of Solomon when he built his temple without the profaning touch of

this metal (1 Kings vL 7)^ when Joshua made flint kmves t0
perform the sacred rite of circumcision (Joshua v. 2) ; the old traditions
must be maintained in religious functions. The champions of the
Philistines, of course, were able to use iron freely, although for defensive
purposes they still use bronze. 2

Goliath had a bronze helmet, a bronze cuirass of scale-armour (not
a mail-coat, as in the English translation), bronze greaves, and a bronze
javelin \ but a spear with a great shaft and a heavy head of iron.
The armour of * Ishbi-benob ' was probably similar, but the text
is corrupt and defective. The armour of Goliath is indeed quite
Homeric, and very un-Semitic. The mrtq vd-yx&KOS, the
and the enormous spear

are noteworthy in this connexion, especially the greaves, the Hebrew
word for which (nrtto) occurs nowhere else. The 0<Spa Atiri&wnfe
alone would seem post-Homeric, but this is an argumentum e slkntlo.
Fragments of a scale-cuirass, in iron, and of a rather later date, were
found in the excavation of Tell Zakariya, overlooking the scene where
the battle is laid (Excavations in Palestine, p. 150). But the culture
that Goliath?s equipment illustrates, like his ordeal by single combat,
is much more European or Aegean than Palestinian.

* Sec the essay on * Bronze and Iron' in Andrew Lang's TJi* World of Homer,
pp. 96-10*.

An elaborate paper, entitled * Die Erfinder der Eisentechnik ', by W. Belck, will
be found in Zatekriftftir Etknoloffig (1907), p. S3*. It claims the Philistines as the
original inventors of the smith's art That is, perhaps, going a little too far.

Greaves appear to be unknown in Oriental or Egyptian warfare. See Darem-
berg and Sagiio, Dtcf. ds* ctntf. gr* ft ran., s. v. Ocrea.

* IL vi Si&

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 17

In the report of Wen-Amon we found that the Zakkala were busy
in the Phoenician ports, and had large influence in Phoenicia. The
representations of Phoenician ships, such as the sadly damaged fresco
which W. Max Miiller has published, 1 shows them to have been
identical in type with the ships of the Pulasati. It is highly probable
that further research will show that it was due to the influence of
the * Peoples of the Sea* that the Phoenicians were induced to take
to their very un-Semitic seafaring life. And it is also probable that
it was due to Zakkala influence that the same people abandoned the
practice of circumcision, as Herodotus says they did when they had
commerce with * Greeks \ 2

An interesting question now arises. Was it to the Philistines and
their kinsmen that the civilized world owes the alphabet? The
facts that suggest this query may be briefly stated. For countless
generations the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and probably the Hittites,
had been lumbering away with their complex syllabaries; scripts as
difficult to learn and to use as is the Chinese of to-day. As in
China, the complexity of the scripts was a bar to the diffusion
of learning : the arts of reading and writing were perforce in the
hand of specially trained guilds of scribes. No one thought of the
possibility of simplifying the complexities; while current * hieratic'
forms of the letters might come into being with hasty writing, all
the elaborate machinery of syllables and ideograms and determinatives
was retained without essential modification.

Suddenly we find that a little nation in Syria appears to have
hit upon a series of twenty-two easily-written signs by which the
whole complex system of the sounds of their language can be expressed
with sufficient clearness. If it was really the Phoenicians, of all
people, who performed this feat of analysis, it was one of the most
stupendous miracles in the history of the world. That the Phoenicians
ever originated the alphabet, or anything else, become* more and more
impossible to believe with every advance of knowledge.

The alphabet makes its appearance soon after the movements of
the ' sea-peoples \ Zakar-Baal is found keeping his accounts, not
on day tablets (and therefore not in cuneiform) but on papyrus,
which he imports from Egypt in large quantities. And we are
tempted to ask if the characters he used were some early form of
the signs of the so-called * Phoenician' alphabet*

The oldest specimen of this alphabet yet found has come to
light in Cyprus: the next oldest is the far-famed Moabite Stone.

* Ififlfc. der voritowt. Gc*e!L (19M), 2, plate iii. II. 10*.

128 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

W. Max Miiller 1 cleverly infers from some peculiarities in the
rendering of names in the list of Sheshonk's captured towns, that
the .scribe of that document was working from a catalogue in which
the names were written in the Phoenician alphabet. This would
bring the use of thi* alphabet in Palestine back to about 930 B.C.,
or about a century earlier than the Moabite Stone. A letter in
nee-Babylonian cuneiform, probably not much earlier than this, and
certainly of local origin, was found at Gezer: the date of the
introduction of the Phoenician alphabet is thus narrowed down
very closely.

Whence came the signs of this alphabet ? De Rouge's theory,
which derived them from Egyptian hieratic, was the most reasonable
of anv, but no longer commands favour. There was for long a script
of linear signs, strangely resembling the Phoenician alphabet, in use
in Crete. It must be admitted, however, that so far no very satis-
factory analogies have been drawn between them, though their
comparison is not without promise of future fruit.

But in this connexion the Phaestos Disk once more seems to assume
importance. We are inclined to ask if it is possible that in the
script of which this document is so far the sole representative, we
are to see the long-sought origin ? It is not unreasonable to suppose
that in process of time the script of the Disk would become simplified
into just such a linear script as that alphabet : and the principle of
elision of the terminal vowel of syllables, already noticed in analysing
the inscription on the Disk, is just what is wanted to help the process
of evolution over that last most difficult fence, which divides a
syllabary from a pure alphabet. Suppose that three syllables, Tea,
ATO, ku 9 represented each by a special symbol, lost their vowel under
certain grammatical or euphonic conditions; then all three being
simply pronounced k might in writing become confused, leading
ultimately to the choice of one of the syllabic signs to denote the
letter k. Thus an alphabet of consonants would develop, which is
just what we have in the Phoenician alphabet. The 45 +x characters
of the original script for we have no guarantee that we have all the
characters of the script represented on the disk could very easily
wear down by some such process as this to the twenty-two signs of
the Phoenician alphabet.

As to the forms of the letters, in the total absence of intermediate

links, and our total ignorance of the phonetic value of the Phaestos

signs, it would be premature to institute any elaborate comparisons

between the two scripts. The Phaestos Disk is dated not later than

1 Anen und Ettropa, p. 171.

THE CULTURE OF THE PHILISTINES 129

1600 B.<\, the Phoenician alpliabet cannot IK* traced even so far back
as about 1000 B.C., and what may have happened in the intervening
six hundred years we do not know. But some arresting comparisons
are already possible. The symbol which I have called (h) might well
in rapid writing develop into the Phoenician sign aleph. The little
man running (a) is not unlike some forms of t:&de. The head (e)
both in name and shape reminds us of rfth. The dotted triangle (i)
recalls daletk or tetk, the fish (1) in name and to some extent in shape
suggests nun it is notable that the fish on the Disk always stands
upright on its tail the five-leaved sprig (w) is something like
mmekh^ the water-sign () might be mem (the three teeth of the
Phoenician letter preserving the three lines of the original sign).
The manacles (z) resembles bet h, the nail-pillar or prop (f) resembles
va,v in both shape and meaning, the remarkable key (0) simplifies
into xayiH, the square (a) into gimel, and the object (?) whatever
it may be, into pe. These tentative equivalents have been added for
comparison to the table of characters on p. 116. The direction of
writing is from right to left in each. case.

The plumed head-dress, so conspicuous as a sign on the Disk,
connects it with the Philistines : and the evidence afforded u< by
the Golenischeff papyrus of the Syrian colonies of Philistines, or of
their near kinsmen the Zakkala, links it with the Phoenicians. Ho\v
far it may be possible to make further comparisons, with the various
scripts of Crete, Cyprus, and Asia Minor, are questions which nmjt
be left for future discoveries and for special research.

We are not here writing a history of the alphabet : but one or
two points may be noticed which have a bearing on the subject.
It is commonly assumed that because the names of the letters have
a meaning in Semitic, and no meaning in Greek, therefore they are
Semitic words adapted into Greek. This is, however, a tion seqmtur. 1
It would be more probable that the borrowing nation should cast
about for words similar in sound, and possessing a meaning which
would make the names of the letters easily remembered. Such an
attempt would be sure to be unsuccessful in some cases : and in point
of fact there are several letter-names in the Semitic alphabet to which
the tortures of the Inquisition have to be applied before a meaning
can be extracted from them through Semitic. It may thus be that
all the letter-names are a heritage from some pre-Hellenic, non-
Semitic language: and instead of the old idea of a Phoenician
Ur-Alphabet from which all the South Semitic, North African, West

1 See M. Rene Dussaud's paper 4 L*Origine geenne des alphabets smit:qnes*
in Journal asiatviue, Ser. X, voL v, p. 357.

K

180 THE SCHWEICH LECTURES, 1911

Asian, Hellenic, ami Italic alphabetic scripts are derived, we are to
picture a number of parallel and nearly related alphabets developing
out of one of the hieroglyphic syllabaries of the Aegean basin one
of which scripts was taught to the Phoenicians by the despised
Philippines, Whoever invented the alphabet laid the foundation-
stone of civilization. Can it be that we owe this gift to the
Philistine^ of all people ?

And even this is not all. The rude tribes of Israel were
forced to wage a long and stubborn fight with the Philistines for
the possession of the Promised Land. For long it seemed
doubtful whether Canaan would be retained by the Semitic tribes
or lost to them : and it is no mere accident that the best-known
name of the country is derived from that of the sea-rovers. In the
struggle the Hebrews learned the lessons of culture which they needed
for their own advancement : and what was more important, they
learned their own essential unity. The pressure of external opposition
welded, as nothing else could have done, their loosely-knitted clans into
a nation. This was the historic function of the Philistines ; they
Accomplished their task, and then vanished with startling suddenness
irom the stage. But the Chosen People were led on from strength to
strength, till they too fulfilled their mission of teaching mankind
to look forward to a time when the knowledge of the Lord should
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Thus the influence of the Philistines remains, even if indirectly,
a heritage of humanity to the end of time.

INDEX

Abarbanel, 100.

Abimelech, 38, bl.

Abi-Milki, 19.

Abraham, 88.

Achaeans, 25.

Achish, 51, 52, 60, 02. 6T>, 72. M.

Adnllam, 53.

Agenor, 97.

Ahaz, Philistine revolt under. 65.

Ahimilki, 65.

Ahimiti, 64.

Ahuzzath. 81.

Aijalon, 63.

AkaSou, 10, 11, 26 (M aku AcLi-l*

Akir, 74.

AlaSia, 8, 19.

Alcaeus, 26.

Aldemios, 107.

Aldioma, 107.

AUr. At*, &5.

Scriptural

, .

Alphabet, origin of, 127.
Alton, 13, 18, 83, 105, 113.
Amos, 125 (see ateo f'td'

Passages).
Anakim, 60, 68.
Anath, 41.
Anchises, 81.
Antipater of Tarsus, 97.
Antoninus Liberally 97.
Aphek, 46.

Aphrodite, statue of, at Gaza, 108.
Architecture, Philistine influence on,

123.

Ark, the, 47. 76, 91.
Armour of Goliath, 54, 126.
Arnold, 3.

Aryans. Philistines probably not, 13.
Ashdod, 47, 60, 63, 64. 65, 71, 72,81, 100,

106.
_ history and site of, 73.

palaces of. 117.

siege of, 66, 73.

speech of, 66.

temple at, 47.
Ashdodimmu, 64. 73.
Asher, tribe of, 69.
Ashkelon, 37, 40, 95, 97.

coins of, 112.

history and site of, 71.
Asbtoreth, Ashtaroth, 93.

temple of, 52, 91.
Asi,7,8.

*n , -

Assyrian annals, Philistines in, 63 sqq.
Astarte, 95 (see also Ashtoreth).
Aswan, Jewish colony at, 11, 41.

Avvim, o, 6
Azuri king of
Azuri cltv eaiturd i-v
64. "

Badyrw, 30, J>3.

Bauer. 74.
Baur, 27.
Belcher, 13.
Beit Bejiin, 7t
Bekk, 1S6.
Bene-Berak. (U.
Benesasira, 10. 44.
Benjamin of Tudelw, 72.
Berossoy, 104.

Beth-Car, 27, 48, 49, 98.

Beth-Pagon. 42. <U, W, Ho.
I Beth-Shan, 52, 91, 93.

Beth-Sheme*h, 4J>, tt3, 76.
1 Birch. 82.
1 Body-guard of Hebrew kings, Philistine,

62.

1 Bones of Philistines. (V*.
!$ovliLn, 105.
; Breasted, 19, 20. 21, 29.

Britomartis, 96,^97, 9b r 99, 123.

Bpvrov, BI/ITTOS, J*.

Burrow*. 15.

Byblos, 8, 30 &q., 3*5.

; Callimaelms, 96.
' Callinus, 28.
! Calmet, 11.

Can opus, decree of. 11.

Caphtor, Caphtorim, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 27.

Cappadocia, 11, 12.
i Canans, Carites, 7,25, 20, 1.

Carpathos, 27.

Casluhim, 4, 5, 12, 28.
i Caunus, 26.
I Chariots, 40, 43.
1 Chassiuat, 81.
, Cherethites,5,61,8S,4>y.
' Cicero, 105.
' Cilicia, Cilicians, 12, 25.

Circumci&ion, 21, 39, 46.

IXDEX

Cloiro. 88.

CoteBum*, 12.

Conway, vj.

CoruHi, 0.

Cnt, Ciirian, fti.

Crete, Cretan*. fi, 9. in, 1$.

me*eiigrft from, to Egypt, s.

Zteedaiu*, W.

Dagon, Dugan, 40, 81, 90. lot.

image of, 100.

uamts compounded with, 103, 104.

U-mpIea of, 07. 73. 90, 91, 1*0.
Dagon, A place J*y Jericho. 61* ^> .

Bfeth-Dttgon,.
AaXW' 2S.
Damascia*, 104, 112.
Dan, tril* of, 3s, 69.
Dunaoi, 25.

Danuna, Danunu, 19, 2, 24, 25.
Iterdazm, 19. 25.

Deborah, suag <*f, i)S. 40, 41, '.to.

lK'ir^dh-Dhu!l>&ii. 77.

Delilah, 55. 61. 81. 87.

Itetair insi*riptinn at. 94.

Iteha, 12.

Deirioeratlc Instincts of Philistine*, 68.

Derketo, 93, i^.

y, 114.
Bhikenn, 77*.

Diodorus Sieulus, iK"i, 1H>, IK*.
JOodecapylon, 111.
Dome of the Bock, Jerusalem, 111. 112.
Dor, do, 3

Eten*Exer. 47.

Etron, 4o, 47, C2, 64. T>. 71.
history and site rf, 7i.
Ekron-Saphonnb, 74.
ElwesL, 2(). 24, 2:>.

Eli, 40.

El-Tekeh, 1& 04. 76.

Ephes-Dainmizn. 5(., 54, 07.

Epiphanius of Coubtantia. 113.

Erman. 20.

Esar-haddon, C5.

Eahmu&asuir. Hft2.

Etruscans, i;L 82, &S T 59, 91. Iu5, 117.

Europe 97.

Evans, 15.

Ewald, 0.

Fcsdvals, 9(.

Featns 7 105.

Fish, sacred, 95.

avoided by Syrians, 97.

Foonoont. 2.

Fntzt*r, 2x

Gath, 47, 51, 54, <MJ, 71, 89.

history and site of, 72.
Gatis, 97.

Gaza, 40, ? 65-67, 71, 100, 106.

coins of, 15, 112.

history and site of, 71.

temples of, 108.

Geba, 49, 53, 54, 56, 58.

Gederoth, 63.

George, St.. and the Dragon, 93.
j Gesenius. 2.
' Gezer, 56, 59, 62, 122.
; Gibbethon, 62.
; GibeahofGod, 4S>.

Gibeon,54.

Gilboa. 52.
, Gimzo, 63.
! Gob, 55, 56.

i Golenischeff Papyrus, 24, 29 (jsee also
\ Wen-Amon) .
; Goliath. 50, 54, 60, 61. 81, 126.
I Governors, Philistine, in Hebrew terri-
1 tory, 49, 88.
! Guylm, 43.
i Greaves, 126.

; Habiru. 18.

i Hadad-Nirari III conquers the Philis-

1 tines. 63.

I Hadrian. 111.

Hall, H.'R., 5, 7, S. 16. 27, 116.

Hanunu, king of Gaza. 63.

Harosheth, 42.

Harris Papyrus, 23.

Hazael. 62.

Head-dress of Philistines, S3. 87 ^
also Crest).

Hebrews in Philistine service, 52.

Herodotus, 6, 12, 26, 47, 65, 66. 73, 94,
127.

Hesychius, 96.
j Hezekiah, 63, 64.
i Hierapolis, 95.
> Hittites, 18.

Hitzig, 3. 12, 81.

Hrihor,29. '

Hroznf , 104, 105.

Human sacrifice, 91, 109. 110.

Hunger, 92.

laxnblichus, 92.

Ikasamsu, 81.

Ikausu, 65, 81.

Ikhnaton, 18, 19.

Images used as amulets, 91.

Insanity, Semitic attitude towards, 51.

Iron, introduction of, 125.

Isaac, 38.

Ish-baal or Ish-bosheth, 52.

Ishbi-benob, 55, 60.

Ittai, 61, 81.

Jabin, 42.

INDEX

J&bneh, 6&

Jehoram, Philistine revolt und-r. 61, 62.

Jehoshaphat, Philistines tributaries to.

62.

Jensen, 104.
Jerome, 99, 103. 11&
Jest, Egyptian, 34.
Jonah, 98.

Jonathan Maccabaeus, *7.
Jonathan, son of Shimei. 57.
Joppa, 64.

Josephus, 1, 12, titt. 7, 1*2, 100, H6, 124.
Justin, 37.

Kadesh, 66.

Kadytis, 65

Kalt, 44.

Kamphausen, rS.

Karnak, temple of, S, 2<>.

Kasios Mountain, 12.

Kanata, inscription at. 113.

Keftiu, 7-11, 14.

Keilah, 51, 57.

Kelekeah, 19, 24, 25.

Kimhi, David, 1<X>, lul.

Kingbhlp, Hebrew, foundation of. 4S.

Kiriath-Jearim, 48.

Kirkmichael, holy well at, 03.

Knobel, 12.

Knossos, 9, 10. 1$, 122.

Knudtzon, 19. 103.

KChler, 12.

Kom Ombo. 4, 11.

Lagarde, 100.

Lakeinacher, 6.

Lampridius, 113.

Land of Philistines, borders <f, 6b.

physical character of, 78.
Lang, 126.

Language, 50, 79.

Leaping over threshold. 62 < v * ate i

Threshold). !

Xieleges,26. i

Lenormant, 92. 1
Levi, Babbi, 100.

Libnah, 62. j

Libyans, 20. 21. j

Lords of Philistines. 46. 87. ,

Lucian, 95, 97, 98. j

Lncumones, 88. i

Lnkku, 19. 20, 25. i
Lycians, 25.

their tombs, 117. ,
Lydia,25.

Maeonia, 25.

Magical formula in Keftian language,

83.

Maiouma, 71.
Makamaru, 30, 81.
Manoah, 46.
Maoch, 81.

Marcus the Deacon, 91, 106.
Harinus, 113.
Marna, 2, 15. 71. 91, 106. 107, 113.

7 ^1*3. r I-L
. 4.

, 24, ti*>.

Xwdiurt Hiihu. 12, 2
117, 118.

iieb. t^mb of, H,
form of d^itv. 5*S H

Mcthvu ha-ammuli,
Meyer" E. , 7ik
M*y*r 3CA. , .

Mxehrai^h, tattte ^f,

Military equipment i

Mlnt-t ^1-Kal'aL, 74.

Miiiua, 15'.

Minoau P^rioda. ir> -qq.

Minos. 2rt, 46, Sw;.

Mitinti, king of A-hkel^ii, *'*-". *K

Mnobeiib, 97.

Moabite ^tone, 12s.

Moore, 40. 41.

Movers 2.

Muller, \V. Max. S. 9. 2<i. IL'. 24.

29, 58. 81. 1LS, 127.
Myia, 25.

Neht- miaiu tV',.
Xefiubenelide-d, 2*J.
Neubauer, 75, 1*>7.

12. :59.

Cannes, 104.

Obed-Edom, <>I.

Odakon, 104.

Ophiu&sa, 27.

Oracle at Ekron. t'2, 91, lirt'*.

Oceans, 25.

Padi, 64, .
Pamphylia, SV.
Pantheon, 111, 112.
Paton, 104.
Pausanias, 96, 105.
Pedasus, 25.
Pfilasgians, 2, 12. 26.
Pelethites, 6. 61.
Peoples of the btu. 1^ iaqq,.
Perseus. 98.
Pet-auset, statue <f, 82.
Petrie, 21, 27.
Phaestos. 16.

Disk, 26, 83 &<iq., lOtf. 115.
Phicol, 81.

Philistia in the time of Abraham, &*.

fertility of. 62, 114.
Philistine, the name, 1, 2.

language, 48.
Philitis, Philition, ? 12.
Philo, 102, 103.
Phoenicians, 13.

Philistine influence on, 69. 127.
Pidasa, 19, 24. 25.

Pisidia, 25.

184

INDEX

Kiny,

Pottery, Philistine, 121.
PraftKM iiweriptions, 4S, 82.
. UK*.

Skips, 117, 120, 127.

Shocho, 63.

Shnnammite sojourns among Phil istines,

IT., * .* Sibbecai, 55.

Prophetic denunciation* >f Philistines, I Sidcm, 33, 37. ^

l*u)aftati t Furc^atn, 23. 24,

I. !'..

HI, 21,22. :JT.

VI, 14.

IX, 34.

XII, I".*.
Eapha. M.
Bedriofc, &

Heinaeh A. J/, #;. 115 f 117.
Eekhmara, tomb of, 8. 9, 11, 12.
Re&an, 60.

Bephaites, BepUaim, tt, 6&.
Rephaim, Philistine i-amp at, 5i>.
Rhinocolum, C8.

Rib-Addi, 10, 25.
River of Egypt, ;.
Roi, 63.

Rukipti, king of Ashkelmi. GO.

fcfagalassus, 25.
iNUEnson, 3H. 44, 87, 1<H>.
Samuel. 47, 4i*.
"

04.

School xreise-tablet Hieratic, 10 7 44,

82.

8ehrftder T 68.
Sehwally, 19.

Sea-moaaters, fttt.
Selden, U7.
Semirmmis, 99.
Sen-rout, tomb of, 8.
Sennacherib, 64, 104.

Sempis, I13L

Seren, 4S, 79, 87 (secoiw Lord* .

Shaukgar, 41.

Shanunah the Haiarite, 42, 57.

Sheehem, temple at, 123.

SbekeUfeh, 20, 22, 24, 25.

Shea, 52.

Sheardaxra. 19, 20, 22, 24.

Sheehonk. 59.

Shiloh,

Skinner, 4.

Slave-trade, 71, 114.

Smith ,G. A. ,,114.

Smith (H. P.;, 47.

Solinus, 96.

Soothsaying, 01.

Sonek, valley of, 45.

Speech of Ashdod, 73.

Spiegelberg. 10.

Stade, 13.

Stark, 12.

Stephanus of Byzantium, 15, 28, 72, 1)7,

100.

Strabo, 26, 27, 28. 66.
Sntu, is.

Symbolic initial of Marna, 112.
Syntax of names in Hebrew, 3.

Table of nations, 1, 4, 28.

Tacitus, 15.

Tages, 105.

Tarsus, 25.

Tell el-Amarna, 19.

Tell es-Safi, 56, 72.

Tell Zakariya, 126.

Temple, Solomon's, 124.

Temples, Philistine, 123.

Tent-Amon, 29.

Teuerians, 28.

Thargelia, 91.

Thera, 18.

Threshold, rites connected with, 102,

111.

Thutmose HI, 7-9.
Tiele, 13.

Tiglath-PUeser III, 63.
Tlmnath, 63.
Tobit, 104.
Toy, 6.

Traditions, modern, of Philistines, 67.
Trees, sacred, 58.

Tribal subdivisions of Philistines, 88.
Troas, 24.
Trumbull, 102.
Turisha, 20, 24.
Tyrrhenians, 24.

Urania, 94, 95.
Uzriah, 62, 72.

Virey,8.

Warati, 30, 81.

Washasha, 22, 25, 27.

Waddington, 113.

Wadyel-Arish,68.
j Weill, 25, 27, 28.
i Wellhausen, 101.
t Wen-Amon, 29, 69. 81. 127.

INDEX is

Wilkinson, 8. Zakar-Baal, W, 127.

Winckler, 19, 52, 92, <4, H'ci. Zakkala, 22, 21, 35. :)<, *>s, ii;*.

Wredemann. 14. Zakro t 27.

Zk^rnutah, 70.
Xanthus, 07. Zcv; dirv/iuof. 02.

Caret*, 38, 27.

Yamani, 04. Zibel, king of Gaza. 'V*.

Yaruna, 19, 24. Zitlka, <U.

Ziklag, 1JJ, M, 52 t *U. 71 . SI. *'..
Zaggi,Sl.

133

INDEX OF SCRIPTURAL REFERENCES

\ IV fa tt fh? Eutifoh iwibt M*iftH *f* ft/*** diffwffwit fhr Hrftmr* the farmer

*ttu* M* x. *, 13. 11: i. 2*>

3 Samuel xviii. 1 : 57.

xii< ** : *.

, xviii. :;> :_W.

\ii. I**-!}** : J**,

xix. 7 : 57.

xv. 1 : .

xx vii. 2: sS

xx. 1-1S : -*X

xxvii. r : .

xxi J-iU : ?JS, iW.

xxix. 2 : IHi.

xxvl. J-2*l : J>$, &', S 1 *.

xxix. :*, i* : S.

Exrxta* xiit. 17: !Bt.

xxx. 14: 5.59.

xv. 11 : :i.

xxxi. 9 : 91.

xxxiii 31 : J. ^

2 Samae! v. 2 : 57.

v. 17-21: 4,53.

'VS.

v. 21 : !.

JcvyliUit v. 2 : !*

v. 22-25: 53.

xS 21 : >. *W.

viii. 1 : 53.

xii. 2:5 : 4:;.

xviii. 3 : 55.

tiii.3-3:4,4<>. 13,fi3,7J.

xx. 23 : 7.

xHi. 4 : 5.

xxi. 12, 17: 4,55.

xv. 11: 74.

xxi. IS, 19: 56.

xvii. 16: 4-1.

xxi. 22 : I5f.

xix. 27 : fit*.

xxiii. 9 : 57.

xix. 40 : 7t>.

xxiii. 11 : 42. i

xix. 43: 74.

1 Kings ii. 39 : 60.

Judges I lb, 19 : 4, -4S, M,

iv.!9:49. !

t*".

i ;v. 21 : 88.

5:1. ^ : 40 t 79.

vi. vii: 124. i

in. 31 : 41.

1 vL 7 : 12>. i

v.f>:41.

viL0: 80.

viii. J-ix. 4ft: 12S.

ix. 1*>: 59.

x. 6, 7. 11 : 2, 44, 1<>">.

xiv. 25 : 59.

ziiLl f 5: 2.

2 Kings i. 2 : 77, 91.

xiv. 2: 2.

xi. 4, 19 : 7.

xvi. 23-31: 41, ',*0, 123.

xii. 18 : 63.

xviii. 2 : tfs.

xviii. 8 : 63, 71, 89.

1 Samuel iv : 46.

xviii 14 : 64.

v. 1-5 ; 62, St), 10t).

1 Chronicles iv. 19 : 45.

vL 1^ : W*.

vii. 12 : 6.

vii : 48.

xi. 13 : 4, 42, 57.

vii. 11, 12: 4.27,47, 52.

xiv, S-12: 1,54.

ix.16: 49.

xiv 13-16: 54.

X. 5 : 49.

xviii. 1 : 54.

xiii. 5 : 90.

xx. 4: 50.

xiii. 19-23: 4. 125.

2 Chronicles xi. 8 : 73.

xiv. 3 : 48, 76.

xxi. 16 : 4.

xvL 14-18: 57.

xxvi. 14: 80.

xvi. 21 : 54.

xxviii. 18 : 63.

xvii : 54 r fej*}.

Ezra ii. 53 : 62. J

xvii. 51-54 : 4, 75.

Xehemiah iv. 7 : 66.

' XehemiaU vii. 55 : *>2.

J xiii. 23. 24 : Wi.

I Pbulin xxxiv. title : 3s.

Is. fc-12 : fil.

Ixxxiii : f>6.

Ixxxiii. ; 42.

Ixxxvii. : 70.

cviii. 7-10: 1.
Isaiah ii. : 91.

ix. 1 : 43.

ix.12: 2.(J3.

x.32: 51,

xx. 1 : C4.

xxviii. 21 : 54.

xlvi. 1 : 99.
Jeremiah vii. 14 : 76.

xxv. 20 : 73, H$.

xlvii, 1 : 05.

xlvii.4: 5, 11.
Ezekiel xvi. 27 : 70.

xxiii. 24 : 80.

xxv. 16 : 6, S3.

xxx. 5:0. 123.

xliv. 7 : 01.
Joel iii. 4 : 43.
i Amos i. : 71.

i.S: 73,88,125.

iii. 9 : 73, 125.

vi. 2 : 73

ix. 7: 1.5, 11,13.
tticahi. 10: 72.
Zephaniah i. 8. 9 : 62. 102.

ii. 4 : 69, 74.

ii. 5 : 6.

ii. 6 : 13.
Zechariah ix. 5 : 88.

ix. 7: 70.
Ecclosiasticus L 26 : 70.

1 Maccabees v. 68 : 78.
x.S3,S4: 47.67,73,106.
xi. 4 : 67.

xiv. 34: 89.
xvi. 15 : 69.

2 Maccabees xii. 40 : 91.
Matthew xii. 24: 91.

' John viii. 6: 51.