Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines

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The Philistines have gone down in history as ancient Israel’s archenemy. Yet they were much more than that. We have uncovered their cities, temples, houses, weapons, tools, and pots—and, recently, remains of the Philistines themselves. Thanks to new DNA analysis, we now can answer questions about the Philistines’ origins. (Ed. note: This article contains images of human skeletal remains.)

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Footnotes

1. This article is heavily indebted to the work of Lawrence Stager and the results of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. See Lawrence E. Stager, “When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon,” BAR, March/April 1991.

2. See Trude Dothan, “What We Know About the Philistines,” BAR, July/August 1982; Seymour Gitin, “Excavating Ekron: Major Philistine City Survived by Absorbing Other Cultures,” BAR, November/December 2005; Daniel M. Master and Lawrence E. Stager, “Buy Low, Sell High: The Marketplace at Ashkelon,” BAR, January/February 2014; Aren M. Maeir and Carl S. Ehrlich, “Excavating Philistine Gath: Have We Found Goliath’s Hometown?” BAR, November/December 2001.

3. Lawrence E. Stager, “The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction,” BAR, January/February 1996.

Endnotes

1. The ceramic connections have been developed in recent times with extraordinary precision in Penelope Mountjoy, Decorated Pottery in Cyprus and Philistia in the 12th Century BC: Cypriot IIIC and Philistines IIIC, vol. 1 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2018).

2. Lawrence E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples (1185–1150 BCE),” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (New York: Facts on File, 1995), pp. 332–348; see also Assaf Yasur-Landau, The Philistines and the Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 9–33.

3. Guy D. Middleton, “Telling Stories: The Mycenaean Origins of the Philistines,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 34.1 (2015), pp. 45–65; Ido Koch, “On Philistines and Early Israelite Kings: Memories and Perceptions,” in Joachim J. Krause, Omer Sergi, and Kristin Weingart, eds., Saul, Benjamin, and the Emergence of Monarchy in Israel: Biblical and Archaeological Perspectives (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), pp. 7–14.

4. Michal Feldman et al., “Ancient DNA Sheds Light on the Genetic Origin of the Early Iron Age Philistines,” Science Advances 5 (July 2019), pp. 1–10.

5. See, e.g., Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, “Migration, Hybridization, and Resistance: Identity Dynamics in the Early Iron Age Southern Levant,” in A. Bernard Knapp and Peter van Dommelen, eds., Hybridisation and Cultural Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 257–261.

6. Shelley Wachsmann, Aegeans in the Theban Tombs (Leuven: Peeters, 1987); Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 44–49.

7. See, e.g., Homer, Iliad 1.1–25; Seymour Gitin, Trude Dothan, and Joseph Naveh, “A Royal Dedicatory Inscription from Ekron,” Israel Exploration Journal 47.1–2 (1997), p. 11.