The Oxford History of the Biblical World (29 page)

In the southwest corner of Philistia lay Gaza, a major outpost and caravan city of the Egyptians, presumably taken over by the Philistines during stage 1. Excavations at Gaza have been limited, and they have revealed little or nothing of the character of the Egyptian and Philistine cities. During stage 1 Philistia probably did not extend
south of the Wadi Gaza (Nahal Besor). To protect his northern frontier, Rameses III built a formidable fortress and residency at Tell el-Farah (S), which remained under Egyptian control throughout much of the Ramesside era, well into stage 2, as the sequence of tombs with anthropoid clay coffins, Egyptian artifacts, and Philistine bichrome pottery attests.

The contrast is thus sharply delineated between the territory controlled by the Egyptians under Rameses III and that of the Philistine pentapolis, the latter characterized by the presence of Myc IIIC pottery and by the absence of Egyptian monuments, buildings, and artifacts. A new and formidable foreign power, the Philistines had carved out an independent territory right up to the Egyptian frontier. All Rameses could do was to attempt to contain them, a policy that continued until his death in 1153.

The total occupied area of the pentapolis was at least 100 hectares (250 acres), with a total population of about twenty-five thousand. To attain such size so soon after their arrival, boatload after boatload of Philistines, along with their families, livestock, and belongings, must have arrived in southern Canaan during stage 1. By the beginning of stage 2, natural growth had more than doubled the Philistine population, enabling their expansion in all directions. By the second half of the eleventh century
BCE
, in stage 3, they were a menace even to the Israelites living in the highlands to the east.

Their new home provided the Philistines with the natural and cultural resources to become both a maritime and an agrarian power. The sea offered fishing and shipping, and to its east lay rich agricultural lands suitable for growing grains, olives, and grapes. This region lacked timber and mineral resources, but even early in stage 1 the Philistines were importing both.

Philistia constituted a vital stretch of the coastal road. As the eleventh-century Egyptian tale of Wen-Amun makes clear, the Philistines, along with other Sea Peoples and the Phoenicians, soon controlled the maritime lanes as well. After some stability had returned to the eastern Mediterranean, the Sea Peoples once again became traders rather than raiders. Shortly after landing, the Sikils constructed the harbor at Dor. By the eleventh century, trade with Cyprus was bustling, and Ashkelon was a busy port again, exporting grain, wine, and oil from Philistia to other parts of the Mediterranean.

From Ashdod to Gaza, the coast of Philistia was ideal for the cultivation of grapes. The sandy soil and warm, sunny climate produced many good wines, from Ashkelon’s light and palatable varieties to Gaza’s heavier ones. At Ashkelon a royal winery, with pressing rooms alternating with storerooms within a large ashlar building, occupied the same central area in the seventh century where a major public building had stood in Iron Age I. Similar Iron II wine production facilities have recently been found near Ashdod.

In modern idiom, the term
Philistine
means an uncouth person, interested in material comfort rather than art and ideas. Archaeologists may inadvertently have assimilated this notion in their terminology: one of the most common Philistine ceramic forms is a jug with a strainer spout, usually called a “beer-jug.” But the
ecology of Philistia is better suited for grape-growing than for cultivating barley, the grain generally used for beer. Moreover, the repertoire of Philistine decorated pottery, both Myc IIIC and bichrome, indicates that wine rather than beer was the beverage of choice. The large bowl, called after its Greek name,
krater,
was used for mixing water with wine, apparently a Greek rather than a Canaanite custom. Such kraters were popular among the Mycenaeans, and in the Iron I period the relatively large proportion of kraters in Philistia compared with non-Philistine territory suggests that the Philistines continued to mix their wine with water. Large bell-shaped bowls for serving wine and small bell-shaped bowls or cups for drinking it are two popular forms of decorated Philistine pottery. The jug with the strainer spout completes the wine service; it was used as a carafe, and its built-in sieve strained out the lees and other impurities as the wine was poured. All these forms testify to the importance of viticulture and wine production during that era.

The inner coastal zone of Philistia, with its wide, undulating plains and deep, fertile soils, was ideal for growing wheat and olives. Oil produced here supplied not only Philistia but also other parts of the Levant, especially the perennial and enormous Egyptian market. In the seventh century
BCE
Ekron was the undisputed oil capital of the country: just inside the city’s fortifications were more than a hundred olive oil processing facilities.

The Philistines also brought changes to the region’s animal husbandry. Like their Canaanite and Israelite neighbors, the Philistines kept flocks of sheep and goats as well as cattle. To these they added a specialization in hogs. In the highland villages of the Iron I period, the bones of pigs are rare or completely absent, but in Philistia they constitute a significant proportion of excavated faunal remains: at Ashkelon 23 percent (but the sample is small), at Ekron 18 percent, and at Timnah (Tel Batash) 8 percent. These differences in pig production and consumption were due more to culture than to ecology. The Mycenaeans and later Greeks valued swine and preferred pork in their diet, a preference brought by the Philistines to Canaan in the twelfth century. It is probably then, the biblical period of “the judges,” that the Israelites developed their taboo against pork consumption, in part to differentiate themselves from their Philistine neighbors; circumcision was another such distinctive cultural marker.

As we have seen, soon after the arrival of the first generation of new immigrants, the Philistines successfully sited their five major cities, taking maximum advantage of their military, economic, and political potential. The urban tradition embodied in their cities differed from the Canaanite patterns they replaced, and the details of their urban planning provide additional reasons for concluding that the Philistines were not a small military elite who garrisoned the indigenous population but a large and heterogeneous group of settlers who brought many aspects of their old way of life and culture into their new landscape. Behind the archaeological residues of the pentapolis one can detect, however faintly, the activities of a diverse community of warriors, farmers, sailors, merchants, rulers, shamans, priests, artisans, and architects.

Weaving industries were often found in major centers. At Ashkelon more than 150 cylinders of unfired clay, slightly pinched in the middle, were found lying on the
superimposed floors of two successive public buildings, some still aligned along the walls as if they had been dropped from vertical weaving looms. The floors themselves had concentrations of textile fibers. Common Levantine pyramidal loom weights have perforated tops, but these were unpierced and were probably spools around which thread was wound and hung from the loom. Similar clay cylinders have been found at Ekron and Ashdod, on Cyprus in temple precincts at Enkomi and Kition (the Sea Peoples’ emporia there), on the Mycenaean mainland, on Thera (in the Cyclades), and in Crete. At Ashkelon, Ekron, and Ashdod these spool weights are found in abundance in stages 1 and 2. They were made from the local clays, but the Aegean parallels further indicate the origin of the new immigrants.

The best example of urban planning comes from another pentapolis city, Ekron. Over the ashes of the Late Bronze Age city was built a much larger Philistine one, about 20 hectares (50 acres) in size, with perhaps five thousand inhabitants. Even during stage 1 at Ekron there are signs of urban planning: industry was located along the perimeter of the city, just inside its fortification walls. Next were houses for ordinary citizens, and in the center of the site were public buildings, including a palace-temple complex, which was rebuilt several times in the more than two centuries of its use.

In the long, pillared main hall of this complex was a large circular sunken hearth. Such a hearth was characteristic of Mycenaean palaces, and the same feature is found at several sites in Cyprus during stage 1, as well as at Tell Qasile, a Philistine settlement north of the pentapolis founded in the mid-twelfth century.

Three rooms of the stage 2 public building at Ekron opened onto its central hall. In the northernmost room dozens of spool weights were found, suggesting that it was for weaving, perhaps by religious functionaries who were making vestments for the statue of the great Mycenaean mother-goddess. (An analogy, perhaps, is the notice in 2 Kings 23.7 of women weaving garments for Asherah in the precincts of the Jerusalem Temple.)

A plastered platform, perhaps an altar, stood in the middle room, identifying it as the primary place of worship. Nearby was an ivory handle of a knife for sacrifice, identical to the complete example in the southernmost room. There were also three bronze spoked wheels, part of a mobile cult stand with parallels in Cyprus and in the Jerusalem Temple. In the third room, next to another small platform or altar, archaeologists found a complete bimetallic knife. Knives with iron blades and bronze rivets are also a rarity in the Levant, occurring more frequently at Aegean and Cypriot sites.

Thus, at the beginning of the twelfth century, some groups within Aegean society transplanted their urban life and values to the similar ecological setting of the eastern Mediterranean coast and Cyprus. This event, sketched above as a mass migration of Sea Peoples during the period 1185-1150
BCE
, may have been precipitated by the dissolution of the highly articulated, finely tuned, hierarchical polities and economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, sometimes called the “palace economy.”

The settlement process for highland Israel had begun a generation or two before the arrival of the Sea Peoples on the coast. That event would necessarily have swelled the highland polity of early Israel as the indigenous Canaanite population found itself
squeezed out of the plains. The displacement and migration of the tribe of Dan from the coast to the north is a specific example of such a ripple effect. In biblical tradition there are important differences between Dan and the other tribes of Israel. The Danites never controlled the territory they were allotted, which extended to the Mediterranean coast as far as Joppa (Josh. 19.40-48). Moreover, unlike the other tribes, Dan has no extended genealogy (see Gen. 46.23; Num. 26.42). And in the Song of Deborah, Dan is characterized as serving as a client on ships (Judg. 5.17), although seafaring was not a characteristic Israelite activity. Because of these differences, some scholars have suggested that originally the Danites were not a part of Israel, but rather a member of the Sea Peoples’ confederation, to be identified with the Danaans of Homer and the Denyen in Rameses Ill’s inscription. Thus the Denyen should have been among those who settled along the coast during stage 1. But the Philistines did not settle in the Joppa region before 1150
BCE
(stage 2), and the Sea Peoples do not figure in the twelfth-century Song of Deborah, so the identification of the biblical Danites with either Danaans or Denyen is dubious.

It is much more likely that the expansion of the Philistines into the Joppa region, marked by the founding of Philistine Tell Qasile, forced the Danites out of that area and sent most of the tribe to the far north, to the Canaanite city of Laish. There, according to Judges 18.27, “The Danites… came to Laish, to a people quiet and unsuspecting, put them to the sword, and burned down the city.”

Evidence for this destruction has recently been discovered by Avraham Biran in his excavations at Tel Dan. Over the ruins of a prosperous Late Bronze Age city, a rather impoverished and rustic settlement was discovered. It had storage pits and a variety of collared-rim storage jars, but little or no Philistine painted pottery. The biblical traditions and the archaeological evidence converge so well that there can be no doubt that the Danites belonged to the Israelite, not the Sea Peoples’, confederation.

Either before the move of the Danites to the north or after, with remnants of the tribe still remaining in the south, interaction between a Danite family and the Philistines is preserved in the legends of Samson (Judg. 13-16). Samson is portrayed as an Israelite “judge” from the tribe of Dan. But he is unlike other judges, typically tribal leaders of the Israelite militia of Yahweh. After the beginning of the account of Samson’s birth (Judg. 13.2), the Danites are not even mentioned in the saga because most of the tribe had already migrated north. Philistine control over Judah is the larger issue in the stories.

Samson fights his battles alone and performs feats of strength more in the mold of the Greek Heracles than of the Israelite Gideon. Samson tells riddles, has seven magical locks of hair, and cavorts with Philistine women. His adventures take place on the border between the Israelites and the Philistines. Samson chooses a Philistine bride from the Philistine town of Timnah, where Philistine bichrome ware is abundant. This intermediate zone in the foothills between the highlands and the coastal plain was the first point of contact between the two cultures in the late twelfth century
BCE
and became a zone of contention and conflict thereafter.

Philistine expansion during stage 2 can be traced by the comparatively high yield of Philistine bichrome ware in the Gaza and Beer-sheba basins in the northern Negeb. The narrative in Genesis 26 concerning Isaac and King Abimelech of the Philistines
reflects this era. The Cherethites, who served as mercenaries under King David, are probably to be identified with Cretans, a contingent of the Philistines (“Pelethites”) who had settled in the semiarid Negeb (1 Sam. 30.14; 2 Sam. 8.18; 15.18; 1 Kings 1.38).