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Church of Ultimate Naked Truth
Why is Religion Special?
Theocracy? No thanks.
Should we Respect Islam?
Why do we assume that the people known as Philistines were, well, philistines? Because we only read the accounts of their enemies. Reading the Bible is not going to give us a fair picture of what these people were really like. Think about how enemies are usually portrayed. There is a natural tendency to emphasise their evil actions, their ruthlessness, their fighting prowess (if they weren't easily routed) and their cunning. Just think about how Nazi Germany is portrayed now. It is the same process. Their art is denigrated and scoffed at. Their ruthlessness and barbarity is exaggerated to the point it becomes literally a byword for uncultured savagery. Any enemy is always shown to be a ruthless bastard, a fierce fighter, a worthy opponent on the battlefield but a bit of a uncultured thug.
Think about what happens in a battle, a siege or the sacking of a port. Operas and poetry recitals are hardly to the fore, are they? Any enemy you face is going to appear a brute. And a bloke who stand six foot six will look like a giant, you'll have a thousand witnesses who will swear blind he was nine feet tall.
The impression the soldiers get of the enemy is of weapons and war chants and fighting helmets. If the enemy doesn't possess a culture with functional writing history is going to get entirely the wrong impression about them, isn't it?
| It is natural that any culture that does not possess writing is going to be given a bum deal by history. Especially when the majority of historians handling the period share the religion or feel a direct cultural connection to those who eventually defeated them. The great unfairness about this is that the Philistines did possess writing, as the Philistines were an offshoot of the Cretean culture which had some of the earliest writing ever known, but it didn't form a continuous culture, people stopped learning how to read it and so their written culture was lost to history. We can see they wrote stuff, but we can't understand what it says. |
Philistine inscription, yes it is crude, but at this is the same age as the earliest evidence of any crude written Hebrew. |
Based on archaeological evidence, one can see that the Philistines were an advanced culture, which had technological, military, and artistic superiority to their Israelite neighbors. However, the Bible depicts the Philistines in a manner that is quite different. Instead of presenting the Philistines as a cultured civilization, the Bible chooses to concentrate on the conflict between the two civilizations, as both tried to expand from their original territories. As a result, the Bible condemns the Philistines for their deeds and depicts the Philistines as a culture that is powerful, but barbaric.
The Philistines
The Anglo-Saxons characterized the Danes and Vikings as heathen savages when they had become literate, but before they were literate they were characterized as heathen savages by the Latin-enabled Romano-British. Christian historians were quick to side with the people whose hard-to-read manuscripts they were poring over because they were telling their own story and because they shared both a religion and a respect for literacy in common. It is the natural tendency for anybody to side with the narrator of a tale unless that narrator reveals himself or his culture to be uncouth beyond reason. This tendency is reinforced significantly if reading and writing is a rare skill, the mark of a cultured man. With a narrator for only one side of the conflict bias is inevitable. That is why the Vikings were shown as uncouth barbarians compared to the civilized Anglo-Saxons, whose only claims to superiority were the possession of writing and Christianity. Any observer at the time would find the two cultures to be very similar in most respects, their technology was comparable, both had mastered metal working in many metals including iron, both had the capacity to cross the sea in ships. The Vikings had a written language but it wasn't as fully developed as the one the Anglo Saxons had developed out of the Latin culture of Rome. Both peoples had comparable economic, social and political structures. To any unbiased observer neither could fairly call the other uncivilized barbarians. But that didn't stop them trying to.
If you are a Christian and therefore hostile to any of my ideas you should try thinking about the Wild West. To the invading white people the tribes of native Americans such as the Sioux and Apache have gained a reputation of being tough warriors and formidable fighters. Tomahawks, war cries, war paint and feather headdresses feature strongly in our image of them. Why? Because to people fighting them for lebensraum these things mattered. The names of their gods, the shape of their calendar, the beauty of their language, their understanding of their environment, their hunting techniques, their politics, their songs are all things that we know little or nothing about. Put yourself in the moccasins of the native Americans or Mexicans, you would know the white man for horses, hats, whiskey, rifles, that gringo song (the refrain Green Grow the Rushes-O) and women wrapped up as if they were playing pass the parcel. You wouldn't think about a culture that involved poetry, opera, building in stone and glass, steam ships, the paintings of Whistler, the exquisite illustrations of Audubon, fine cuisine, classical scholarship and cutting edge science. The people of Boston and New York knew they were living in a society with a rich culture, but the Apache just saw a bunch of heavily armed psychopaths who sat around big fires singing gibberish getting drunk and farting a lot. They looked after cattle and exchanged the cattle for cargo they didn't understand either. Cowboys didn't make whiskey or rifles or locomotives. Even their women were freighted out for them. If the Apache had won the white men would be dismissed as a hard-fighting foe with deadly weapons but no match for civilized and cultured men like themselves.
The Philistines were every bit as civilized as the Israelites. They were actually a whole era ahead in technological terms, the Israelites were technically in the Bronze Age while the Philistines had mastered iron. This explains why the Philistines defeated the Israelites so often, but the Bible always attributes Israelite defeats down to a lack of piety among his own people. The Israelites were a Bronze Age slave-owning culture with a polygamous king and a claim to have built a temple. A whole temple. Whoo-hoo. The height of civilization was a temple to make burnt offerings to their god rather than to have idols. They had got rid of most of their gods but consolidated all their superstition into worshipping a single god by killing animals and setting fire to them. Because of this, a simple difference in theology alone, they claim to be inherently superior to the other cultures around them. Monotheism, which they got as a cast-off from Egypt and one temple that isn't there any more. That's it, the only reason why people see the Israelites as superior to the Philistines. Worshipping a god who would one day, many centuries later, evolve into something you would almost have the courage to bring home to meet your parents (if they don't mind bigots) and the ability to write down their side of the story in a form of writing that didn't get lost to history.