Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dora:

What a wierd “history”.

1 Samuel does give where David’s original 600 troops came from. They were 
Israelis.

The words in question may have derived from the names of peoples to refer to 
their choice of weaponry or way of fighting. There is not enough evidence in 
Tanakh to say either way. Their use in Tanakh seems to indicate certain 
groups of professional soldiers.

In English, we still talk about “going berserk” in fighting wildly, yet how 
many of us realize that the term had its origins among the berserker, Viking 
shock troops that would fight wildly? Likewise, native Israeli soldiers who 
copied the PLTY or KRY in weaponry and/or battle techniques, may have called 
themselves by those names to refer to the weaponry and/or battle techniques, 
not intending that they should be recognized as having come from those 
peoples.

Tanakh is no help in tracing the etymology of these terms, and apparently 
there is not much  outside of Tanakh that survived from that time either.

Karl W. Randolph.

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

> I found my photocopies of part of Baruch Halpern's book on King David.   I
> don't have and did not read the part where David picks up his 600 characters
> to begin with.   That could shed light on what he thought to be their
> origins.
> 
> In the research I did on the web, I learned that "Cherethites" were a people
> of the central Negev associated with the Philistines in some unknown way,
> and "Pelethites" were some group always mentioned in conjunction with
> "Cherethites" that may mean something to do with soldier.   And they're
> linked with Edom, and a couple of other places in the Negev associated with
> the development of Yahweh.
> 
> I also learned that Judah itself was part of teh Negev - atleast
> technically.
> 
> Baruch Halpern argues that David's roots were in the central Negev - and
> Philistine, and with the Gibeonites, whose rotos are also southern.   He
> confusingly argues that some of David's iconography, as with the ark of the
> covenant, is Egyptian - but I think it was simply a variety of Canaanite,
> maybe of a Negev stripe instead of a coastal plains Canaanite cult stripe,
> but that's probably debatable.     Halpern argues that David actually
> conquered Israel as an outsider, Philistine or even Edomite, and imposed the
> religious system of his own roots and his allies on the people of Israel.
> He argues that the slaughter at Shiloh was partly about a religious conflict
> between the Gibeonites and the Benjamites or Saul's tribe.  He argues that
> Israelite religion was traditionally Canaanite, adn this is why when Israel
> broke away from Davidic control after
> teh reign of Solomon, it installed golden calf iconography.   Halpern thinks
> that if the ark of the covenant had been integral to Israelite cult, Saul
> would ahve actively sought it and David would have brought it out much
> sooner, instead of leaving it at the houses of Gibeonite and Philistine
> priests.
> 
> I suspect that actually the term "Philistine" is a red herring here.   It
> may ahve been inserted deliberately.  The last thing the authors of Samuel
> wanted was for people to realize that David didn't represent Israel!   Like
> all Philistines, these people, to whatever degree they ever were Philistine,
> ahd assimilated.  Except that this bunch appears to have assimilated into
> the Yahwistic culture of the Negev.   Wahtever Philistine identity they had
> ever had was relevant only inasmuch as it admits to David's ties.
> 
> Yours,
> Dora Smith
> Austin, Texas
> villandra AT austin.rr.com
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "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.
-- 
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