Although the Bible cites Dagon as the main Philistine god, there is a stark lack of any evidence indicating the Philistines had any particular proclivity to his worship. In fact, no evidence of Dagon worship whatsoever is discernible at Philistine sites, with even theophoric names invoking the deity being unattested in the already limited corpus of known Philistine names. A further assessment of the Iron Age I finds worship of Dagon in any immediate Canaanite context, let alone one which is indisputably Philistine, as seemingly non-existent.
There’s no Philistine-based evidence for Dagon as a Philistine god. Which is kind of what you’d expect if the stories were made up years after the fact and in a completely different part of the region from the pentapolis.
There’s nothing remarkable about that - it’s similar to how the descendants of the Norman conquerors now speak a Germanic language, not the Romance one they started out with at the conquest. But that’s by slow process of intermarriage and assimilation, and even then Philistine retains some non-Canaanite elements.
Well, so’s the rest of Exodus, and the entire life of Moses and Joseph, but that didn’t stop you using that to justify your answer. Mine just happens to be the only one with an unambiguous definite time period attached.
The way Southerners learned Igbo? No, slaves generally learn the language of their masters - Africans learned English, French, Spanish, Portuguese…Dutch. Some creolization happens, but language flows with power and prestige. There are some exceptions - the Eastern Empire never took to Latin, for instance, but that’s because Greek was already the widespread prestige language of power and culture there. That would not have been the case with Hebrew in Egypt.
That region also produced a group of sailing merchant marauders, who seem to have mixed and mingled with a lot of the people along Northern Africa and the Mediterranean Islands.
Similarly, we might say that the US isn’t European heritage since there’s clearly large blocks of black, red, and yellow people beside the white (to use the medicine wheel breakout). And, likewise, we can note that our culture has inherited elements of tradition from all of these places.
But it certainly started as a group of Europeans and that has been the predominant culture. Should Tibetan culture take primacy at some point, that might change the best word to use when talking about certain points of time in US history. But that conversion to Tibetan Buddhism and Tengrism wouldn’t make the US retroactively a Tibetan-style country since its inception.
It’s plausible that Philistine might have become a more cosmopolitan culture, divorced from the other Canaanites both socially, linguistically, and ethnically as time moved forward from the Iron Age to the pre-Classic era. But the original, foundational group appears to have been a group of Canaanites. There’s no indication that there was a quick and genocidal swap over from them to a group of Tunisians, due to the actions of Moses. Both archaeology and the Bible attest to Canaanitic elements of their language and religion through the pre-Classic period.
No. The evidence - the material culture - is the other way : the foundational group was most likely from the Aegean. That’s the current scholarly consensus.
I retract what I said! Your link doesn’t do much to support its position but, yep, it looks like genetic evidence shows that the original Philistines were descended from Cretans, who were likely descended from Western Turks. Apparently, that’s a new (circa 2019) discovery.
Obviously, based on the religious and linguistic record, I’d have voted entirely opposite. Somehow, the Canaanite language and religious terms had taken over by the time the Pentateuch was being compiled. I guess they just made up the name of the king that Abraham met (no surprise, I suppose).
Sometimes, Tibet wins!
(But the other groups - Edomites, Moabites, etc. - minus competing evidence, are all still not-killed Canaanites)
I’ve also seen hypotheses that “moloch” was not the name of a god, but a type of human sacrifice, and that moloch sacrifices were being made to Yahweh in the era before the proto-Israelites stopped sacrificing their firstborn sons. (There is ample evidence in the Torah that infant sacrifice was performed at some point in the authors’ distant past.)
Indeed, it’s speculated that the character of Melchizedek, who shows up out of nowhere in Genesis in the middle of an unrelated story to give Abraham a blessing, was invented by one of the authors of the Torah because they misinterpreted a passage in Psalm 110, “you are a priest forever in the order of melech tzedek (I.e. “the righteous king")”, as a name rather than a title.
Hold it right there. Turk ethnicity was not formed until many centuries later, and anyway, the ancestors of who would one day become Turks were living in Siberia then. Communication between the Mediterranean and Siberia in 1200 BCE? Zero.
Edit, a few minutes later: You were thinking maybe of Anatolians?
There’s a fellow in Michigan who was single-handedly building a replica of Stonehenge in his back yard, using his own muscle power and no technology more advanced than the ancients could have had. IIRC (his original site is now extinct), he calculated that, using his techniques, a force of 10,000 men could have built the Great Pyramid in 30 years. Did they actually use precisely his techniques? Maybe, maybe not (there are a lot of possible techniques), but whatever techniques they used were probably roughly comparable.
Maybe mythical, maybe legendary, that is what this thread is about- and many of us us agree there may be a kernal of truth in Exodus.
Sure, and if their masters spoke Nubian- which many did- the slaves might pick up Nubian. And you are misreading my posts.
There was a recent episode of Expedition unknown, and they easily moved one of the big stones from the quarry up a mild hill with a sledge and like 20 guys. They wet the ground in front. In fact there are ancient Egyptian artworks that show them doing this.
Apparently they also moved them by boat from there to the building site.
Absent any single piece of actual archaeological evidence, just a collection of Just-So stories and a deliberate avoidance of the clear physical evidence that actually exists that shows the Israelites were indigenous Canaanites all along.
You realize the 25th dynasty was way, way later than the supposed date of Exodus, right? And in any case the Napatans were so Egyptianized they spoke … Egyptian.
Egyptians spoke Egyptian. They would have commanded their slaves in Egyptian. I’m not misreading anything.
It cites 3 different academic works spanning decades saying exactly what it is asserting. It then goes on to cite multiple channels of evidence for that assertion. I think it did enough.
Assuming you mean Anatolians by Western Turks, this is not thatrecent a discovery.
Early Iron Age Philistine religion shows strong Aegean roots, visible in cult objects, figurines, altar forms, and ritual practices that parallel Mycenaean/Minoan traditions rather than local Canaanite ones. Only later - after a few generations in the Levant - did Philistine religion become heavily Canaanized, blending local deities and practices with those imported from the Aegean world.
There are Egyptian documents about enslaving “Habiru” (or “'Apiru”) people. It’s quite controversial but I think it’s 99+% certain that the words “Habiru” and “Hebrew” are cognate. (There is specific evidence for the equivalence that doesn’t depend just on sound similarity.)
In the 15th century BC, Tuthmosis III won the Battle of Megiddo and enslaved at least 3600 Habiru.
In the 14th century BC, during the reign of Amenhotep III slaves at Avaris revolted.
In the 13th century BC, Ramesses II used Habiru for hard labor.
In the 12th century BC, more Habiru were enslaved.
Interesting how the same Afro-Asiatic root ʿ-p-r ‘dust’ also spells the name of the ʿAfar people of Djibouti/Ethiopia/Eritrea, who also speak an Afro-Asiatic language. The same root may be implicated in the origin of the name of Africa, albeit from a different part of Africa and a different branch of Afro-Asiatic.
It seems intuitively obvious to me that slaves need to learn the basics of their masters’ language. If they don’t, they are presumably disposed of and replaced with more useful slaves.
DrDeth’s point was apparently that Egypt was lousy with masters who were not Egyptian and spoke some other language. I think. I may be, what’s the word… misreading.
Well, whether or not that was true, it’s not consistent with the biblical story. The Hebrews were supposed be to laboring to build grain storage for the Pharaoh in Egyptian cities. They weren’t in the outskirts with some foreign masters, they were in the heart of Egypt.
One informative clue, perhaps, is the Book of Genesis. In that Book the Jewish people consistently refer to themselves as “the children of Israel.” But in that Book “Hebrew” is used by Egyptians as an exonym.
I was thinking of the physical location of Turkey.
Sorry, in general, I’m just not terribly fussed about ethic lineage relative to physical location, language, culture, etc. That seems to screwing me up in this conversation.
