Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ken Litwak <kdlitwak AT concentric.net>]

Ian, I dn't want to attack anyone personally but you always seem to
find a way to avoid the point of my statemetns or questions.  I will try
one more time.  

1.  You dated the appearance of the Philistines in palestine based on
Egyuptian inscriptions and the Ugaritic letters.  I noted that it is
only a hypothesis that the Egyptian materials are talking about PLST. 
Your response seems lieka non-sequitor to me.  Do you nderstand my
point?  YOu are basing an argument on a hypothetical transliteration
ofa  dead langauge.  In addition, you seem to put great faith in
Egyptian texts, as though they were inerrant or something.  They are
historical writings, subject o\to the limitations of such, plus they
seem to be official documents, which makes them quite suspect in my
mind, because the authors have to protect themselves from looking bad or
saying the wrong thing.  Note:  the archaeological remains in Paleestine
are a separate issue entirely.  I am taling about the Egyptian evidence
you relied on.

2.  I posited a couple of mutually exclusive possibilities.  PLST is
used more than once to mean foreigner in the Scriptures of Israel.  In
contexts where there is a possible apparent discrepancy, if we
absolutize the archaeological and epigraphic data as you do, which I
would not do, we should ask if PLST w\should be translated as
"Philistines" in that case.  

3.  If an alternate translation does not fit the context, what then may
we suppose?  I see a few choices.
a.  The writer was wrong.  If so, can you explain how the same wrier
seems to know about a great many other groups and seems to treat them
correctly but does not treat this group correctly?  I can't explain the
data under this option.  Would none of the writer's contemporaries have
known otherwise?  If so, why wasn't this blatant error fixed?  BTW, data
from Judtih is of no interest to me, as I don't believe any Jewish group
ever held Judith to be canonical (we don't know what the Qumranites
thoght of this work) and neither did any Christian group so far as I
know.  Its presence in the LXX does not imply canonicity, as later
discussions ion medieval Christianity, including Jerome, indicate. So
I'm bracketing out the data from the APocrypha as not relevant to the
issue.  Anyway, how can we explain that a text which, under your view,
presumably went thorugh significant reworking, never had such a blatant
error fixed?  If the Egyptians knew when the Philistines arrived (if we
accept the Egyptian evidence at face value), then it seems inexplicable
to me that no Jews knew this when the text was slapped together
carelessly centuries later by the bonehead redactors of JEDP.  
b.  The  term PLST is broader in scope (as noted above ) than Philistine
and was applied in general to people groups of the same region before
the Philistines arrived.  There's no way to test tis either positively
or negatiely that I can think of.
c. The writer used a name that would make sense to his/her audience,
knowing that it wasn't techincially correct.  Supplying the correct
name, when no one was familar with that name, might not have been
appropriate for the write's purposes.  A modern historian might not do
this, but the writer of the Pentateuch was not a modern historian
(though no more ideologically biased than any modern historian). 
d.  oOre data would show there's no problem.  Maybe it will be
discovered some day.  I can validly argue, however, for no position
based on what hasn't been found, whether it relates to the Philistines
or anything else, like Jericho.  I can't argue about what happened from
walls I can't find.  Even if I found data at Jericho, what it means
would still be formed by the ideology of the archaeologist. If you need
proof that ideology can transform data, just look at the US Senate last
week. How does the same setof data look so different to so many people?
So I'd like more data, but I recognzie that if we had it, its
significance would still be up for debate.

  In short, Ian, I can think of numerous ways to explain the data.  The
charge that external evidence sows the biblical texts are blatantly
wrong simply is not the best solution IMO.  Finally, may I note in this
conenction that this kind of disagreement does happen all the time in
historical research.  I'm utterly convinced that without a doubt,
Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked and let it happen and
can't understand how anyone can look at the data and not agree.  Data is
not just data.  How you read the data ian has as much to do with your
general view of the Pentateuch as anything else, just as my view does
for me.  

  I'm done with this thread, and any others currently going on that are
not Hebrew interpretation, so please don't pose questions to me about my
post.  I won't be continuing this thread.  
Ken Litwak