Philistine: a member of the coastal people who settled southwest of Israel and became its long-running rival
This is the name of a people, and it turns up far more often than any other neighboring nation in the historical books. It almost always appears in the plural, "the Philistines," naming the whole nation at once: five cities strung along the coastal plain southwest of Israel, each with its own ruler, worshipping Dagon and holding the lowlands while Israel held the hills. The land itself took its name from them (פְּלֶשֶׁת), and the plural people-name can stand in for that territory too, as in the phrases "the land of the Philistines" and "the sea of the Philistines," which is the Mediterranean.
Three things mark them out whenever they appear:
- Their beginnings are traced to Caphtor, a homeland across the sea, not to Canaan.
- Israelite speakers reach for the label "the uncircumcised" (עָרֵל), turning a visible difference into a taunt.
- Their rulers carry a title of their own, translated "lords," that Hebrew uses for no other nation.
The singular form does something the plural cannot: it picks out one man. Across the story of David and Goliath the giant is hardly ever named, and is called simply "the Philistine," over and over, as though the whole nation had stepped forward in one body. That is why the singular reads less like a label and more like a challenge.
The word carries a long arc. It first appears in the accounts of Abraham and Isaac, where the Philistines are settled neighbors who make treaties over wells. In Judges and Samuel they are the pressing enemy who take the ark, disarm Israel of iron, and kill Saul. David finally breaks their grip, and after that they fade into a smaller rival whom the prophets name among the nations facing judgment.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the Philistines who appear in the accounts of Abraham and Isaac are the same Iron Age people known from Judges and Samuel.
- majorityThe patriarchal references are anachronistic, applying a name familiar to later readers to the earlier inhabitants of the southern coastal region.; Trude Dothan, The Philistines and Their Material Culture (Yale University Press, 1982); Ann E. Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005)
- minorityThe references reflect genuine earlier Aegean contact along that coast, so the name is used of a real, if smaller, presence before the later settlement.; K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003)