Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Dora:

I noticed that these terms were used exclusively to refer to soldiers. What 
made me suspect that it may refer to classes of professional soldiers was the 
realization that the PLTY is always written with a definite article prefix in 
Tanakh, which would have had a pronunciation of “hapeleti”. This sounds 
awfully similar to a class of soldiers among the Greeks, who had imported a 
lot of their culture along with their alphabet from Semitic sources.

The terms, as well as the weaponry, may have been Philistine, but in the list 
of David’s top soldiers, almost all of them were native Israelis (2 Samuel 
23).

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dora Smith" <villandra AT austin.rr.com>

> 2 Samuel 20:23.  Now Joab was in command of all the army of Israel; Benaiah
> son of Jehoiada was in command of the Cherethites and the Pelethites;
> 
<snip>
> 
> What sense do you make of this?  Do you think David recruited his bodyguard
> selectively from faraway places, or is the text trying to tell us that
> Israel cared in the time of the monarchy what Aegean nations the
> Philistines, whose culture had long become completely Canaanite, originally
> came from 200 years ago?
>
<snip>
>  
> Can anyone tell me more about the identity and history of David's guards?
> 

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