Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

To all who answered my post about Philistines and Samaritans:

The attempt to make the Philistines of Genesis&Exodus into a different, 
completely unknown group is motivated only by awareness of the 
anachronism. No ancient scholars thought there needed to be two groups, 
nor, I would guess, does any modern reader unaware of the anachronism. 
Therefore Occam's Razor would certainly come down on the side of there 
being only one referent for the word "Philistines", even though the way 
they are pictured in Genesis has little in common with the historical 
Philistines. If you had any plausible historical candidates for the 
Genesis "Philistines", that might rebalance the scales, but no one does. 
(In particular, the "invaders" Jim postulates do not fit the texts that 
refer to the "land of the Philistines". How can "invaders" be considered 
owners of the land?)

When I was young I read Robert E. Howard's "Conan" books, which featured 
a map in which countries like Kush and Cimmeria were fit together in 
ways that had nothing to do with anything historical. He simply used 
names that the reader might vaguely recall from somewhere, without 
attaching specific data. Similarly in the Fantastic Four, Dr.Doom was 
king of "Latvia", but "Latvia" was a mountain kingdom that had nothing 
to do with the Baltic state. It seems that the author of Gen.21&26 
operated in much the same way with the name "Philistines".

As regards 2Kings17, it is amazing to me that you can read it to say 
that 90% of the people remained (that would NOT be just Karl's "poorest 
of the poor"), as archaeology shows (27K out of about 300K deported) .

2Kings17: 18  "... there was NONE LEFT (lo nisha'ar) but Judah alone"
2Kings17:20   "And Yahweh rejected ALL THE SEED OF ISRAEL (kol zera' 
yisra'el), and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until He had 
cast them out of His sight."

Not only does the text seem clear, in stating that NO ONE in conquered 
Israel knew Yahweh (thus a priest had to be imported to stop the lions), 
but once again you are going against the unanimous ancient understanding 
-- especially that of ancient Judaism, which used 2Kings17 as proof that 
the Samaritans were in no way descended from the Israelites.

In both these cases the fundamentalist reading has to do a lot of 
reaching and postulation of epicycles in order to save the text. But 
those who seek to understand the Bible according to the same standards 
they would apply to the Vedas,  Gilgamesh or the Book of Mormon do not 
have to come up with any far-fetched explanatory mechanisms.

The general point then is that while we are indeed working in an area in 
which definitive proofs are hard to come by, it is only a matter of 
logic, not ideology or the "religion of naturalism", that leads us to 
strongly suspect  that the Biblical text sometimes misrepresents the facts.


Gabe Eisenstein