canaanites and philistines - by r. drews

[JSOT 81 (1998) 39-61]

CANAANITES AND PHILISTINES

Robert Drews

Department of Classical Studies, Vanderbilt University,Nashville, TN 37235, USA

The thesis of this paper is that ‘Philistines’ is one of the Iron Agenames for people who in the Late Bronze Age would most often havebeen called ‘Canaanites’. No Canaanite nation vanished, and no Philis-tine nation suddenly appeared. It was only the names that changed. Thisconclusion fits well with the generalization, now accepted by mosthistorians and prehistorians, that in the second millennium BCE nationsdid not yet exist: the ‘national migrations’ posited for the secondmillennium BCE are figments of the ancient and modern imagination.

1. Caphtor

Before exploring the equivalence of ‘Palestine’ with the southern partof ‘Canaan’, it may be helpful to clarify the relationship of ‘thePhilistines’ to Crete or, more broadly, to the Greek speaking world.Thanks to recent archaeological excavations, we may be beginning tounderstand why Amos and Jeremiah described the Philistines as ‘aremnant of Caphtor’ (or as having been ‘delivered from Caphtor’ byYahweh), why Hebrew traditions located people called ‘Caphtorim’and kër∑®ª in Philistia, and why Zephaniah addressed the inhabitants ofGaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron as ‘you nation of kër∑®ªm’.1

1. In the RSV translation, Jer. 47.4 warns, ‘The Lord is destroying the Philis-tines, the remnant of the coastland of Caphtor’. Amos 9.7 presents Yahweh as recit-ing his ‘deliverance’ of various nations: ‘Did I not bring up Israel from the land ofEgypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?’ Zephaniah 2.5calls the people of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron ‘a nation of Cherethites’.

40 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 81 (1998)

The LXX regularly translated rwtpk as ‘Cappadocia’, perhaps becausethe first three radicals in the name rwtpk resembled the first threesyllables of Kappadokiva (the Greek name for what had begun as thePersian satrapy of Katpatuka). The principal liability of the LXX’stranslation is that Hebrew writers who used the term imagined thatkaptør, unlike Cappadocia, was in (or possibly on) the MediterraneanSea. For the last hundred years most scholars have believed that theBiblical ‘Caphtor’ was the island of Crete.2 All along, an associationbetween the Philistines and Crete was suspected from Old Testamentpassages that located kër∑®ª or kër∑®ªm (ytrk or µytrk, usually Angli-cized as ‘Cherethites’) in or near the Philistine cities. When the LXX

did not ‘translate’ ytrk as ‘mighty men’ (aJdroiv), it Hellenized them as‘Cretans’ (Krh`te~).3 The identification of ‘Caphtor’ with Crete washelped along in the nineteenth century, when Egyptologists discoveredthe name Kft¶w in New Kingdom inscriptions. The Egyptian name evi-dently represented a land far away in the Mediterranean Sea, and thephonetic similarities between Kft¶w and rwtpk were striking. Evans’discovery of Knossos’s ‘Minoan’ splendor showed a close connectionbetween Crete and Egypt from the Hyksos period to the NineteenthDynasty. That was enough to persuade most biblical scholars thatKft¶w, and so also ‘Caphtor’, was indeed Crete, and that the Caphtorimand Cherethites were descendants of immigrants from Crete.4 Lingeringdoubts about Kft¶w were largely dispelled thirty years ago by aninscribed statue-base of Amenhotep III: under the heading of Kft¶wthe inscription lists various place-names, three of which seem tobe the Cretan cities of Knossos, Amnissos and Kydonia.5 With the

2. For a survey of early attempts to solve ‘the riddle of Caphtor’ see Trude andMoshe Dothan, People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines (New York:Macmillan, 1992), pp. 7-9.

3. See Zeph. 2.5 and Ezek. 25.16; in the LXX Krhvth also appears at Zeph. 2.6.4. On the consensus over eighty years ago see, for example, the summary

statement made by R.A. Macalister in his 1911 Schweich Lectures, and publishedin R.A. Macalister, The Philistines: Their History and Civilization (London:H. Milford, 1914), p. 13: ‘The identification of Caphtor and Keftiu with Crete is sogenerally accepted, that there is a danger that some difficulties in the way should beoverlooked’. Macalister went on to address and dispose of these difficulties (forexample, the final r of ‘Caphtor’).

5. Michael Astour, ‘Aegean Place-Names in an Egyptian Inscription’, AJA 70(1966), pp. 314-17; K. Kitchen, ‘Aegean Place-Names in a List of Amenophis III’,BASOR 181 (1966), pp. 23-24; after an initial flurry of interest, the inscription

DREWS Canaanites and Philistines 41

identification of Kft¶w almost certain, there is now also a general con-sensus that the kaptør of Hebrew writers was Crete. For the minoritywho still do not accept the identification of kaptør or even of Kft¶w withCrete, the favorite alternative is Cyprus (the majority view, on the otherhand, is that Cyprus was the Alashiya of the Amarna Tablets and ofother Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hittite records).6

It is important that scholars on both sides of the ‘Caphtor’ questionconcede that any identification of ‘Caphtor’ is to some extent anachro-nistic. Most ancient Hebrew speakers who used the term kaptør are notlikely ever to have seen an island or a map, and some of them may noteven have seen the Mediterranean. Whereas Kft¶w and Alashiya mightconceivably have been meaningful terms for Egyptian merchants andadministrators in the New Kingdom, for Hebrew speakers in the EarlyIron Age ‘Caphtor’ could hardly have been more than a name. Althoughwe may posit a very loose connection between ‘Caphtor’ and the islandof Crete, we must suppose that for most people in Iron Age Israel andJudah the term was—like Ultima Thule for the classical Romans—entirely subjective, with no objective referent. Evidently none of thegreat islands of the Mediterranean was ‘known’ in Iron Age Jerusalemuntil the seventh century BCE.7 The ethnicon kittim may originally have

received little attention until it was featured in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: TheAfroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-sity Press, 1991), II, pp. 432-34. See also Eric H. Cline, ‘Amenhotep III and theAegean: A Reassessment of Egypto-Aegean Relations in the 14th Century BC’, Or56 (1987), pp. 1-36. For an Egyptologist’s summary of the Kft¶w question seeWolfgang Helck, ‘Zur Keftiu-, Alasia- und Ahhiyawafrage’, in H.-G. Buchholz(ed.), Aegäische Bronzezeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1987),pp. 218-26.

6. For Caphtor as Cyprus see John Strange, Caphtor-Keftiu: A New Investiga-tion (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980); for objections see A.B. Knapp’s review in Or 52(1983), p. 289. The equation of Cyprus with Alashiya is even more certain than theequation of Crete with Kft¶w. On the cult of Apollo Alasiotas at Cypriote Frangissasee Olivier Masson, ‘Un vieux problème: Alasia = Chypre?’, REG 103 (1990), pp.231-35. I would also suggest that the equation of Alashiya with Cyprus is indicatedby the epithet ajleisiva attested for Aphrodite, ‘the Cyprian goddess’; for a differentexplanation of the epithet see Sven-Tage Teodorsson, ‘An Epithet of Aphrodite’,Glotta 66 (1988), pp. 136-37.

7. Zephaniah’s labelling of the residents of Gaza and the other Philistine citiesas ‘a nation of kër∑®ªm’ suggests that by the late-seventh century at least someHebrew speakers had heard of Crete. Phoenician traders had begun fetching Cretaniron for Assyrian kings in the eighth century. After 612 BCE, Levantine trade with


had connections with the island that we know as Cyprus, since kittªm isplausibly derived from the placename Kition, the principal port on theisland’s south coast. But few speakers of ancient Hebrew ever visitedKition, and kittªm soon slipped its Cypriote moorings and was availableto serve as a vague expression for inhabitants of transmarine lands asdistant as Greece and Italy. In monarchic Israel and Judah a distinctionbetween Cyprus and Crete was so seldom needed that Hebrew speakersdid not have conventional terms for distinguishing the one island fromthe other. If in the tenth century BCE a woman from Gaza told a manfrom Jerusalem that some of her ancestors had ‘come from Caphtor’,both she and he may have understood the expression to mean nothingmore specific than that the ancestors had come from an exotic place,accessible by sea, where people spoke an utterly foreign language. Atany rate, because no distinction between Crete and Cyprus was possiblefor biblical writers who knew nothing about either island, people whoma writer described as ‘Caphtorim’ could have been descended frominhabitants of Crete, Cyprus, and probably the Peloponnesos and otherAegean places as well.

2. ‘Mycenaean’ Immigrants to the Southern Levant

Excavations at the large cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon and Ekron, and atthe small but impressive coastal town at Tell Qasile,8 have left littledoubt that there was a significant immigration to the southern Levan-tine coast from the Aegean—and more directly from Cyprus—in thetwelfth century BCE. Through much of the thirteenth century BCE finelydecorated LH IIIB pottery had been imported to Abu Hawam and otherCanaanite sites, where it served as a luxury ware to complement thepredominant, utilitarian Canaanite pottery.9 It is now clear, however,

Crete dropped sharply. See Sarah Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 131-37.

8. Popular but fairly up-to-date summaries have been published by the excava-tors: for Ashkelon see Lawrence Stager, ‘When Canaanites and Philistines RuledAshkelon’, BARev 17 (March–April, 1991), pp. 24-43, and for the results of exca-vations directed by the Dothans at Ashdod and Ekron and by Amihai Mazar at TelQasile see T. and M. Dothan, People of the Sea, pp. 129-79, 223-55. A detailed,documented presentation of what was known almost twenty years ago is availablein Trude Dothan’s The Philistines and their Material Culture (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1982).

9. More than 2300 vessels are catalogued in Albert Leonard’s An Index to the


that the twelfth-century ‘Cypriote’ and ‘Mycenaean’ pottery in use atsouthern Levantine sites—classified as LH IIIC:1b—was locally pro-duced, from Canaanite clay.10 Evidently, some potters who until c. 1175BCE had been working in Cyprus or the Aegean were after that dateliving in coastal Canaan. How and why a displacement of Cypriotesand Mycenaean Greek speakers may have occurred is suggested byexcavations on the Greek mainland, Crete and Cyprus. Many sites onboth the mainland and Crete were abandoned during the catastrophicdestructions that swept the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the LHIIIB period.11 Although Cypriote centers were also hard hit, they weregenerally rebuilt and apparently their population was swelled byAegean immigrants who spoke a South Greek dialect (thus creating theCypriote half of the Arcado–Cypriote dialect, which in the first millen-nium BCE was the most direct descendant of Mycenaean Greek). It istherefore a reasonable deduction that soon after 1200 BCE a great manySouth Greek speakers fled from Crete and other areas of ‘Mycenaean’Greece, that one of their prime destinations was Cyprus, and thatfrom Cyprus there was a further displacement to the southern Levantby either Cypriote natives or the refugees from Crete and the Aegean

Late Bronze Age Aegean Pottery from Syria-Palestine (Jonsered: P. Åstrom, 1994).(At p. 193 Leonard comments on the difficulty of separating vessels made in Cretefrom those made on the Greek mainland, but in pp. 193-200 lists those pots that are‘most probably’ from Crete.) For an overview of Cypriote and Aegean pottery ofthe Mycenaean (LH IIIA and IIIB) period at Canaanite sites see A. Mazar,Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000–586 BCE (New York: Doubleday,1990), pp. 259-64; see also Susan Allen, ‘Trojan Grey Ware at Tel Miqne-Ekron’,BASOR 293 (1994), pp. 39-51. For suggestions about the southern Levant’s place inthe clockwise or counter-clockwise sailing routes that linked Egypt and the Aegeanin the LH III period see Eric H. Cline, ‘Contact and Trade or Colonization? Egyptand the Aegean in the 14th–13th Centuries BC’, Minos 25–26 (1990–91), pp. 7-36.

10. F. Asaro et al., ‘An Introductory Study of Mycenaean IIIC1 Ware from TellAshdod’, Archaeometry 13 (1971), pp. 169-75; cf. Stager, ‘When Canaanites andPhilistines Ruled Ashkelon’, p. 35: ‘When tested by neutron activation analysis, theearly monochrome Mycenaean IIIC pottery proved to have been made from localclays, whether at Ashdod and Ekron in Philistia or at Enkomi, Kition and OldPaphos on Cyprus. Almost none of it was imported.’

11. For a brief survey and a map of the destroyed sites see R. Drews, The Endof the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe c. 1200 BC (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), Fig. 1 and pp. 11-12, 21-29. For a detailedlook at Cyprus see Vassos Karageorghis, The End of the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus(Nicosia: Zavallis, 1990).


or—most likely—both. Of course the cities of Canaan had also beensacked at the beginning of the twelfth century, but Ekron, Ashdod andother places on or near the coast were soon rebuilt and on a much largerscale than before. For refugees from the Aegean and Cyprus theproximity of coastal Canaan to Egypt may have offered the best hopefor protection in a world turned upside down. In any case, it shouldnow be admitted all round that by the middle of the twelfth centurythere had been a significant immigration from Greek-speaking lands tosouthern Canaan.

On the other hand, as John Brug and others have pointed out, south-ern Canaan was not overwhelmed by any ‘national migration’.12 Basinghis estimate on the incidence of ‘Aegean’ artifacts and pottery (both LHIIIC:1b ware and the slightly later and derivative bichrome pottery con-ventionally called ‘Philistine Ware’),13 Ed Noort has recently observedthat only at Tell Qasile, Ekron and Ashdod do the newcomers fromCyprus and the Aegean seem to have accounted for more than 20% ofthe population.14 According to the statistics assembled by Brug,‘Philistine Ware’ is best represented at Ashdod: of all the potteryrecovered from Strata XII and XI at Ashdod, 27% can be classified as

12. After a meticulous quantitative analysis of the distribution of ‘PhilistineWare’, John Brug (A Literary and Archaeological Study of the Philistines [Oxford:British Archaeological Reports, 1985]), concluded (p. 204) that ‘the strong con-tinuity of culture from the Bronze Age suggests a very strong continuity ofpopulation in Philistia from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age’. For other argumentsagainst a ‘Philistine invasion’ of southern Canaan c. 1200 BCE see S. Bunimovitz,‘Problems in the “Ethnic” Identification of the Philistine Material Culture’, Tel Aviv17 (1990), pp. 210-22, and R. Schmitt, ‘Philistäische Terrakottafigurinen’ (unpub-lished PhD dissertation, University of Groningen, 1994). The various argumentsagainst a national migration have been well recapitulated by Ed Noort, DieSeevölker in Palästina (Kampen: Kok, 1994).

13. The term is unfortunate. It was coined a hundred years ago, when it wassupposed that ‘the Philistines’ brought the bichrome (black and red) decorativestyle with them when they invaded Canaan. In fact, ‘Philistines’ are attested inCanaan several decades before potters began to produce the bichrome pottery.Amihai Mazar, ‘The Emergence of the Philistine Material Culture’, IEJ 35 (1985),p. 95, argues that the black and red pottery ‘postdates Ramesses III and perhapseven his immediate successors’. For a good discussion of ‘die sogenannte“Philisterkeramik” ’ see Helga Weippert, Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit(Munich: Beck, 1988), pp. 373-82.

14. Noort, Die Seevölker, pp. 124-25.


‘Philistine Ware’.15 But the ‘Philistine Ware’, like the LH IIIC:1bpottery from which it developed, was a luxury item much admired bythe native Canaanites, and purchased for special purposes by those whocould afford to do so.16 The fact that more than 20% of the twelfth-century pottery found at Ashdod, Ekron and Tell Qasile is more or less‘Aegean’ does not necessarily mean that 20% of the people living atthese three sites were of Aegean origin. In fact it is theoretically possi-ble (although hardly probable) that the only Aegean immigrants toCanaan during the twelfth century BCE were a few dozen families ofvery productive potters and craftsmen.17 At some forty other Early IronAge sites in Canaan, all of them quite small, foreigners must have beenfew and far between, the vast majority of pots and other artifacts con-tinuing the native, Canaanite traditions in shapes, decoration andworkmanship. At Izbet Sartah, for example, fifteen miles inland fromTell Qasile, almost two thousand sherds were recovered from twelfth-and eleventh-century levels, but only twenty-eight (1.5%) can beclassified as coming from ‘Philistine Ware’.18 It is nevertheless note-worthy that even at these smaller sites twelfth-century levels yieldoccasional ‘Aegean’ objects.

The material record thus allows us to say with some confidence thatthe ‘Caphtorite’ tradition articulated by Amos and Jeremiah had a fac-tual basis: although the Iron Age population of the southern Levantinecoast was essentially descended from the Bronze Age population ofCanaan, in the twelfth century BCE there was a significant influx ofimmigrants ‘from Caphtor’ to the coast’s major cities. We may assumethat after a generation or two of bilingualism South Greek gave wayentirely to Northwest Semitic, and that after several centuries of closecontact and intermarriage the ‘Caphtorim’ or kër∑®ªm were thoroughlyassimilated to the indigenous Canaanite majority.

The archaeological evidence also supports the Hebrew prophets’description of the newcomers as a ‘remnant’ or ‘residue’ (¡ë’∑rªt),whom Yahweh claimed to have ‘delivered’ or ‘brought up’ to Canaan.Contrarily, the material evidence does not at all support the widely-held

15. Brug, The Philistines, pp. 67-68.16. Cf. Weippert, Palästina, p. 380: ‘Wie einstmals die mykenische Keramik,

so diente nun die zweifarbig bemalte als Luxusware, mit der man bevorzugt reicheGräber und Tempel ausstattete’.

17. Weippert, Palästina, p. 380.18. Brug, The Philistines, pp. 92-93.


belief—based on a hasty tying of the ‘Caphtorite’ tradition to the evi-dence of the Medinet Habu reliefs—that the immigrants from Caphtorwere a nation of warriors, who conquered the coast of the southernLevant. The immigrants seem instead to have been civilian urbanites,who as refugees joined the urbanites of southern Canaan in rebuildingthe region’s sacked cities. In Noort’s words, the distribution of‘Mycenaean’ pots and other artifacts in the southern Levant indicatesthat we are dealing not with ‘Eroberer’ but with ‘Siedler’ from Cyprusand the Aegean.19 To sum up: the excavations at Ashdod, Ashkelon,Ekron and Tel Qasile warrant our speaking of Mycenaean refugeesjoining the rebuilders of these sites, but not of a migrating nation ortribe that first destroyed the cities and then rebuilt and occupied them.

Paradoxically, however, by confirming important parts of the literarytradition, the archaeological data also limit that tradition’s value as his-torical evidence. The material record from Philistia suggests how smalla fraction of the population in Iron-Age Philistia had actually been‘delivered from Caphtor’. Although the ‘Philistine’ contemporaries ofAmos, Jeremiah and Zephaniah evidently were in part descended fromBronze-Age Cretans and Cypriotes, for the most part they weredescended from men and women who had lived in Canaan all along.Over the centuries, the real experiences of a minority had become thelegendary past of all who lived in Ashdod, Ashkelon and the other‘Philistine’ cities.

3. The Canaanite Name

Let us turn from questions of demography to the question of the Philis-tine name, and to the hypothesis that ‘Palestine’ was nothing more thanan Iron Age equivalent to what during the Bronze Age had usually beenthought of as the southern part of ‘Canaan’.20 It is fairly obvious that theheyday for the names ‘Canaan’ and ‘Canaanites’ was the Late BronzeAge. An eighteenth-century letter from Mari may refer to Canaan, butthe first certain cuneiform reference appears on a statue base of Idrimi,

19. Noort, Die Seevölker, p. 125.20. Martin Noth, ‘Zur Geschichte des Namens Palaestina’, ZDPV 62 (1939), pp.

125-44, discussed the Hellenistic and Roman usages of the name but did notexplore the name’s origin. He assumed without argument that a Peleset nationinvaded the Canaanite coast at the end of the Bronze Age and conferred its nameupon the land.


king of Alalakh c. 1500 BCE.21 In Egyptian sources ‘Canaan’ is firstmentioned in the fifteenth century BCE, in an inscription of AmenhotepII. Thereafter it appears in another fifteen Egyptian texts, all but one ofwhich date from the period of the Egyptian empire. In several of theEgyptian texts the reference ( pÄ-kn’n) seems to be to a common noun(‘the Canaan’) rather than to a proper name. In addition to the Egyptianlanguage references, another dozen references to ‘Canaan’ or ‘Canaan-ites’ appear in the Amarna tablets. Four texts found at Hattusas refer to‘Canaan’ or ‘Canaanites’.22

In the Late Bronze Age, ‘Canaan’ was the name of a relatively largeterritory. From the Egyptian texts it appears that the whole of Egypt’sprovince in the Levant was called ‘Canaan’, and it would perhaps notbe incorrect to understand the term as the name of that province.23 Likethe Egyptian empire itself, the name ‘Canaan’ did not extend north ofthe Orontes, and for at least much of the time did not include Ugarit.Because texts from both Alalakh and Ugarit refer to individuals ascoming ‘from Canaan’, it is reasonable to suppose that in neither citydid the writers consider themselves ‘Canaanites’.24 On the other hand,all of the Levant from approximately the Nahr el-Kebir (which flowsinto the sea some twenty miles north of Byblos) south to the Sinai wasapparently called ‘Canaan’, at least in some quarters. For New King-dom administrators ‘Canaan’ began at Gaza, and in fact Gaza wasoccasionally called ‘the city of Canaan’ or even ‘the Canaan’. More

21. On the problematical Mari reference see Niels-Peter Lemche, The Canaan-ites and their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites (JSOTSup, 110; Sheffield:JSOT Press, 1991), pp. 27-28. For a catalogue of the second-millennium referencesto Canaan and Canaanites see N. Na’aman, ‘The Canaanites and their Land: ARejoinder’, UF 26 (1994), pp. 397-418. (On the Mari letter and the Alalakh textssee his pp. 398-99.)

22. For the Amarna and Hattusas texts see Na’aman, ‘Rejoinder’, pp. 399-405.23. Na’aman, ‘Rejoinder’, p. 406: ‘Canaan’s extent in the north and south

according to all Late Bronze Age sources is congruent with the borders of theEgyptian province in Asia. Not a single text uses the name Canaan to describe areaseither located outside of it or only part of its territory.’ On this one point Na’aman’sconclusion is not radically different from that reached by Lemche, The Canaanites,p. 43: all the western Asiatic references to ‘Canaan’ agree ‘that Canaan belonged tothe Egyptian empire’. But Na’aman, unlike Lemche, concluded that the Egyptianprovince was geographically defined.

24. Cf. Na’aman, ‘Rejoinder’, p. 403: ‘It is evident that Canaan was regarded atUgarit as a foreign land whose name was enough to define the origin of individualsand groups of people’.


often, however, the texts emphasize the plurality of cities and kings:‘the kings of Canaan’ and ‘all the cities of Canaan’ are collective termsfor all of the pharaoh’s Asiatic vassals.25

Yet one wonders whether in the Bronze Age the term was much usedby ‘the Canaanites’ themselves. Niels-Peter Lemche, perhaps overstat-ing the case, has recently concluded that they did not use it at all: ‘theCanaanites of the ancient Near East did not know that they were them-selves Canaanites’.26 Although in parts of ‘Canaan’ people evidentlydid not object to being called ‘Canaanites’, the name seems to have hadobjectionable connotations. In Israelite lore, Noah’s cursing of Ham(Gen. 9.25) devolved specifically upon Ham’s fourth son, Canaan:‘Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers’ (one ofwhom was Mizrayim, or Egypt). Until E.A. Speiser proposed that thename ‘Canaan’ was derived from the (unattested) word kina∆∆u, whichSpeiser supposed must have been an Akkadian term for reddish-blue orpurple, Semiticists regularly explained ‘Canaan’ (Hebrew këna‘an;elsewhere in Northwest Semitic kn‘n) as related to the Aramaic verbkn‘: ‘to bend down, be low’.27 That etymology is perhaps correct afterall. Speiser’s alternative explanation has been generally abandoned, ashas the proposal that ‘Canaan’ meant ‘the land of merchants’. DonaldRedford has recently noted that ‘when “Canaanites” first appear, theusage is slightly pejorative; and one reflects that commonly in Hebrewthe root means “to be abased, put down, subdued”, etc.’28 It may be thatthe term began as a Northwest Semitic common noun, ‘the subdued, thesubjugated’, and that it then evolved into the proper name of the Asiaticland that had fallen under Egypt’s dominion (just as the first Romanprovincia in Gaul eventually became Provence).

The name ‘Canaan’ did not entirely drop out of usage in the IronAge. Throughout the area that we—with the Greek speakers—prefer tocall ‘Phoenicia’, the inhabitants in the first millennium BCE called

25. Na’aman, ‘Rejoinder’, p. 401.26. Lemche, The Canaanites, p. 152.27. E.A. Speiser, ‘The Name Phoenikes’, Language 12 (1936), pp. 121-26.28. D. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 168 n. 192. Lemche, The Canaanites, p. 28,notes that in the Mari reference the Ki-na-a∆-num are paralleled with ‘brigands’,and suggests that at Mari Ki-na-a∆-num was ‘a sociological designation of somesort which shared at least some connotations with the sociological term ∆abiru’.


themselves ‘Canaanites’.29 For the area south of Mt Carmel, however,after the Bronze Age ended references to ‘Canaan’ as a present phe-nomenon dwindle almost to nothing (the Hebrew Bible of coursemakes frequent mention of ‘Canaan’ and ‘Canaanites’, but regularly asa land that had become something else, and as a people who had beenannihilated).30 In the Papyrus Harris, from the middle of the twelfthcentury, the late Ramesses III claims to have built for Amon a templein ‘the Canaan’ of Djahi. More than three centuries later comes thenext—and very last—Egyptian reference to ‘Canaan’ or ‘the Canaan’: abasalt statuette, usually assigned to the Twenty-Second Dynasty, islabeled, ‘Envoy of the Canaan and of Palestine, Pa-di-Eset, the son ofApy’.31 Although New Assyrian inscriptions frequently refer to theLevant, they make no mention of ‘Canaan’. Nor do Persian and Greeksources refer to it.

4. The Philistine Name

As the Egyptian province in Asia collapsed after the death of Mernep-tah, and as the area that identified itself as ‘Canaan’ shrank to thecoastal cities beneath the Lebanon range, the names ‘Philistia’ and‘Philistines’ (or, more plainly, ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’)32 came to

29. O. Eissfeldt, ‘Phoiniker’, RE, XX, col. 354.30. On this see Lemche, The Canaanites, Chapters 3 and 4.31. Lemche, The Canaanites, p. 54; for the complete list of Egyptian references

cf. M. Görg, ‘Der Name “Kanaan” in ägyptischer Widergabe’, BN 18 (1982), pp.26-27.

32. Our names ‘Philistia’ and ‘Philistines’ are unfortunate obfuscations, firstintroduced by the translators of the LXX and made definitive by Jerome’s Vg. Whenturning a Hebrew text into Greek, the translators of the LXX might simply—asJosephus was later to do—have Hellenized the Hebrew µytvlp as Palaistivnoi,and the toponym tvlp as Palaistivnh. Instead, they avoided the toponym alto-gether, turning it into an ethnonym. As for the ethnonym, they chose sometimes totransliterate it (incorrectly aspirating the initial letter, perhaps to compensate fortheir inability to aspirate the sigma) as Fulistiim, a word that looked exotic ratherthan familiar, and more often to translate it as ajllovfuloi. Jerome followed theLXX’s lead in eradicating the names, ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’, from his OldTestament, a practice adopted in most modern translations of the Bible. Jerome tooeschewed the toponym; and instead of Latinizing µytvlp into Palaestini he eithertranslated it into alienigeni, or further obscured it by roughing up and then translit-erating the Hebrew into Philisthiim (at Exod. 15.14, ‘the inhabitants of Palestine’become almost unintelligible as habitatores Philisthiim). In his Liber Hebraicarum


the fore. An Egyptian source of c. 1100 BCE, the Onomasticon ofAmenope, included Plst (or, more literally, Prst) as one of a long list ofnames that a scribe might be called upon to write (although Gaza,Ashkelon and Ashdod were also on Amenope’s list, as were the namesSherden and Tjekker, evidently neither Israel nor Judah made the list).33

By the end of classical antiquity, when Jerome was writing at Bethle-hem, most people in the southern Levant who did not call themselvesIoudaioi called themselves Palaistinoi. Although the popularity of theGreek name Palaistinoi, or Palaestini in Latin, was due in large part toHadrian’s decision in 135 CE to change the name of the Romans’southern Levantine province from Judaea to Palaestina, the name waswidespread long before the change in official nomenclature. Theinhabitants of the so-called ‘Phoenician’ cities were evidentlyexceptional in calling themselves ‘Canaanites’: south of Mt Carmelmany (and possibly most) people evidently regarded themselves asPalashtin. Along with the ‘Canaanite’ name, other names that had oncebeen current in the southern Levant disappeared from usage during theIron Age, leading to the mistaken perception that a notorious ‘Gang ofSeven Nations’ had been exterminated by Joshua (as enumerated inDeut. 7.1 these were ‘the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, theCanaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites’, an order thatvaries slightly in other passages).34

Quaestionum in Genesim Jerome explained that Palaestini was a modern‘corruption’ of the ancient name: ‘Chasloim … qui deinceps Philistiim appellatisunt, quos nos corrupte Palaestinos dicimus’ (PL, XXIII, col. 320). But in effectJerome’s procedure reassured the Palestinian Christians of his own day that theyhad really no connection with the Philisthiim who had caused Israel so muchtrouble in the days of Samson and Saul.

33. For Prst see A. Gardiner, Ancient Egyptian Onomastica (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1947), I, no. 270. The Onomasticon of Amenope simply lists thetoponyms and ethnonyms that the aspiring hieroglyphic scribe should learn, andafter transcribing and ‘translating’ it Gardiner opined (pp. 24-25) that ‘certainlythere was never written a book more tedious and less inspired than the Onomasti-con of Amenope’. Names numbered 268 and 269 are ⁄rdn and ‰kr. Number 270,Prst, was probably associated with Sherden and Tjekker in Amenope’s mindbecause the only references to Peleset in Egyptian texts were those that identifiedPeleset, Sherden and Tjekker as confederates defeated by Ramesses III. The namesfor Ashkelon, Ashdod and Gaza were nos. 262-64 in Amenope’s list, but interven-ing between them and ⁄rdn are two names (no. 267 is lost) that may refer toMesopotamia.

34. In the Table of Nations all but the Perizzites were subsumed under the


The LXX’s regular translation of µytvlp into ajllovfuloi is signifi-cant here. Not a proper name at all, allophyloi is a generic term, mean-ing something like ‘people of other stock’. If we assume, as I think wemust, that with their word allophyloi the translators of the LXX tried toconvey in Greek what pëli¡tªm had conveyed in Hebrew, we mustconclude that for the worshippers of Yahweh pëli¡tªm and bënê yi∞rå’∑lwere mutually exclusive terms, pëli¡tªm (or allophyloi) being tanta-mount to ‘non-Judaeans of the Promised Land’ when used in a contextof the third century BCE, and to ‘non-Israelites of the Promised Land’when used in a context of Samson, Saul and David.35 Unlike anethnonym, the noun µytvlp normally appeared without a definitearticle.36 Like the words gôyim or ethn∑, but with geographical limita-tions, from the vantage point of the biblical writers µytvlp wereevidently what people in the Promised Land were if they were not partof Israel. As foreseen, for example, by Moses and Yahweh on Mt Nebo(Deut. 34.1-3), the limits within which bënê yi∞rå’∑l and pëli¡tªm (orallophyloi) would be mutually exclusive terms were Dan and Beer-sheba to the north and south, and the desert and ‘the Western Sea’ tothe east and west. In the semi-desert east of the Jordan and the DeadSea people had their own proper names—Ammonites and Moabites—but in what had once been Canaan people were either pëli¡tªm or bënê

general heading of ‘Canaanites’. At Gen. 10.15-17 we are told that after Ham hadbegotten Canaan, ‘Canaan became the father of Sidon his first-born, and Heth, andthe Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites’.

35. If I understand him correctly, Roland de Vaux (‘Les Philistins dans laSeptante’, in J. Schreiner [ed.], Wort, Lied und Gottesspruch: Beiträge zur Septuag-inta [Festschrift Joseph Ziegler; Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1972], pp. 185-94),argued that the LXX translated pëli¡tªm as allophyloi because by the third centuryBCE the ‘true Philistines’ had virtually disappeared from the coastal strip betweenTyre and Gaza, and what was once ‘the land of the Philistines’ was now populatedby Hellenes and other foreigners who had come to Philistia in the wake of Alexan-der’s conquests. According to de Vaux, the LXX translators anachronisticallyapplied the term allophyloi, which meant something like ‘aliens’ or ‘intruders’, tothe real Philistines of Samson’s and David’s day. This argument cannot be correct:if the LXX translators thought the third-century occupants of Philistia were not the‘real’ Philistines, the translators would have been at pains to distinguish the ‘real’Philistines from the third-century interlopers, and would surely not have applied tothe former a derogatory term appropriate to the latter.

36. In most passages the translators of the LXX followed the Hebrew usage, andomitted the definite article from allophyloi (see, for example, Judg. 1.6a; 1 Sam.4.1; 5.2)


yi∞rå’∑l. The one area of the Promised Land that had never become apart of Israel, even in the storied days of David and Solomon, was ofcourse the wealthy and populous coastal strip between Gaza and TellQasile. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible, then, that coastal plain,with its five great cities, was quintessentially the land occupied bypëli¡tªm.

As a self-designation, however, pëli¡tªm or—in Aramaic—Palashtinwas evidently in use over an area considerably wider than that of bibli-cal ‘Philistia’. Various considerations indicate that at least in thePersian and Hellenistic periods most inhabitants of the Levant south ofthe Lebanon Mountains who did not consider themselves Judaeanscalled themselves Palashtin or Palaistinoi. In the LXX translation ofJoel 3.4, ‘all the regions of pële¡et (tvlp)’ became ‘all Galilee of allo-phyloi’, the translators implying that most people in Galilee were thencalling themselves Palaistinoi. In the middle of the fifth century BCE,Greek speakers referred to everything between the Sinai and Phoeniciaas Syria Palaistin∑.37 That Greek convention can best be explained bythe hypothesis that all along the coast south of the Lebanon Mountainstravellers c. 450 BCE encountered people who called themselves, inAramaic, Palashtin. Early in the seventh century BCE the prophetIsaiah lamented that the House of Jacob was crowded with Palestinians(2.6), and that Israel was being swallowed by Arameans from the eastand Palestinians from the west (9.12).

Already by 805 BCE ‘Palestine’ was evidently a meaningful term forAssyrians, denoting a land that extended far to the north of Judah andeven of Israel. Adad-nirari III claims, ‘In (my) fifth year of reign, whenI took my seat on the royal throne, in might I mobilized (the forces ofmy) land, (to) the widespreading armies of Assyria I gave the order toadvance against Palashtu [Palestine]. The Euphrates I crossed at itsflood.’ Yet the inscription claims no penetration of the Levant south ofDamascus. Elsewhere Adad-nirari claims that in a campaign in 796BCE he cowed into submission ‘Tyre, Sidon, Israel (mat Ôu-um-ri),Edom, Palestine (Pa-la-as-tu), as far as the shore of the Great Sea ofthe Setting Sun, I made them submit all to my feet, imposing uponthem tribute’.38 Since it is unlikely that when Israel, Tyre and Sidonsent Adad-nirari tokens of submission, Joash or Amaziah in Jerusalem

37. Cf. Herodotus 1.105; 2.104, 106; 3.5, 91; 4.39; 7.89.38. For the first inscription see ARAB, I, nos. 734-35 (trans. D.D. Luckenbill).

For the second see ANET, p. 281 (trans. A.L. Oppenheim).


sent none, it may be that Adad-nirari’s term Pa-la-as-tu was meant toinclude the kingdom of Judah as well as the large cities that scholarscall ‘the Philistine pentapolis’.

As is well known, in Egyptian sources the ‘Philistine’ name firstappears in the inscriptions of Ramesses III (1186–1155 BCE). AtMedinet Habu Ramesses recorded the victories that in his fifth andeighth years (1182 and 1179 BCE) he won against a confederation ofland- and sea-raiders who threatened the northeastern Delta, and whoearlier—so he claimed—had brought ruin to many lands:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their rww.39 All at once thelands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand beforetheir arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on,being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in Amor. They desolatedits people, and its land was like that which has never come into being.They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was preparedbefore them. Their confederation was the Philistines, Tjeker, Shekelesh,Denye(n), and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon thelands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting:‘Our plans will succeed!’40

John Wilson translated as ‘Philistines’ a name that is more often andmore cautiously transliterated as Peleset, but Wilson’s translation canhardly be wrong. The Peleset who gave Ramesses trouble seem to havelived within striking distance of Egypt, since in two other textsRamesses boasts of having subdued the lands and towns of the Peleset.A reference to ‘the land of the Pele(set)’ appears in the Medinet Habuinscription for the twelfth year of Ramesses III (1175 BCE), and anotherinscription of the same king includes ‘the lands of the Peleset’ in theroster of lands and people that His Majesty had devastated.41 Because

39. This Egyptian word, which Wilson translates as ‘islands’, can also be trans-lated as ‘coastlands’. Alessandra Nibbi, The Sea Peoples and Egypt (Park Ridge,NJ: Noyes, 1975), p. 65, notes that rww often stands ‘for inland areas and forAsiatic settlements’.

40. Translated by John Wilson in ANET, p. 262.41. The inscriptions are translated by W.F. Edgerton and John Wilson, Histori-

cal Records of Ramses III: The Texts in Medinet Habu Volumes I and II (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1936). For Ramesses’ twelfth-year inscription seetheir translation of Plate 107: ‘I overthrew the Thek[er], the land of Pele[set], theDenyen, the [W]eshesh, and the Shekelesh’. At Plate 29, the leaders of his infantryand chariotry declare to Ramesses: ‘The heart of the land of Temeh is removed, thePeleset are in suspense, hidden in their towns, by the strength of thy father Amon,


the burial statuette of Pa-di-Eset (tenth or ninth century) associates theland of Pr∞Ä® with the former province of Canaan,42 one can hardlyavoid the conclusion that Peleset was an Egyptian rendering of what inHebrew was rendered µytvlp. In short, ‘Philistines’ or ‘Palestinians’do indeed first appear in Egyptian records in the first quarter of thetwelfth century BCE, as opponents of Ramesses III, and they evidentlywere at home in the southern Levant.

A Hebrew reference to ‘Palestine’, probably dating to the twelfthcentury BCE and possibly even older than the Egyptian references,appears in the Song of Moses. Here the new name seems to be para-lleled with ‘Canaan’:

The people have heard, they tremble;pangs have seized on the inhabitants of Philistia.Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;the leaders of Moab, trembling seized them;all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.43

Edom and Moab were two different lands, but ‘Palestine’ and ‘Canaan’evidently were not. The parallel brackets—‘the inhabitants of Philistia’and ‘the inhabitants of Canaan’—were to some extent overlappingterms: when the poem was composed, ‘Canaan’ would undoubtedlyhave been understood as the old name for the land that began at Gazaand extended through the mountains of Lebanon. The poet therefore atthe very least must have assumed that ‘Palestine’ was included within‘Canaan’, and possibly thought of the two names as synonyms.

Where did the toponym ‘Palestine’ and the ethnonym ‘Palestinians’come from? Because the name makes its initial appearance during orshortly before a significant immigration from Cyprus and the Aegeaninto southern Canaan, it is widely believed that the warriors whomRamesses called Peleset are to be counted among the immigrants fromthe Aegean: ‘Palestinians’ was the name either of all the immigrants, orat least of the bellicose group against whom Ramesses battled. A ven-erable hypothesis is that the Peleset nation, having been expelled fromits home in the Aegean, attempted to carve out a new home in Egypt;and that after defeating this migratory nation on land and sea Ramesses

who assigned to thee every [land] as a gift’. Plate 118C accompanies a reliefshowing Ramesses holding his enemies captive; the caption reads: ‘The countriesof the Peleset, whom his majesty slew’.

42. Lemche, The Canaanites, p. 54 n.3.43. Exod. 15.14-15 (RSV).


III settled the vanquished Peleset in the cities being rebuilt along theVia Maris, and so transformed the southern coast of the Levant from‘Canaan’ into ‘Philistia’.44 Such a reconstruction, advocated by Albrightand many others, is supposed to rest on Ramesses’ own claims in thePapyrus Harris, but instead rests on a distortion of what Ramesses said.Although Ramesses did claim to have settled ‘hundreds of thousands’of the rampaging horde in fortresses, these fortresses were located noton the Canaanite coast, but in Egypt.45 The Medinet Habu inscriptionsthemselves make it quite clear that Ramesses’ Peleset opponents werenatives of the Levant, and not of the Aegean. Had Ramesses wished tosay that the Palestinian aggressors were Cretans or Cypriotes he wouldpresumably have called them Kft¶w or ‘men from Alashiya’. Instead, herepeatedly identified them as S®tyw or ‘Ämw, terms Egyptians used fortribesmen in the southern Levant.46 Far from transforming part of Djahiinto Palestine, Ramesses evidently found ‘the land of the Palestinians’already there.

Ever since the nineteenth century, the assumption that ‘the Phili-stines’ came from Caphtor to Canaan has inspired attempts to identifythem with one or another Aegean community. An old argument holdsthat the Peleset or pëli¡tªm were Pelasgoi, driven out of the Aegean bythe Greeks (the ‘Pelasgians’, in a number of Greek myths, occupiedGreece before the time of Herakles and Perseus). Allen Jones transliter-ated the Philistine name into Greek as ‘the tribes (phylai) of Hestia’,and argued that these tribes made their way from the Aegean to Canaanat the end of the Bronze Age. Most recently, pëli¡tªm has beenexplained as a deformation of the Greek Pyleastai, an unattested name

44. Most recently, Neal Bierling, Giving Goliath his Due: New ArchaeologicalLight on the Philistines (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 62; cf.T. Dothan, The Philistines, p. 3.

45. Cf. John Wilson’s translation in ANET, p. 262: ‘I extended all the frontiersof Egypt and overthrew those who had attacked them from their lands. I slew theDenyen in their islands, while the Tjeker and the Philistines were made ashes. TheSherden and the Weshesh of the Sea were made non-existent, captured all togetherand brought in captivity to Egypt like the sands of the shore. I settled them instrongholds, bound in my name. Their military classes were as numerous as hun-dred-thousands. I assigned portions for them all with clothing and provisions fromthe treasuries and granaries every year.’ For an earlier translation see J. Breasted,Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906), IV, par.403.

46. Edgerton and Wilson, Historical Records, Pls. 31, 43, 44 and 46.


for the ‘men from Pylos’: when Pylos, one of the most important siteson the Greek mainland, was destroyed c. 1200 BCE, its inhabitantssailed to southern Canaan, where their name was pronounced pëli¡tªmby their Hebrew-speaking neighbours.47 These several suggestions reston the assumption that the Philistine name was first attached to theAegean immigrants who came to the southern Levant early in thetwelfth century BCE. That assumption, however, is surely wrong.

As I have argued in Section 2, the Aegean newcomers to the southernLevant in the early twelfth century seem to have been South Greekpotters, artisans and other urbanites whose Aegean communities hadbeen either destroyed or threatened, and who found shelter at Ashdod,Ashkelon, Ekron and a few other cities. Although a significant andconspicuous group, the South Greek speakers were a minority in theirnew homes. In all the cities in which they settled the dominant materialculture certainly, and the dominant language presumably, remained‘Canaanite’. The South Greek immigrants to the southern Levant didnot impose upon it the name ‘Palestine’.

In fact, a distinction between ‘Palestinians’ and the immigrants ‘fromCaphtor’ is preserved in the Old Testament. In the taxonymy known asthe Table of Nations (Gen. 10.14), for example, ‘Palestinians’ (µytvlp)and ‘Caphtorites’ (µyrtpk) are classified as two closely-related but sep-arate peoples. The fact that the ethnonyms or proper names kaptørªmand kër∑®ªm were once in use among Semitic speakers in the southernLevant is fairly strong evidence that that is how—early in the IronAge—the Aegean immigrants were known in their new surroundings.The immigrants themselves, especially if they had in fact come fromCrete, may have preferred to be called ‘Cretans’, while ‘Caphtorites’may have been how most Semitic speakers referred to the newcomers.Just as in David’s professional army a ‘Pelethite’ unit of guards wasdistinguished from a ‘Cherethite’ unit, so we must distinguish betweenthe ‘Palestinians’ and the ‘Cretans’ in twelfth-century Ashdod andEkron.

If ‘Palestinians’ did not come from Cyprus or the Aegean, where didthey come from? Lemche’s observations about the unpopularity of thename ‘Canaanites’ supply an obvious answer: as the Egyptian empirein the southern Levant collapsed, Northwest Semitic speakers living

47. Allen H. Jones (with foreword by Cyrus Gordon), Bronze Age Civilization:The Philistines and the Danites (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1975); OthnielMargalith, ‘Where did the Philistines Come From?’, ZAW 107 (1995), pp. 101-109.


south of Mt Carmel divested themselves of the ‘Canaanite’ label andassumed another. For such a change in nomenclature there is a closeanalogy in another part of what had recently been ‘Canaan’. In the hillcountry west of the Jordan many people whose ancestors had evidentlybeen ‘Canaanites’ chose in the twelfth century BCE to declare them-selves ‘Sons of Israel’. Along the coast north of Mt Carmel, for reasonsunknown, the Canaanite name remained in good odor; but elsewherethe old name was no more durable than the Egyptian empire that hadfostered it. ‘The Palestinians’, like ‘the Israelites’, were not a newnation that migrated to the southern Levant at the end of the BronzeAge, but a new name.

5. Speculation about the Palestinian Aggressors against Egyptin the Reign of Ramesses III

Although natives of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron may havebegun to identify themselves as Palashtin or pëli¡tªm by the earlytwelfth century BCE, it is not likely that these city-dwellers were theenemy that Ramesses III confronted on land and sea. As I have arguedelsewhere,48 the catastrophe that overwhelmed the eastern Mediter-ranean world at the end of the Bronze Age seems to have resulted whenmen in marginal lands, who earlier might have served as mercenary‘runners’ in the chariot army of a Great King, recognized that insufficient numbers they were themselves able to defeat and destroy achariot army. Although earlier runners had been conscripted fromwithin the kingdom for which they fought, during the thirteenth centuryrunners began to be recruited from wilder lands such as Sardinia,Sicily, northern Greece, and the periphery of Canaan. When men inthese uncivilized lands discovered how vulnerable a chariot army wasto the kinds of weapons with which they were proficient, they bandedtogether and began attacking the kingdoms on their horizon. In onekingdom after another the richest palaces and cities were sacked andthen burned.

If that general thesis is correct, the aggressors defeated by RamessesIII in his fifth and eighth years would very likely have been embarkedon plundering expeditions. By far the most tempting objective intheir part of the world would have been the ‘House of Ramesses’(Pi-Ramesses), the magnificent palace-city that Ramesses the Great had

48. End of the Bronze Age, esp. pp. 135-63 and 209-25.


built along the easternmost (Pelusiac) mouth of the Nile, and sometwenty miles south of the great coastal lagoon that is today Lake Men-zalah. Pi-Ramesses continued to be the royal capital for the subsequentpharaohs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties until after thereign of Ramesses III, when a new palace was built at Tanis, on thelagoon.49 At any rate, the objective of the aggressors who threatened theeastern Delta was certainly loot and not land. The attack was essentiallya sea-raid, although both the Year 5 and the Year 8 inscriptions suggestthat while some Palestinians sailed towards the Delta with their Denyenand Tkr associates others attempted an overland route.50 But thosePalestinians who tried to reach the destination on foot were interceptedby the garrisons that Ramesses had posted at his frontier in Djahi, andall of the raiders who suceeded in reaching the Delta were aboard ships.The raiders evidently entered the lagoon, but while still in their boatswere surprised by Ramesses, who had assembled a great many boats ofhis own, each of them carrying archers. The raiders had no bows, andgot far the worst of the confrontation in the lagoon. The royal cities inthe eastern Delta were saved.

At least once during his reign Ramesses went forth on a land cam-paign into the southern Levant (Djahi), intent on punishing at least thePalestinians who had dared to participate in the raid. The retaliatoryexpedition proceeded into Djahi, cutting down trees and destroyingsettlements. People in the path of the Egyptian army fled.

No land has stood firm at the sound of my name, but they leave theirsettlements, moving away from their place, scattered ------- before them.I am a bull, charging, relying upon his horns … As for the foreign[countries], --------- destruction to their towns, devastated at one time;their trees and all their people are become ashes. They take counsel withtheir hearts: ‘Whither shall we (go)?’51

For the last hundred years scholars who have believed in ‘the migrationof the Sea Peoples’ have cited the oxcarts depicted in the Medinet Habureliefs, the carts transporting the Palestinians’ wives, children and pos-sessions. But the texts at Medinet Habu, while saying nothing at allabout a migration toward Egypt, speak only about refugees fleeing the

49. On the relationship, spatial and chronological, between Pi-Ramesses andTanis see Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, pp. 285-87.

50. Edgerton and Wilson, Historical Records, Pls. 27-28, line 52, and Pl. 46,lines 19-23.

51. Edgerton and Wilson, Historical Records, Pl. 46, lines 29-35.


wrath of the pharaoh. Obviously, many of the villagers who fled,whether on foot or in oxcarts, were caught and killed.52

The Palestinian raiders who caused Ramesses so much trouble aremore likely to have come from the hill country to the east of ‘Palestine’than from the cities in the coastal plain. In fact most of the cities ofCanaan had already been sacked and burned before the raid on the east-ern Delta.53 If the Palestinian raiders did come from the hill country,they would surely have included warriors whose descendants wouldone day call themselves Judahites or Israelites. Noort has called atten-tion to the fact that although the Medinet Habu inscriptions refer toPalestinians only as Ramesses’ opponents, the pictorial reliefs seem toshow them serving as professional infantrymen in Ramesses’ ownarmy: both before and after 1179 ‘feather-crowned’ warriors assistedRamesses in defending Egypt against Libyan incursions.54 Like these

52. For a full study of the actions described in Ramesses’ Year 5 and Year 8inscriptions see Drews, ‘Medinet Habu: Oxcarts, Ships, and Migration Theories’,forthcoming in JNES. The old view, that in 1179 Egypt was attacked by three orfour migrating nations, all of them searching for a land in which to settle, had greatappeal in the late nineteenth century. In End of the Bronze Age, pp. 48-72, I arguedthat there were no migrating nations at the end of the Bronze Age, and indeed nonations at all. But I did cencede (p. 52) that the so-called ‘land battle’ relief atMedinet Habu is evidence for at least a small group of Palestinians attempting tomove into the eastern Delta. Even that concessions was erroneous, as the forthcom-ing JNES article will argue in detail, since the inscriptions in the temple’s interiorleave no doubt that Ramesses’ campaign into Djahi was not defensive but retalia-tory for past transgressions by Palestinians.

53. W. Dever (‘The Late Bronze-Early Iron I Horizon in Syria-Palestine: Egyp-tians, Canaanites, “Sea Peoples”, and Proto-Israelites’, in W. Ward and M. Joukow-sky [eds.], The Crisis Years: the Twelfth Century BC [Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt,1992], p. 100), lists a dozen sites in the coastal plain that fell victim to what heregards as ‘Philistine destruction’. Economically and socially the hill countrycontrasted sharply with the cities in the coastal plain, and with the ‘Via Maris’ thatran from Egypt to Phoenicia. See Gloria London, ‘A Comparison of Two Con-temporaneous Lifestyles of the Late Second Millennium BC’, BASOR 273 (1989),pp. 37-55. On the Great Kingdoms’ recruitment of ∆apiru and other ‘runners’ fromfrontier districts see Drews, End of the Bronze Age, pp. 151-57.

54. See Noort, Die Seevölker, Figs. 20 and 22 for feather-crowned warriors inRamesses’ service for the Libyan campaigns; Fig. 18 shows them assistingRamesses against the Nubians, a fictional or idealizing campaign (the Nubianshad been pacified long before Ramesses’ accession). Noort argues (p. 94) that theidealizing relief is significant because it suggests that the royal artists assumed thatRamesses was normally accompanied by Peleset runners.


‘friendly’ Palestinians in Ramesses’ service, individuals from Judahand Israel seem to have been employed as mercenaries by the pharaohs:philologists suggested long ago that the ‘Hebrew’ traditions in Genesisand Exodus reflect the service of Judahites and Israelites as ∆apiru inthe armies of New Kingdom Egypt.55 Late in the thirteenth century BCE

men in the central hill country of ‘Canaan’ seem to have discoveredthat if thousands of them joined together they could defeat the kings ofCanaan, and plunder their cities. Possibly the boast was a sheer inven-tion, but first-millennium Judahites claimed that ‘in the days of Joshua’their ancestors had raided Gaza, Ashkelon and Ekron (Josh. 10.41;Judg. 1.18). When Merneptah led an expedition to Canaan, warriorsfrom Israel were evidently among the enemies whom he defeated. Lessclear but more tantalizing is the Papyrus Anastasi, which suggests thatc. 1200 BCE a punitive expedition against renegade runners (ne‘arim)from Djahi was one of the things for which Egyptian administratorswere typically expected to plan.56 Finally, at the end of the second mil-lennium there evidently survived among the worshippers of Yahweh,‘Lord of Hosts’, some memory of a famous confrontation at sea withthe pharaoh’s army: the Song of Moses, which celebrated Yahweh’sdrowning of Egyptian charioteers and their horses in the Yam Suph,perhaps commemorates the most glorious incident of a confrontationthat otherwise went in the pharaoh’s favor. One or more Egyptian horsetransports may have sunk during the sea-battle in the lagoon.

In the Medinet Habu inscriptions the most conspicuous absentees inRamesses’ list of opponents are people from ‘Canaan’ in general, andin particular from the lands that in historical times were called Judahand Israel. It is difficult to imagine that warriors from all parts of‘Canaan’ did not join in what may have been the most ambitious of allthe raids that ended the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. I wouldsuggest that Judahites and Israelites may be not entirely omitted fromRamesses’ roster of participants in the wicked ‘conspiracy’. Using aterm by which some of his opponents identified themselves, he referred

55. For the views of Alt, Noth, Greenberg and others see the Vorschungsstand(pp. 37-40) with which K. Koch (‘Die Hebräer vom Auszug aus Aegypten bis zumGrossreich Davids’, VT 19 [1969], pp. 37-81), began his own controversial analysisof the biblical references to ‘Hebrews’.

56. See Wilson’s translation of the Papyrus Anastasi in ANET, pp. 475-79. Atthis passage the papyrus reads Djahan, but Wilson suggests (p. 476 n. 20) that thereading is ‘probably to be emended to Djahi’.


to all those raiders whose homes were in ‘Canaan’ under the catch-allname, ‘Palestinians’. Runners from Israel and Judah may have beenamong the ‘Palestinians’ who joined the raids on the Delta, and so pro-voked Ramesses’ punitive foray into Palestine.

ABSTRACT

The Mycenaean pottery made at Ashdod and the other cities of the southern Levantin the twelfth century BCE suggests a significant immigration of South Greekspeakers. The immigrants undoubtedly inspired the later legend that ‘the Philisti-nes’ came from Caphtor. In fact, however, their nomenclature suggests that‘Philistines’ or Palestinians were initially distinguished from the immigrant kër∑®ªmor kaptørªm, and it is likely that the people called Palashtin were the NorthwestSemitic speaking majority among whom the immigrant minority had settled. Thename ‘Canaan’, never very popular, went out of vogue with the collapse of theEgyptian empire. In the Iron Age many inhabitants of what had once been Canaanpreferred to be called ‘Sons of Israel’, while those who did not affiliate themselvesto Israel preferred the name, ‘Palestinians’. The Palestinian (Peleset) raiders whocaused Ramesses III so much trouble, and against whom he led a punitive expedi-tion, certainly came from the less civilized parts of Palestine, and may well haveincluded men whose descendants would one day identify themselves as Israelites orJudahites.

canaanites and philistines - by r. drews

Documents

island of crete

thebiblical caphtor

identification of caphtor

caphtor byyahweh

coastland of caphtor

aremnant of caphtor

nation of cherethites

close connectionbetween