Yigal,
You are right. Still here is a detailed story of a simple [very] young Hebrew man, the son of simple God fearing people, freely interacting with the Philistines [and their daughters]. It is, of course, possible that Samson, after years of dealing with them learned their language and that the famous, remarkably worded, XIDAH is given to us in translation. It is also possible that the town of TIMNATAH was a mixed town. But it is equally possible that the Philistines spoke a Hebrew dialect.
As far as I can recall not one of their names, including that of DAGON their god, is unmistakably non Semitic.
Isaac Fried, Boston University
On Oct 20, 2007, at 4:38 PM, Yigal Levin wrote:
In the Bible, or at least most of it, everyone speaks good Hebrew. So do the
Egyptians in Genesis and Exodus, the Midianites in Exodus and Judges, the
Moabites in Judges, Arameans in Kings, all of the sailors and the people of
Nineveh in Jonah and so on. This is just one more indication that the
biblical authors did not intend to write word-for-word historical accounts
of actual events - they had messages to get across, and wanted those
messages to be as clear as possible to their intended audience - who of
course spoke Hebrew. Only in those few places in which the foreigners'
language was a part of the story did the writers make an effort to make them
sound foreign.
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