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".
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