The Genesis “Philistines”
People described as “Philistines”
inhabit part of Genesis, Judges and especially Samuel (and parallel passages in
Chronicles), and there are also various references to them in the prophetic books.
They first appear—saving the “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10—in the
patriarchal narratives in Genesis 20-21 and, more particularly, Genesis 26.
Here the contrasting agendas of historical inquiry and literary0ideological approaches
become very evident. The historian and archaeologist may well dispute the
use of the term “Philistine” for such a purportedly early period, but these
Gerarites are “Philistine” in at least one important respect. They are
frequently contrasted with their later counterparts as being peaceable and even
hospitable towards the ancestors of the Israelite people (Wenham comments
not inaptly on the “ecumenical bonhomie” between the patriarchs and the other
inhabits of Canaan [G.J. Wenham, Story as Torah: Reading the Old Testament
Ethically (OTS; Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 2000), 20]), and it is true that
they go so far as to recognize that the blessing of God is upon Abraham, and to
request a covenant pact first with Abraham and later with Isaac (At the same
time, the author of Gen. 20 may not be presenting Abimelech as being quite so
innocent as he may at first appear [cf. M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical
Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indians
University Press, 1985), 316]). On the other hand, both the Abraham and the
Isaac cycles refer to rivalry between the Hebrew ancestors and the Gerarites
over access to wells. This becomes a key issue in the rancorous exchanges
between Isaac and the Gerarites in Genesis 26, and it is here that the use of
the term “Philistine” comes properly into play. In chs. 20-21, the only
specific mention of “Philistines” is in the double reference to the “land of
the Philistines” in 21.32,34.
In point of fact, for “wells” we
might as well read “land” in ch. 26, since the historic issue of “living space”
is already in view here. When famine drives Isaac to Gerar, God tells him to “say
in this land . . . for to you and your descendants I will give all these lands”
(v. 3). Moreover, Isaac “sowed in the land, and the same year he repeated a
hundredfold” (v. 12). This is basically about territory, and the later
struggles between Israel and Philistia are anticipated in these rivalrous
dealings between the vanguard parties represented by Abraham and Isaac on the
one hand and Abimelech on the other. To make too much of the apparent “anachronism”
in the use of “Philistine” is to risk neglecting the point. Even the
twice-expressed recognition by Abimelech that God “was with” the patriarchs
underlines the rivalry theme (cf. 21.22; 26.28). A similar recognition is
attributed by Nehemiah to “all the surrounding nations” when they realized that
the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem had been achieved “with the help of our
God” (Neh. 6.16). And so on both occasions when Abimelech speaks thus and
requests a pact with the patriarchs he is accompanied by the commander-in-chief
of his army. (Robert P. Gordon, “The Ideological Foe: the
Philistines in the Old Testament,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions: Selected
Essays of Robert P. Gordon [Study for Old Testament Study Series; London:
Routledge, 2016], 158, emphasis in bold added)
