Where Did the Philistines Come From?

As you may know, I've been doing regular Bible readings. As it happens, I have just reached the book of Judges in this year's round. Judges is an interesting book, in that it appears to be a collection of unrelated hero tales from a pre-monarchical period in Israel's history. From the round numbers (forty years, eighty years, twenty years), there doesn't appear to be any attempt to date these stories or place them in an historical context. (They are, however, placed in a theological context.)

Throughout the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, supposedly the work of Moses, as well as in the book of Joshua, there are references to the people who live in the land promised to the Israelites. For example, in Joshua 3:10, "This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Prizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites." This list is consistent. Part of it dates back to Genesis 10:15, "Canaan was the father of Sidon his firstborn, and of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites." (I could, by the way, get into the implications of the fact that the authors of the Bible appear to have thought of the Hittites as a tribe of Canaanites, rather than the possessors of an empire of which Syria was merely a small portion. But I won't do that now.)

In Judges 3, however, there is a change in the cast of characters. Judges 3:1-3: "These are the nations the Lord left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan (he did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience): the five rulers of the Philistines, all the Canaanites, the Sidonians, and the Hivites living in the Lebanon mountains from Mount Baal Hermon to Lebo Hamath." According to the indices to my NIV Study Bible, all of the references to the Philistines (with one exception) are in Judges or later books. That one exception bears some inquiry.

In Genesis 10:13-14, just before the previous passage cited, it says: "Mizraim was the father of the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites, Pathrusites, Casluhites (from whom the Philistines came) and Caphtorites." I don't have the facilities here to verify this, but that parenthesis just shouts out "Later addition." In other words, some late editor of the Bible, finding all these references to the Philistines in Judges and other post-Mosaic books, and not finding any mention of them earlier, inserted this reference to maintain the idea that Genesis gave a complete listing of the peoples of the world.

In any event, I think this is evidence of a very important break in the continuity of the biblical narrative. Through Joshua, the Bible is based on a set of traditions passed down through a chain of sources with some specific parameters. Beginning with Judges, we start seeing stories based on a period of actual Israelite residence in Canaan, when they began to encounter people, like the Philistines, who were not part of the earlier tradition.