Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [75]
Were the Philistines really all that bad?
With the most famous character in Judges, the legendary Samson, and his naughty wife, Delilah, the villains have changed. The abominable Canaanites have been replaced by the barbarous Philistines.
History has not been kind to the Philistines, whose name was picked up by the Greeks and Romans and applied to the entire area as “Palestine.” They are on the losing end of one of western civilization’s “shortest sticks.” For a long time, when someone was called a “Philistine,” it was an insult—a derogatory term for a boorish, classless, ill-educated person with no appreciation of life’s finer things. The French have a different word for such a person—“American.”
Were the Philistines really all that bad? Or were they a kinder, gentler nation of barbarians? Recent archaeological discoveries have softened the harsh image of the Philistines, who were among the so-called “Sea Peoples” of the Mediterranean who entered the ancient Near East in the last years of the thirteenth century BCE, destroyed the Hittite empire, and then threatened Egypt until Ramses III defeated them around 1190 BCE. At about that time, the Philistines settled on the southern coast of Canaan, in what is now the area around Gaza, the name of one of five established Philistine cities. From this coastal base, the Philistines pressed inland, coming into collision with the Israelite tribes who were spreading themselves down from the hill country toward the coast. A well-organized military force, the Philistines were a major threat to the more loosely organized Israelite tribes. Presumably from either the island of Cyprus or Crete, the Philistines left pottery that shows the influence of the early Mycenean culture. And just as many of the Israelites were attracted to the Canaanite religion, the Philistines also assimilated the local divinities. The Philistine deities, Dagon, Ashtaroth, and the notorious Baal-zebub were all related to Canaanite gods.
Did Delilah snip more than just hair?
The most famous of the Judges characters was not a “judge” at all. He wasn’t even a very good boy. Most people probably recall something about Delilah cutting off his hair—she didn’t even do it, she brought in a barber—but the story of Samson is a lot more than just Delilah’s deceitful hair-cutting skills. Samson was the product of another biblical miraculous birth. His barren mother is promised she will conceive, but the unborn Samson is pledged to God as a “nazirite,” a term for a person who has made specific vows in dedicating his life to God (laid out in Numbers 6). Nazirites could not drink wine, have any contact with dead bodies, or allow a razor to cut their hair. While Samson is still in the womb, his greatness is predicted. The vow dedicating Samson to God, and not his hair alone, is the source of Samson’s superhuman strength, first demonstrated when he kills a lion with his bare hands. This feat is one of several parallels between Samson and the Greek strongman Heracles—Hercules to the Romans—whose first act was also to kill a lion.
The story of Samson is basically a string of grudges and fights over women escalating into warfare—not unlike the story of Troy. Samson falls for a Philistine girl and marries her. At the wedding feast, Samson tells a riddle and bets that the wedding guests can’t solve it. When his bride tricks Samson into revealing the secret of the riddle, the guests win the bet, and Samson has to kill thirty men to pay off the bet. Angrily, Samson abandons his wife, who is then given to Samson’s best man! When he learns about that, Samson sets the Philistine wheat fields, olive groves, and vineyards on fire by tying burning branches to the tails of three hundred foxes tied together in pairs and setting them loose. The Philistines retaliate by burning Samson’s wife and father-in-law to death. Samson escalates this tribal grudge match by killing more Philistines. When the Philistines