The Real Origins of the Philistines and Palestinians

ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for checking out my youtube channel today the study of antiquity and the middle ages as always i'm your host nick barksdale and today we are joined once again by a very special guest a very awesome youtube channel that i'm happy to be affiliated with and that is world history by a jew none other than seth fleischman seth thank you so much for coming on today thanks nick it's a pleasure to be back again definitely to my audience again definitely check out the links in the video description below they will take you to his channel to where you can explore all the hard work that he does and really take advantage of everything that he has to offer welcome back to world history by a jew i'm your host seth fleischman and tonight we're doing the real origin of the philistines we are in the middle of a series on the bronze age collapse and i'm going to start off tonight with a story a story all of you have heard before but it may have been a while so there was a war in the land of israel the israelites were fighting the philistines one of them was a philistine giant from goth named goliath for days goliath would shout to the israelites each day and tell them to find a man that is brave enough to fight him and he comes out for 40 straight days find a man that is brave enough to fight me and all these israelites were terrified even though goliath said that the philistines would surrender if he was bested in in single combat no israelite was brave enough to face him but then along came comes a shepherd boy named david he is meeting up with israelite army because he has a couple brothers that are fighting in the army led by king saul who's fighting the philistines so jesse david's father sent david to deliver food to his brothers in the army as he got closer david realized that all the israelites were terrified of goliath he couldn't believe it so in spite of his brother's pleas david decides he will face goliath alone david got king saul's support by telling him that he had faced both lion and bear to protect his father's sheep and as we see goliath saying is anyone going to fight me and david comes out to tell him me david walks out to the field with no armor and only a slingshot and stones his weapons the philistine giant looks scornfully at this young lad coming to face him come here and i'll give your flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field but david responds you come to me armed with sword and spear but i come against you in the name of the god of israel i shall strike you down so the whole earth will know the god of israel goliath came at david but david put a stone in his sling and slung it killing the philistine with a blow to his forehead when the philistines see their champion dead they flee only to be routed by the israelites chasing them king saul now rewards david by making him an officer in the army so this is our opener because this leads to some important questions for us tonight first of all was goliath a philistine or a palestinian should we be saying israel or should we be staying palestine what's the better term are philistines and palestinians the same thing and what are the real origins of these people let's go exploring so our agenda for the evening we're still our overall question of the series is is the bronze age collapse in the bible i addressed this quite a bit in the last lecture i'm not going to address it directly tonight other than the connections to the philistines so first of all i'm going to quickly go through the bronze age collapse and reintroduce to the sea peoples those of you who've been in the last few lectures know it very well but just give me a couple minutes to get everyone else the basic info they need to enjoy this lecture then we're going to introduce the philistines i'm going to look at how the what we know about the philistines from the bible and then we're gonna go on a little pottery exploration which may not sound exciting at first but uh trust me i couldn't do a relief i didn't have a good relief explanation for us to go through tonight so i figured i would try pottery i think it's going to work you have to let me know if it works or not and then after that we'll move more into archaeology besides just pottery and talk about philistine findings and archaeology and then we're going to jump from what's in the ground all the way to the lab and look at the latest dna research and what that can tell us i'm going to go through the development of the names for the land of canaan so we'll get into this canaan to philistine to philistia to palestine to israel judea so on and so forth then i'm going to talk about how modern israelis and modern palestinians are connected to this philistine heritage and then i'm going to answer our basic lecture questions so you're going to see this again tonight these are our questions for the night and this will pop up a couple more times okay so let's jump into our review summary of the bronze age collapse so circa 1300 bce it was a high point of civilization if you had to pick a period of time to live in antiquity this should be tops of your list uh we have powerful empires dominating these for mediterranean these are the mycenaeans were the greeks before the greeks we had the hittites who were covering most of modern turkey and then move on and we have the the mitani people in syria and then egypt egypt was of course dominant not just in modern egypt but also covering all of modern israel and most of lebanon as well so you have these inner league trade networks it was very sophisticated so they were trading everything from grain uh enclosed necessities to luxury items like gold and jewelry there was sophisticated international diplomacy and we have great records of this which which is very interesting i talked about this in prior lectures so uh we're going through a technological revolution this is the late bronze age which is going to start the iron age so there is a technological shift as well so all these great things happening and suddenly it all collapses so why did it collapse there was an extended period of drought like an historic drought over decades so areas that once had plenty of food stopped having them and people became desperate to feed their families there was a what's called an earthquake storm over 50 years there were multiple significant earthquakes and also tidal waves which destroyed cities and ports and boats yet a technological imbalance it's great that technology is improving but not when uh the cost is to keep up is more than one can afford some of these countries are overly dependent on trade so if you got your grain from egypt and suddenly egypt didn't have grain to send you anymore how are you gonna feed your people bad leadership the great leaders were gone we have these bloated bureaucracies uh from the eras of the great leaders and then finally the most significant point was the invasion of the sea peoples all right so we're gonna now do a quick review of the sea peoples and then after that it's all new material from here on out okay so the sea peoples were a confederation of seafaring people some were land-based also but for the we call them sea people there were nine distinct people we are going to be concerned with so uh i don't want to torture you by saying them all with my tennessee accent but let's just say these first few will keep coming up the peloset these are the palestinians philistines fellowship whatever term you want to use luca we'll talk about some more sheridan the sheridan or the sherdana were the ones i talked about who who played both sides of the shekalash the these guys we'll all and i'll give you a list in a minute so no one needs to memorize anything the origins of these people are somewhat disputed although there's a decent amount that have been most likely identified and i and i'll talk about the philistine origins tonight so then so this lecture in the next lecture i'll be focusing on individual c people and how they're reflected in the bible this one is obviously the one on the philistines and i will get to the the philistine origins uh a little bit in a little bit now these sea peoples wreaked havoc all over these to mediterranean attacking the modern countries of egypt israel lebanon syria turkey cyprus sicily and greece so that's a lot of destruction so what's the result of all this destruction so the mycenaean greeks and the hittites are gone their empires are gone forever uh egypt is still around egypt survives but it no longer has a superpower status anymore many many city-states are destroyed during this process uh so ugari was the one we've talked about several times now they're gone uh and i don't need to go through the list i will mention you should look at the list of land of canaan like ashdod and ashkelon akko khazor megiddo these all mean something to us now some of those could be involved with israelite conquest as well so honestly i'll see people more on that to come so there's several sea people that settle in the land of canaan and the one we're looking at tonight is the philistines so here here's the the list that i promised you um the ones that are highlighted in yellow or green are the ones that i'm planning to go into more details about in either really well this lecture's just the the teleset so the next lecture i'll do the other four okay they all all four of these have a special connection to us in the bible you just don't realize it now i want to show you a little bit of a relief i said that i wasn't doing release tonight but i'm touching on this just to remind you that each of these sea peoples are distinctive you can see each of these guys looks a little bit different in this picture and here's our shirt in our chardonnay notice the horned helmets which we talked about a lot a couple lectures ago but these are not the guys we're focusing on tonight these are the guys we're focusing on tonight so i want you to keep an eye out for the philistines and they have this feathered hair dress by the way there were a couple other sea peoples that maybe had this for their dress as well but for our purposes if you see this feathered hairdresser and a relief then in your mind just think philistine that's what i'm asking you to remember okay uh now with that being said let's explore the connection between the bronze age collapse and the bible most famously with the philistines all right so i'm going to introduce you to the philistines the name as i've already mentioned a couple times is derived from the egyptian term pelicept which in hebrew is pellechete so that's pretty close uh the greeks would corrupt this name to the to be philistia so where the teleset people settled became philistia i did some etymology last time i'll do some more entomology this time so i'll explain that a little bit better if you didn't see the last lecture so the so english speakers then derive the term palestine really the the the romans took it from the greeks and then the us english speakers took it from the romans uh there are numerous references to these people in the bible so with a lot of my lectures on in the egyptian series i would have like one sentence and have to try to figure something you know what this one sentence is talking about in this case there's no question these guys are in the bible there's well over 250 references in fact if you look at some of their equivalent names some people argue it's as many as 500 references but let's just say they're in there a whole bunch i think that no one's going to argue with that um they could the philistines would compete with the israelites for control over the land of canaan the most famous one is the one who opened up our lecture tonight that's goliath everyone knows goliath who was from the city of god now speaking of the city of god there were five main cities that the philistines settled in so gaza ashkelon there's goth for goliath uh ekron and ashad so these are then there are other little settlements too but these five cities are combined to be called the pentapolis and as you can see they're all on the coast of the southern canaan so this would be south the southwestern coast of modern israel they were a formal enemy for the israelites in fact they fought him for centuries i mean not constantly but on and off for centuries especially the first couple hundred years and the philistines would last almost 600 years one little funny detail i want to mention before moving on is circumcision well i guess depends on how long ago was how sensitive you are to the topic but there it seems that the philistines were the only ones in the area not practicing it so we think of jews and and brittany law but it wasn't just israelites it was also egyptians and canaanites practiced circumcision as well it seems that philistines were so well known for being uncircumcised it was often used as a synonym for them they're just the uncircumcised ones so okay so this is your setup and now i'm going to start breaking it down we're going to look at what we know from the bible we're going to look at archaeology we're going to look at the latest dna i'm going to take it each step along the way all right so let's uh let's go first into the biblical tradition this map you saw last lecture it's a great map i'm actually using a couple times this lecture i think it's going to come back to the next one i really like this one for for explaining where we are in history uh now before there was a kingdom of israel before there was a kingdom of judea we have the era of the judges all right and we had numerous conflicts in that work the biblical tradition tells us between the philistines and the israelites i think the most memorable story uh from this period is probably the story of samson right uh i'm kind of put i'm putting the story of goliath into where the kingdom is already starting so i think the pure judges era you'd have to look at samson and i'm going to use i'm going to talk about samson the next lecture because sams is going to help us make another connection uh next time so to come back for that we also had a big impact on the tribe of dawn i don't want to pick on one tribe but these poor guys they were settled right in this area of uh see joppa so that's near jaffa tel aviv if you if you don't know java this area right here was supposed to be the area of uh the tribe of dawn's inheritance as told in the book of joshua however you see it's right beside philistia and the philistines actually kicked the tribe of dawn out of their own inheritance and they moved up here so uh i know this map doesn't show it great because it doesn't show the tribal borders but if you see the little city here dawn that's where tel don is today and that's actually where the dynites went to after the philistines kicked them out there was open warfare between the philistines and and judah and it began with the battle of ebeneezer i should say the israelites were routed and the ark was taken it went very poorly for the jews and then it got worse the philistines went destroyed shiloh and they headed north to take megiddo and date cheyenne so things just kept getting worse and worse right okay so let's move to the next step to stop the philistines the israelites would unite and appoint a king now i want to stop for a second and and emphasize this really think about it the reason there ever had to be a king of israel was to defeat the philistines that's why the israelites demanded to have a king was they needed someone to unite them to push the philistines back so uh we know the first king was king saul but of course that would then lead to having king david in this entire monarchy we can in a way thank the philistines for now the things would start turning around once king saul is there uh not perfect but turning around so in the battle of mikmosh saul's son jonathan pushes the philistines back he would later become a great friend to king david david then slew goliath as we started off with this lecture in the philistines as we know fled and were routed after after that after the combat between these two champions the philistines though were not done yet they would defeat the israelites on mount gaboa and king saul and his three sons were killed so we kind of go back down again but then we have another high because king david becomes king and he takes door he takes jezreel valley then to beijing valley and then david pushes philistia all the way back into this little corner and he establishes the united monarchy so great times had by all after that right um post david the philistines and it is recorded in the bible that the philistines in the israelites continued really i should say the judeans but the is the philistines the judeans the jews continued their relationship for good or for bad well afterwards so in the mid 800s we know the philistines brought a tribute to jehoshaphat the king of judah and then the philistines though would go back to fight uzia the king of judah around the mid 700s bce and the judaeans would break down the walls of goth remember that's goliath's home and also ashdod as well and then we're not done hezekiah the king of judah would face would defeat the philistines in gaza uh good thing gaza has been peaceful ever since right that really solved that problem long term the philistines would hang around for nearly 600 years but it would not be the israelites that would finally push them out we are told that it was the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar we're going to cross this with the archaeological record in a minute but i'm going to leave leave this point there for now okay so uh this leads me to the most common question i get about the philistines and that is where did the philistines come from so we're going to do a little bit of research to get to this all right so let's start with what the bible tells us okay this the philistine genealogy so if you look here on the left and i'm not i'm not going to read all these to you but what you can see from the bolded words this is telling you where the philistines came from according to the bible so uh if you look at ham he was the son of noah right and ham had uh kush mitzrayim putin kanan okay mitz rhyme by the way i should emphasize is egypt okay so com got egypt so egypt that's ryan now is going to have a bunch of other children and that we have the petrus theme and the casa louisiana wentz came forth the philistines so this is giving us the biblical genealogy of where these people came from that the philistines came from these other two groups and they were also connected to this coptering all right now the if you look a little bit further down there's others there's these kerathites as well um and then one of my favorite lines i put this in red i was afraid i was going to say i was going to forget it if i didn't i didn't do something to make it stand out but i just wanted to say i think this is great where you have this this negev of the karate so the desert in in israel uh we now have this this part of the desert that's considered the negev of the care of the herathites so uh here's a list of these people that are mentioned in the quotes to the left the two that i'm really focusing on these two the ones that are in bold all right because they they clearly are identified as part of the of the police part of the the philistines now where are these guys from we actually have enough tradition to know so cough tour you will see several theories as to what exactly kaftar was but when you cross the the bible commentators with acadian with the with egyptian it becomes very clear so acadian has copter up which is crete and the egyptians have kept two which is crete and you can see the etymology of kaptor it's it's very similar the egyptians give us a little bit more information they specifically named keftu as being in the middle of the great green the great green i said this one in our previous lectures the great green is what the egyptians call the mediterranean uh they also have reliefs of these people from kef2 and they're clearly wearing minoan and mycenaean costumes in other words they're wearing greek costumes and they're where and they're holding greek objects like greek cups and greek vessels okay the other one is the herathites well the heretites actually sound more like crete in greek because creedy uh and we've got to remember it's creatine if you look at the hebrew and then karidi in greek is crete and of course we say crete in english that's where our word crete comes from so it seems that both of these people are related to the island of crete we get that through the greeks they help us back up that that biblical aspect and then the acadians and egyptians help us add up the cop tour the difference between the two that's probably a longer discussion than we need to get to tonight but um so the bible is telling us that they do have a connection decree that's what we're getting out of this the philistines have a connection to crete now what i want to do is look at some pottery to see if the pottery can help us identify where the philistines are from all right so when you look at these six vases these are actually called epithos an epithos is just a storage jar like a huge storage drawer if you're going to trade something if you're a merchant you'll move it you know you're selling olive oil you'll have it in one of these fit those okay these there's six fit those here there each pair is from a different people okay and they're the distinctive difference is these necks so you see the first one is short necks the middle one has kind of this fluted type neck and then you have this collar here on the last one okay so let's look at where each of these are from these have been found in philistine lands okay and we know also uh just from archaeology that the it seems to see peoples we're using these fit those without much of a net to them the next one is canaanite okay so the uh canaanite has out that has this like where the the neck comes out opens back up again afterwards even though you see a different shape between these two it's the neck i want you to look at and the last one you probably guessed by now is israelite all right now the israelite one the way you can tell is this collar and i want to get you a better view of the collar okay you see how it squares off right here if you can remember this you will be amazed how much it helps you when you read an archaeological article like you'll find some you'll read an article about some new archaeological discovery and you'll see they always push the pottery to the side somewhere if you look at the pottery and you see the square off uh collar then you've got a pretty good idea that it's israelite uh and that's it's a great little helpful hint now there are exceptions to this right these people were trading okay so it doesn't always work if a canaanite trades oliver with an israelite then the canaanite pithos is going to be in that israelite town in addition it could be that someone just liked it right they could have shared technology but in general for us novices this is a very good way of telling the difference so we can assume it's fairly accurate so this is this this is storage jars these are merchant pottery i want to look more like an everyday pottery to see if we can tell a difference and where it's from so we identified that pithos as being a sea peoples type item now i want to look at these dishes okay so similar idea here we've got different pairs each pair is of different origin all right i'm not expecting anyone to know this all pan so so let me tell you the first one is philistine okay so the prettiest one uh this is it's by chrome which means there's two colors uh and you can see it has much more intricate designs that's actually philistine and more on that in a minute uh the next one with these more simplistic designs is canaanite all right and by the way for a long time candy knight was playing but towards the end of the bronze age i started doing very simple single color monochrome designs on their pottery and then the last one i'm sure you guessed is israelite so the israelites are the boring ones you know everything's plain uh you can just say they're very efficient right they don't want to waste time designing things they uh um also you know if they mix milk and meat they got to crush they have to demolish it they can't reuse it so maybe they don't invest as much in their dishes as someone who doesn't keep kosher i don't know but clearly each of these three categories gives you a way of seeing the difference between them and any of you now can see which it probably is again doesn't always work but this is a very helpful hint to the origin of each now how is this going to help us connect where the philistines are from that should be your next question and for that i want to look at another people's dishes the myceneans okay now when you compare if you think of this last one i just showed you right here and the difference between them and now let me look at the mycenaeans again you can see the mycenaeans are much closer to the philistines in fact if you really look at the details right you can see the scaling here right here the same scaling here you can see how they like the triangles you got the triangles right here you see how they're like these little arrows you have the arrows right here the lesson here is the philistine pottery looks quite a bit more like greek pottery mycenaean pottery looks much more like greek pottery than it does anything in the land of canaan israelite or canaanite that's what i want you to see now i'm going to look at one more version of this and that's with drawings so if you look at these drawings i'll give you a hint they're either philistine or they're greek you want to tell me which is which it's a joke i don't expect you to know because they all look identical to me uh but let me show you the first one is from the uh it's from the rhodesians island of rhodes excuse me the second one is philistine the third one is philistine and the fourth one is from cyprus so look at these designs can you tell where this designs come from look at look at the duck between cypress and here look here at roads look at the fish the philistine fish to the roads fish um and so on and so forth so i just want you to see really for especially for us non-experts you really can't tell them apart so the pottery was a very early indication for archaeologists 100 years ago potter is a very early indication of archaeologists that the philistines came from the greek world also as you know pottery is great for dating i've talked about pottery a lot when i talk about flinders petrie but i've never actually tried to go through showing the differences in pottery so i hope you all like that for something different so we're going to sum this up by saying if the pottery looks like it's from the greek world what does that tell us about the origin of philistine people and now we need to move on to the archaeology because we're about to have another indication of the greek origins okay now i'm going to look at two different types of archaeology one is i'm going to look at extra biblical sources and then i'm look at the horror of archaeology and the dirt okay so let's look at the the extra biblical sources and the first one here we're going to look at a couple things about egypt so first of all is the reneptostella now i did a whole lecture on this i'm not going to go into it in any detail other than to say in one sentence we know thanks to moneta that as of 1210 bce or so there were canaanites not philistines in ashkelon because he thought them if you want to know more just go see the video uh spent an hour talking about it now next is this pottery we just went through how do we bring that back into the archaeology well in in two lectures ago we talked about metanet habu the reliefs there when ramses iii uh defeated the sea peoples and he tells us he settled them along the coast of canaan we can see from the pottery that the pottery this philistine pottery started appearing around 1175 bce we know that ramses had his great victory yeah 1177 bce is the common date maybe in 75 maybe 80 but basically 1177 bce and this pottery perfectly fits with what ramsey's the third is telling us that the philistines were now starting to settle in nashua i also want to look at assyrian and babylonian records these are the great conquerors and i have a map here as i'm talking look at this map this is showing the the different campaigns from both the assyrians and the babylonians but we know from 730s bce that the assyrians conquered philistia all right and then thanks to the treaty of ester hardin which was actually a treaty between the assyrians and the city of tyre which is right here in modern lebanon but in this treaty it talks about the philistines so we know that they were still there even though they had been defeated 60 years earlier they were still in philistia the babylonian chronicle though that's really where it ends so i told you the philistines lasted almost 600 years so i'm saying that's for about 1177 bce up to 604 bce that's when the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar destroys ashkelon he destroys ashton destroys ekron and he is actually going to exile these people back to babylonia and we know they were in babylonia because 12 years or so later there's cuneiform rationalists listing philistines working for nebuchadnezzar in babylon so their officials did make it back to babylon but unlike the jews who would come back from exile the philistines never did okay after nev after the babylonians defeat them and and disperse them they never uh come back together as a people again philistia is done as of 604 bce and it's done for good now i want to mention a few other archaeological finds so i just want to show i talked about the pottery i want to mention a few other differences that are relevant to our discussion i'm not going to talk about the battery anymore uh i just don't want to forget that it was here but also burial customs okay uh so by the way when i say the aegean the myceneans the greeks i'm really i'll talk about the same thing i'm talking about that area of the mediterranean around modern greece and the islands surrounding it okay uh down the decree so forth uh anyway so the the burial customs were very of the philistines were very similar to that of the uh myceneans and those of the greek world okay so one is that these metal mouth lords like they put these metal mouth guards over their mouths when they they died i'm sure it's you know to keep out evil spirits or something something along those lines doesn't matter but it's a very distinctive practice and the philistine burials continue that practice something that you really only see in the greek world okay also there they have these burial figurines and i put an example of one here right so these burial figurines were were buried with the bodies and again this this this type of item specifically this look was very unique to the greek world and then one other big difference is and this one is would probably be anyone's guess is you see much a lot more pork bones a lot more pig is being eaten in philistine towns than in uh proposed israelite towns it's not 100 right you can have one of the other culture in a given town that can happen but basically if you look in the urban areas you're going to see a huge difference in the consumption of pork between the philistines and in the jews and in in to this you know that continue to this day right you see the same thing even this day and again there's exceptions but uh you know it when it when it comes to pork it's like the only thing jews and muslims agree on so there's probably something to it uh and it was back then too and then i want to talk about advanced metallurgy so philistine iron versus israelite bronze so the philistines really came with this new iron technology they were kind of the harbingers of this iron age now let me just say the hittites had it too the hittites had been there before i'm not saying that the philistines invented it uh but they were they were probably the first ones in the land of canaan that really brought this iron technology in mass and the question is do they have a technological advantage do they know how they have a know-how the israelites couldn't replicate or do they somehow manage to have a political uh uh monopoly and when you read the bible uh it does talk about the philistines controlling iron particularly when they were ruling most of what is now israel but you could argue either way whether it's technological or political i just want to say though that also this iron tech matches what we know to see people right we know the sea people are bringing this new technology their defeat as we talked about and at the prior lectures they're defeating these chariots now they have new weapons new weapon techniques and they're they're beating armies they wouldn't have been able to be before and it's not just these odds here odds and ends of iron they're bringing knives plowshares spirit heads battle axes so a lot of technology okay so this is enough of what we can learn in the ground now i want to switch over and look at what science can tell us what can we learn from dna now i always like to point out in these lectures when new stuff is happening there's always new developments in archaeology and one that makes a huge difference in biblical archaeology just happened in 2016 for ever archaeologists have been looking for a philistine cemetery there's so much information you get from a cemetery and they finally found the philistine cemetery of ascalon in 2016. so this opened up a whole new avenue of exploration regarding the philistine people and there's there's a couple dna studies very recent one just released its findings last year in 2019 and the other one just released their findings in 2020 this year and i want to go through these with you and how they help us with our discussion okay so dna study number one report as reported in 2019 there were three time periods in ashkelon that were studied with the dna of the burials were studied okay so we had burials from 1650 to 1200 bce we all agree that's before the sea peoples um the next area of study was 1150 to 1100 bce which was just after the sea peoples arrived and the last one was more like 950 to 800 bce which was long after cpu you know a couple hundred years after the cpus had arrived these years obviously aren't exact but just trying to make it arranged for some simplicity's sake okay so let's look at the findings so group number one so this is this first one the the people of ashland were not distinguishable from other area canaanites in other words their dna was basically the same as all the other canaanites in the land of canaan and this would also back up what mernepta told us right murder told us he faced canaanites and echelon based on the the way they were portrayed in his reliefs and we see this here now i want to look at group two so group two was right after the sea people's arrived we had there was four infant burials of note that are very important these four infants all had dna 25 to 70 percent non-canaanite dna that specifically was from greece crete and sardinia so right in the the mediterranean world right around greece right in this greek world this mycenaean world we've been talking about uh and then what's interesting is when you look at group oh and i should also mention the emphasis is important due to the fact that they had to have been born there right if you have adults they could have always moved there you don't know but in order for an infant you know you don't travel across the ocean with an infant uh or a pregnant woman either that's very dangerous for health so most likely the assumption is an infant uh born in the land of canaan was uh most likely conceived or at least knowingly conceived and certainly born where in that place so it's important to show that this this greek dna is there group number three goes back to the canaanites in other words we have this influx of greek dna in group two in this time period and a couple hundred years later boom back to canaanite so it's like from goes from three back to one and skips number two they kind of disappeared on us more on that later dna study number two which was just from this year uh in fact when they released a study it was my article of the week and my email that week so we had 73 people in the land of canaan uh that were that and they expand over a 1500 year period so we had these 73 burials and by the way if you look at this map on the right i just want to show you these are where these ancient where they're pulling these ancient beer remains from for testing if if you're interested to know uh four of the sites for this particular test were in modern israel and one was in modern jordan okay so what's interesting about these 73 people is they were all genetically similar like they were not completely different at all they clearly had dna links between them this includes modern israeli jews and modern palestinian arabs both showed over half their dna match with the ancient canaanites from here okay that's a really important point the other half of these israelis and palestinians buried okay so you had half that were canaanite but the palestinians then diverged really to what you'd assume right muslim conquest arabia east africa whereas the jews had an influx from whether they were ashkenazi or safari and wherever their their families may have been at the time now i want to look at one more study this just kind of adds to our story it's not where the prime studies but this is also recent only three years ago and they did testing of five canaanite burials in sedona uh sit on here yes it is right here sidone which is a monarch which is in modern lebanon so they tested these five candidate burials from ancient sedona with modern lebanese modern lebanese do have a reputation for being in this area for a long long time without moving and what do you know modern lebanese had a 90 percent dna correlation with these ancient canaanites incidents so impressive stuff so what do we learn from these dna studies let's look at the philistines the evidence remember those three different time periods the middle time period had greek dna so the evidence supports the 1175 bce settlement that we've been working at the infants as i mentioned that were born at the site had to basically had to be born locally but they had greek dna which is important but why did they disappear after two years 200 years well they went native yeah that's kind of a normal phrase to say that they mixed with the local population this tells us something important because this tells us these philistines this entire philistine kingdom the entire philistine people the israelites were facing for 600 years the philistines were actually a minority the peloset were a minority of the kingdom from which their name was derived okay now looking at this minority the non-canaanite dna in other words the greek dna indicates multiple locations of european origins so these people that did settle in philistia had crete greece and sardinia sardinian dna in them however you got to give the philistines credit they seem to have always been a minority uh never a majority of their own people but they brought with them the sophisticated greek culture that stuck so even though their dna would disappear after less than 200 years this philistine culture this this kind of merged greek culture would last 600 years 400 years after the dna had disappeared so uh but it is interesting so you got to give the culture credit but it is very interesting note that philistines were minority in their so-called philistia now the lebanese doesn't help us as much but just to prove a point and that is that the lebanese are a great test case they prove it's possible to retain a high correlation of dna if the people stayed in the same place and married amongst themselves which the lebanese did okay now i want to look at what this does for modern jews modern jews in this in this studies got about half their dna from ancient canaanites all right this shows us that we have an ancient connection to the land some people aren't going to like that it's half canaanite okay they were like there's no way it's canaanite we're not canaanites but let's face it jews were a mixed multitude that left egypt they came to the land of canaan and how many times do we read about proselytes about respecting proselytes about treating proselytes uh properly in the bible it's telling us there probably were a lot of proselytes around that's why they talked about them so much i should also mention a third possibility and that is it is possible there are people from canaan that have only been found in canaan and therefore they're labeled canaanite perhaps they in their own times have been labeled something else what i really want to get to though what the whole point of this is is not whether you're bothered by canaanite or not it's that jews for the most part left this land nearly two thousand years ago they come back you know eighteen hundred years after they left and they still have half their dna from this land half their dna is tied to this land and it's equal to the people that never left all right that's big it's equal to the people who never left even though jews have been gone for nearly 2 000 years right now i want to look at how this affects modern palestinians modern palestinian arabs i'm going to get into that just a minute so palestinians get about half their dna from ancient ancient canaanites as well the other half were likely impacted by the muslim conquest which is probably the most obvious that moved a lot of people and changed a lot of marriages uh so and then these where did these other halves come from as i mentioned before arabia uh the near other places in the near east and east africa i don't think that should bother anyone it makes logical sense what's important to note here is there's no distinguishable south europe dna south europe is greece there's no greek dna in these people even if they were descended from the philistines i'm not saying they are i'm just saying that the philistines their dna was gone after 200 years so you're talking you know another 27 100 2800 years down the road that dna is certainly not going to be in anyone today so there's no philistine dna it's not in modern palestinians and it wasn't even the modern philistines once their kingdom was gone um so now let's go back to our lecture questions was goliath a philistine or a palestinian you're starting to know these answers right should we say israel or palestine are philistines and palestinians the same now let's take a closer look at the modern land and people now i went through a pretty detailed etymology discussion in my last lecture uh between palestine and philistine i don't want to do that this time except to say if you want to know more go to that one however i do want to point out one edition and that is this philistine i think it's important when you look at the term philistine for someone who speaks arabic that philistine and palestine would sound the same why there's no p sound in arabic so that could cause some confusion even well-meaning confusion because in english we say palestine when we mean the new and we say philistine when we mean the old um and arabic does not have that mechanism for differentiation if you're wondering if somebody speaks arabic usually pronounces the p sound as a b so instead of the word push it would be the word bush and there was this joke i heard a long time ago it's going to date itself but so when mubarak was the dictator of egypt mubarak comes and visits president bush and i'm dating it and he has his great tour of the united states with president bush after that he flies back to cairo he lands in cairo and he and he calls all his head staff into the room and say how much better the american president is treated than he is even though he's the absolute ruler of egypt and they say well how come mubarak and he said because president bush has his name on the back of every door in the united states um so i i don't i can't tell if you're laughing or not by those kind of finding it popped in my head again so let's look at palestine the land instead of palestine the people okay so biblically speaking as we've well established we have the land of the philistines with the patapolis okay and the greeks then gave us this term philistia and now i want to go back to our culture to this this idea of cultural bias right if the greek people know that philistia was founded by fellow greeks they're much more likely to call it philistia than they are to call it israel or judea they're going to use the term for their own people so there could very well be some cultural bias for the romans though when the romans conquered israel or judea should say judea when the romans conquered judea they named it syria palestine or just palestine okay this was in 135 of the common era the roman emperor hadrian under his leadership they defeat the barakah revolt which is a horrible tragedy in in jewish history um but after barack obama's revolt that's the end of the independent kingdom of judea that's the end of the jews having their own kingdom or a country up until 1948 well rome intentionally chose to honor the jews enemies so rome took the greek name intentionally and named it palestine to to honor the jews rival and to erase jewish identity at the same time the romans renamed jerusalem as well to aliyah capitalina which was to honor both the emperor hadrian and the greek god zeus so they really were trying to erase the jewish memory i'm happy to report the romans are long gone but it's now the jews land again um but nonetheless uh the name the romans gave the land stuck so the romans called it palestine then the byzantium came in uh and byzantium or we think of as the eastern roman empire they continue calling it palestine the muslims came in after the muslim conquest they kept the name palestine of course they pronounced with an f but same idea the ottomans same name palestine and at the as after as world war one was coming to an end the british get control of this territory and the british named it after the roman term the mandate of palestine was the british term which makes perfect sense because for 1800 years it had been palestine now so but what i want to point out is from the romans in 135 ce to the end of the british mandate in 1948 ce so you're 1800 years the term palestinian was used for all residents of this area jew muslim and christian if you lived here you were a palestinian so what's my point i get a lot of complaints when when i say palestine people get naturally get offended or they're sensitive to it palestine is a legitimate term for the region as a historical name um same same way of saying byzantium byzantium was never the name the romans used for the eastern roman empire but it's okay to call it zantian from historical point of view same thing for palestine it's just gotten politicized all right it was the legitimate term for the region for 1800 years it was used by the greeks romans byzantines ottomans and yes jews so let's talk about these crazy jews calling themselves palestinians i want to point out a few uh jewish organizations to you and what they and how their names developed the jerusalem post was founded by jews in 1932 as the palestinian post it changed his name in 1950 the jerusalem post and here's the the newspaper from the day israel was born modern israel was born the israel philharmonic orchestra was founded by jews in 1938 as the palestine symphony orchestra changed his name in 1948 here's a ticket from a concert of the palestine orchestra dated in 1936 united jewish appeal a this is for those who don't know that's an international body for raising money for jewish causes so the in the israeli arm of it was founded as the united palestine appeal and in 1925 and changed its name to the united jewish appeal in 1939 when it was rolled up into some other groups in world war ii the palestine regiment of the british army right so palestinians jews and arabs fought for the british during world war ii the regiment from this area was called the palestine regiment and it was a majority jewish regiment 1600 jews and 1200 arabs when it was founded should also mention that after the creation of the british man zionists jews were trying to get other jews to visit the region puts posters all over the world saying visit palestine okay so clearly jews use the term palestine for themselves now i want to look at this a little bit more when does the modern israeli identity begin when do they stop being palestinian stop being palestinian jews have become israelis this is almost certainly between the years 1948 and 1950 and i look at it from two events first we have the war of independence in 1948 when israel actually becomes a country and then two years later in 1950 when the palestinian post becomes a jerusalem post these two key events in my mind is the transition from palestinian jew to israeli all right and now i'm going to get do a little bit of an editorial i actually think it's completely ridiculous that jews ever use the name palestinian because if you look at it from a biblical point of view i mean could you imagine king david king saul samson these guys would be rolling in their graves that jews were called palestinians i didn't want to say nazis that'd be an exaggeration but i think for us for those who know a little bit of russian history imagine 500 years from now jews calling themselves cossacks i mean it sounds utterly ridiculous but this is basically the equivalent of a jew calling themselves a palestinian that you know for hundreds of 600 years we fought these people and then we're going to take our name from them a little bit ridiculous that's going to help us with our last point here so my basic idea is let the palestinians have the name we don't want it we should have never taken it it's ridiculous we ever had it all right now i want to flip this around a little bit and i'm going to look at this as a more of like a not from a palestinian point of view but at least more what they would what their world view would be on that okay palestinians and i mean modern palestinian arabs do claim ancient dissent okay but what jews are most sensitive to is when palestinians call themselves philistines well i can tell you that that's not very common for palestinians to say their philistines they have done it arafat did say it but it's really a relatively recent claim uh that that you know it's not like for a hundred years they've been saying they were they were descended from philistines okay the most consistent claims have been the next two so that's jebocites and that's actually the most consistent claim if you want to look at air fact quotes or palestinian leadership quotes they seem to save jebesites more than anything else uh jebesites is it's a little bit disputed exactly the genocides were but the uh cliff notes version of it was they were canaanites residing around jerusalem before the israelite conquest the jews were not successful in pushing them all out so we know jebesites we score into the biblical tradition and genocides remain there afterwards okay so the trick is there's no archaeological evidence of the genocides there's no proof these people were ever there uh so there's no way to connect them or disconnect them from the from the modern palestinians there's no proof the other being only because the canaanites now canaanites we've heard less really but they have used it consistently throughout the years i mean the palestinians have used consistently thanks to dna i think this claim is only going to increase because the dna studies do back up the claim that palestinians are descended from uh ancient canaanites but what i want to say is for the average palestinian other than the political aspect i don't think they would care because the quran doesn't have genocides it doesn't have canaanites they don't have philistines they wouldn't know who any of these people are if it weren't for what their leadership said okay now these next quotes can be highly inflammatory uh so i want to be careful with them what i want to establish is that the palestinians were not a people in identifiable people until later in other words in the look at what was said in the 1930s here you have a syrian arab leader saying palestine is a term invented by the zionists that's right the romans gave us the term when they kicked us out of our land but somehow it's our term that we invented and he then goes on to say that palestine is alien to the arabs all right that's the 1930s a long time ago now but if you go on here and look at this conversation between assad and arafat in 1976 or if you look here from this plo executive committee statement in 1977 they the palestinian people does not exist it's really for political purposes that there's a palestinian people okay um i don't want to get any more than that but what i want to say is these people do at this point claim to be palestinian people what does that mean for us today all right so when did the modern palestinian identity begin so palestinian arabs became palestinians somewhere between 1964 and 1968 that's when they gave up on this whole were syrians or jordanians or what have you and were palestinians so the big event that happened was in 1967 when you had the six day war in israel miraculously defeats the combined armies of egypt syria and jordan and davidson in six days this was the sign to the palestinian leadership that they were not going to win at least not going to win any time soon against the israeli army so they started shifting to more political goals uh unfortunately part of that to them political goals includes terrorism the the days of them depending on an army kicking the jews out kind of ended in 1967. the palestinian national charter is the palestinian liberation organizations that's the governing body of the palestinians that is their charter which was first uh put out in 1964 and then again in 1968 what happened between those two things the six day war in 1964 uh jews were considered palestinians if they lived in the land of palestine it said it very specifically and the palestinians referred to as palestinian arabs that all changed in 1968 1968 the charter was rewritten and this time specifically called palestinian arabs as the palestinian people so this shows a real peoplehood happening in the end of the 1960s so what does this mean so palestinian jews became israelis around 48 or 50 and the palestinian narratives and palestinians around 1964 to 1968 okay so i should say the palestinians originally took this name not because of the philistines they were not claiming the name because of the philistines they were claiming the name because they were native residents of the british mandate palestine and that's that by at that point in the beginning this applied to both jews and arabs under the british and initially under the palestinian arabs themselves and i know i keep saying this thing about the ridiculous thing but it really does bother me so i keep saying it over and over again i hope it will stop bothering me now what do i think about the palestinian arabs becoming the palestinians and i may differ with some of you on on my thoughts basically i believe people have a right to self-identify as they wish so assuming whatever they're self-identifying as doesn't infringe the right on the right of others i don't see a problem so and also just because the palestinians did not claim peoplehood until 20 years after the jews that does not mean it's somehow not allowed okay because the the basic thing is no one else was claiming the name the philistines are long dead and the palestinians want it okay so to summarize we know now many palestinian families have ancient roots in canaan but they are not the biblical philistines they're not from the bible uh but that you know the biblical philistines were forced from their land 2 700 years ago they're long gone so that emphasizes the point no one else alive has a right to claim the name so let them be palestinian if they wish my problem what really bothers me is the problem lies in weaponizing palestinian to delegitimize israel okay let's wrap up that's a tough one our lecture goals for tonight was goliath the philistine our palestinian we all know very well as a philistine now should we say israel or palestine it is the modern country of israel that's undeniable but from a uh scholarly point of view from historical point of view it's not necessarily wrong to say palestine our palace our philistines the palestinians the palestinians the same absolutely not for the most part of their history palestinians wouldn't have claimed to be it's only more recent time that they have uh at all so what are the real origins so the origin of the palestinians are it was defined by the palestinian liberation organization you can look up the charter but it defines palestinians as pre-1948 natives to the british mandate palestine it's nothing to do with the philistines that's where they their palace palestinians because of the mandate palestine the evidence does support significant dissent from canaanite natives right from the dna but there was a genetic infusion of the from the muslim conquest we had arabia we had egypt we had africa okay things did change but they have they seem to have some sort of connection until 50 years ago they the palestinians saw themselves as syrians or jordanians it was only really since 1968 they coalesced into a people called the palestinians now we'll look at the origin of the philistines so the evidence supports an 1175 bc settlement that fits great with our entire chronology for the last i don't know five six lectures all of it fits together uh in this lecture just another piece in the puzzle we see that the philistines had a genetic confusion from the greek world but let me say it was multiple places in the greek world from what's now modern greece from crete from sardinia the philistines were not one uh just one sea peoples so they may have included the pellet set but this tells us they were not just the pellet set this is an important point i'm gonna come back to they quickly diffused into their they quickly diffused their greek dna into the canaanites and disappeared at least dna wise even though they had a sophisticated culture that lasted for 600 years now i want to come back to this point this is my ending point okay so dr mayer is one of the most distinguished archaeologists in israel and i wanted to use this quote regarding various sea peoples instead of just the pelican while i fully agree that there was a significant foreign component among the philistines in the early iron age these foreign components were not of one origin and no less important they mixed with the local levantine populations from the early iron age on what is he saying he's saying we have multiple people here it's not just the peloset and you have multiple canaanites so what does this all mean there are other philistines so next time we'll come back we're going to meet the other philistines we have biblical enemies that have surprising origins we have the impact of the philistines on the israelite conquest we have an israelite tribe who may very well have been partially sea peoples and then we have other biblical topics like the mystery of amalek so i hope you will come back in a couple weeks and we will continue this conversation and try to solve a few biblical mysteries with that i'd like to open the floor for questions

Channel: Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Views: 169,867

Keywords: Philistines, Palestine, Palestinian, Palestine History, Canaan History, Canaanites, Ancient Egypt, Ancient History, Ancient Canaan, Ancient Greece, Bronze Age Collapse, Bronze Age, Sea Peoples, Sea Peoples Documentary, palestine and israel, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, ancient greece history, mycenaean greece, Biblical Archaeology, Bible History, Old Testament, philistines history, palestine origin, Ancient Palestine, Semitic, Indo European, palestinian history, History

Id: IEmMdBfD3OQ

Length: 60min 19sec (3619 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020