b. The Background, from Extra-Biblical Sources
1. Origins. While ancient Near-Eastern sources
enrich several aspects of our knowledge of the Philistines, nothing very
positive or convincing can yet be offered on the Casluhim.3 However,
Caphtor can now be definitively
identified with Crete, and so the Caphtorim as Cretans.
The name ‘Caphtor’ recurs in cuneiform
documents as Kaptara, and is identifiable with Egyptian Keftiu. People from
Keftiu are represented in tomb-chapels at Thebes of the fifteenth century B.C.;
those paintings that are demonstrably first-hand representations clearly depict
the same people as feature in the frescoes at Knossos in Minoan Crete, and
correspond to what is known of Minoans and Mycenaeans alike. A Theban
topographical list of Amenophis III (c. 1400 B.C.) demonstrates textually just
what the Egyptians understood by Keftiu. Two names on the right side—Keftiu and
Tanayu—define the area(s) of the thirteen surviving names on the left side.
Tanayu itself best corresponds to the Greek Danaoi, used of Greeks in the
Argolid and soon more widely.
The correspondence between Crete
plus the Argolid and Aegean and the twelve names legible out of thirteen can be
tabulated as follows.
Keftiu (Crete) Tanayu (Danaoi)
1. Amnisos (i) 4. Mycenae
2. Phaistos (??) 5. Dqis = ?
3. Cydonia 6. Messenia
10. Knossos 7. Nauplia
11. Amnisos (ii) 8. Cythera
12. Lyktos 9. Wilia (Ilios ??)
This table speaks for itself.
Four names (one duplicated), perhaps five, clearly belong in Crete. Cythera
leads one to the mainland, especially the Argolid, with three clearly
identifiable names. Troy remains an alluring if doubtful possibility from
further north.
Thus, if the Philistines reached
Canaan from Caphtor, they did so from Crete—as did the Caphtorim of Deuteronomy
2: 23. In turn, the Cherethites (Kreti) can be ‘Cretans’ without qualms. Beyond
Crete, the further origins of the Philistines are less clear. Ramesses III of
Egypt (c. 1190 B.C.) includes them (Prst) among ‘the foreign countries making a
conspiracy in their isles’, who came east and south through Syria to Egypt. The
‘isles’, again, are Crete and the Aegean basin. Hints in this general direction
come from the limited evidence for ‘Philistine language’ having possible
affinities with west-Anatolian languages (see below), and the often- suggested
identification of Philistines and ‘Pelasgoi’, which latter are associated with
western Asia Minor and Greece in some strands of the confused Greek traditions.
Further one cannot go. (Kenneth A. Kitchen, “The Philistines,” in Peoples of
Old Testament Times, ed. D. J. Wiseman [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 54,
56)
