Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Peter,

Reading this...

>"It's perfectly possible that the people along the coast were called 
>Philistines before the Philistines got there, but that possibility is 
>so infinitesimally small that under normal human thinking we discard 
>it out of hand as ridiculous to even consider... Medinet Habu has the 
>Egyptian equivalent to Philistine... The other groups mentioned and 
>portrayed also bear Greek cultural traits and Greek ethnic names."

You asked:

>Do I understand you right as saying that the other groups had Greek 
>names but that the origin of the name "Philistine" is unknown?

No, this is not correct.

>Surely 
>there is more than an "infinitesimally small" probability that the 
>name "Philistine" (used in Egyptian inscriptions and the Biblical 
>texts) was not Greek at all but meant "inhabitant of Peleshet" (ethnic 
>origin unspecified) which was perhaps a name for south-west Canaan?

Before you propose such a hypothesis, it might be useful to know how the
area was referred to before the Philistines arrived. There is nothing like
it in Egyptian records prior to their arrival, though the area had been
under Egyptian administration for several hundred years.

>Ian also wrote:
>
>"The tablets go back to the times they apply to, often being trading 
>accounts of kings with various other countries, so we can construct 
>the trade relations in the area. There are treaties, land deals, 
>conquests,.. all events that you mightn't accept as ever having 
>happened, but they have a historical value that places them at times 
>in the past that at least give them the possibility of being 
>contemporary reports. This simply cannot be said about the biblical 
>narratives."
>
>This description of the tablets sounds like quite a good description 
>of significant parts of the Hebrew Bible. 

In what way?

The tablets were found in archaeologically datable layers ("the times that
they apply to"). For example the Ebla archives were found in a building
that was probably destroyed by Naram Sin, dating the texts to the end of
the Early Bronze. The archaeological data exhaustively shows this to be the
case.

>So how can you justify your 
>last statement?

The biblical documents can at best be dated to the second century BCE, and
therefore don't go back to the times they literally apply to.

"Simply" is simply no argument.

Yet it simply is the case.

>Perhaps you can 
>clarify: are you claiming a difference in historical value because of 
>a difference in genre, or only because of the greater antiquity and 
>archaeological context of the tablets?

In your court of law, the judge will rule that if a witness did not
experience the data reported themselves they are not providing secondhand
information, often termed hearsay, which in itself is not considered
admissable evidence.

Genre considerations may also come into consideration, but the main problem
is qualitative regarding the witness.


Ian