Empire: World History - 291. Ancient Gaza: The Philistines (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Gaza is one of the oldest urban centres on Earth, and in this series we are exploring its long history. It was first referred to by Pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century BC when it was known as Ghazzati. In this episode we ask: Who were the Philistines? Why did Egyptian pharaohs put monopolies on Gazan sweet wine? And what was 'The Bronze Age Collapse'? William and Anita are joined by Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and author of How The World Made The West, to discuss the ancient history of Gaza. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunple. And we are starting a brand new series today, one which has been in the news for the last. two years. How would you put it, William? I mean, the deepest of emotions swirl around. The very concept of even discussing this. This is the most divisive subject in the world at the

moment, I think it's fair to say. There is such high emotions when talking about Gaza and Palestine and Israel, never have views on this being more polarised. Friendships have been lost. But what is important, I think, is that we all need to. to do our best to understand the long background to this story. And that has been notably absent. I haven't seen on a single TV documentary. I haven't seen on a single radio show anything that taught me about the history, the deep history of the story of Gaza. And that's what we're going to try and lay out in the series. Absolutely. So as always, on Empire, we sort of try to go back to the very, very beginning. And first of all, you know, one thing that we should all know, Gaza's one of the oldest

urban centres on planet Earth, one of the most fought over and contested spaces. We just talked about that for over 3,000 years. And it is also, just look at a map, it's the crossroads between Africa and Asia, the desert and the Mediterranean. So for millennia, because of the geographical location of this place, it's been a crucial strategic and economic hub. Once an incredibly rich port, and you might remember when we talked about the Nabatians and got really excited about that, from which spices, incense, perfumes, the things that you perhaps

know less about, wines of Asia reached Greece and Rome through Gaza. And it was also this sort of sentinel fortress guarding the best land route, leading from the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coastline all the way to Egypt. And I think one of the consistent things you see in history is that everyone wants to own this and concrete. And over the centuries, we hear the succession of aggressive foreign empires, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, and finally the British, of course, coming through and fighting here. What's the more difficult to see, I think, in the Chronicles? We always get the story of the Victors, and it's always the victors writing their version. But what we don't see so much in the Chronicles are the locals

who are living here throughout these centuries and whose DNA has remained remarkably consistent. The modern inhabitants of this land today share much the same wide mix of DNA. DNA as the groups who live here today and successive studies have shown this. When you dig up skeletons from the Bronze Age, they show still a broad similarity to the sort of thing that you're getting with the modern inhabitants of the land. So it isn't like there's been a massive, despite all these conquests, that there's been massive extinctions, if you like. In a very broad sense, the DNA is consistent over the millennia. And of course, today, as we've said, this area is still at war, the people of Gaza are now clinging on, threatened with both starvation and

expulsion. And this is a part of the world that dominates our front pages, yet we do not know this early history. And we should know it. It's absolutely crucial to understand current events, to know what preceded it in detail, going really into the minutiai so that people can understand it. And I don't think there has been in any media, anywhere in the world, a series like this. I've been looking around and searching for it, and it just hasn't been this. So I think this is the first time that people have attempted to put into broadcast form a deep dive into the history of Gaza. So look, that's what we're doing. That's what this new series is about.

I'm going to talk about the history, the inhabitants, the peoples who have passed through, and the importance of this narrow stretch of land. And, you know, as William was saying, this is obviously a deeply contested, divisive subject. And so we are treading into this with care, put it that way. We're going to try and be very careful about this. we will lay out the different views about the past. And we do this because we have the handholding of some of the top academics in the world on this region. And to start, let me welcome the new Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, Joe Quinn, author of the magnificent How the World Made the West, a 4,000-year history.

Welcome to you, Joe. Thank you. It's an honour to be here. We should say that Joe's wonderful book, How the World Made the West, has just been long-listed for the Cundle Prize for History. which is the world's grandest history prize. So we're all the luckier to have her here. Is that the one you really, really, really want? Or is that one that you really want? That's the one I've once been a finalist for. Didn't even get on the long list this time. Oh, darling. I didn't want to tap dance over your grief. But yeah, let's do that. Tippity tap. Well done, Joe.

I can't think of a nicer person to be displaced by. I feel like I'm being made the Assyrian king here. Yes, you are. And wear your crown with pride, lady. So let's first of all just situate Gaza. I mean, most people who watch the news will know where it is. But let's situate it in old biblical times, if you like. I mean, where do we place it? The city of Gaza, the wider Gaza Strip, as we now call it, is in the southern stretch of the Levantine coast. The Levant, of course, is the name that European travellers gave the region of Western Asia between the Mediterranean and Iraq. So it's literally the land of the rising sun, modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan. And the coastal plain is a kind of fairly narrow strip of flatland.

It's below the spine of highlands that run all the way down the Levant from north to south. So from Mount Lebanon, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Jerusalem, they're all part of that very mountainous terrain above the coast. And the plane is a very different world. So it's a very good farming land. It's got a pretty gentle climate. But it's also, of course, more open to attack, both from sea and land. And it is, as you said, Anita, it's this bottleneck of communications between Africa and Asia.

And Gaza itself is the southernmost port on that coast. And it does it. It marks the end point. Mediterranean end of that caravan route that's been bringing spices and incense up from Southern Arabia for millennia. The truth is that the population of the cities of the southern Levant, especially the port cities, is always going to be a mix. It would be strange if they weren't both local and non-local elements. And that's what the culture looks like too. It's interesting when Victorian and Edwardian travellers start using that word Levant

and talk about people as being Levantine, they mean actually mixed. don't they? It's one of the defining features of this region that in the late Ottoman period when British travellers are first using this word, that you have every community, every religion. And this is not just true of the 19th century when this word is coined. It's equally true of the early centuries that you write about, Joe. I think what we should say also is it's very fertile. I mean, I think a lot of us think about sand in Gaza. We hear about these tunnels which Hamas are digging through the sand. And I think many of us, particularly seeing the recent photographs of the destruction in Gaza,

assumed that it's a desert. In fact, the whole point of Gaza is it's very fertile. The Wadi Gaza has underground waters which bubble up and which for millennia have attracted migratory sea birds. It's where they stop, too, on their way in every direction. And

as we mentioned in the beginning, this is somewhere that has grown the, not just wine, but the best wine of the ancient world. Sweet wine, like the modern Chateuchat, Kemp, you know, the kind of smartest sweet wine you could possibly buy. That was what Gaza wine was. And last week, actually, I went to an exhibition, which I think, Joe, you're going to go to next week, called the Treasures of Gaza in the Institute de Mondeh Abbe in Paris. And the first

thing you see when you walk into the first hall of that exhibition are these enormous, long amphorae, which are called torpedo jars, because they do look very like torpedoes, except they're obviously ceramic. And these once held this incredibly sought-after wine that from the most ancient times, right up until about the 6th century to Anglo-Saxon times, was being exported around the entire Mediterranean and beyond to Britain because it was so very, very delicious

and the grapes there were so very, very special. Joe, can we go right back to sort of where archaeological record begins, if you like sort of 2000 to 1,500 BCE? I mean, what do we know about? the people and the place from them. Okay, so we're in the height of the Bronze Age at this point. So there's these huge inland agricultural empires that are trying to carve up the known world between them.

And I should say the known world doesn't include Europe yet because no one knows much about it and they're even less interested. But from the Garzan point of view, say around 1500 BC, you've got the Hittites ruling most of Anatolia, modern Turkey to the north. You've got the Mesopotamians, the Babylonian kings. in what's now Iraq to the east. And closest of all, so just the other side of the desert, you've got Egypt, you know,

which is at this point for 1,500 years, being an enormously powerful kingdom and empire. And then to the Levant itself is, by contrast, this region of small cities and kingdoms. A lot of cities strung along the coast, a lot of small ports, also along the rivers, along the roads, up to the mountain passes.

over to Turkey and Iraq and so on. And all these tiny little polities, might say little, little powers, they're trying to negotiate their position with and between these bigger empires that surround them. And conversely, all the kind of great kings, the big emperors, are very keen to control the Levant, precisely because it lies in between them. It's a zone of communication between them. Very important routes running through it, both by donkey and by Sam. along the coast. For these kings, controlling trade, travel and communications is probably the most

important thing. One name that comes up very early on in any discussion of the early history of Gaza are the Canaanites. They appear in the Bible. Tell us about that word because it's a sort of complicated term, isn't it? No one called themselves the Canaanites. No, exactly. So it's basically a generic external name for people who live on the Levantine coast and some of the kind of closer inland areas. So when you first come across it, the second millennia BC, it's used to mean something like brigand or barbarian or something.

Who's using it, Joe? You say... Well, the local kings, basically, because that's who we have the evidence from, you know, the documents, often they're written on their own statues of these small local kings who are talking about each other, essentially. So they use this term Canaan and talking about Canaanites

to mean kind of people who live in other parts of the Levant. Nothing very specific, maybe sort of the way that we might use a word like the Midlands or something. And then the Hebrew Bible uses it as, again, a generic term for people who are living in the whole region of the Levant, at least as far as the River Jordan. So this is the promised land. So it's not exclusive to the Bible. You have other people using this term. No, no, there's lots of other sources for it. But they're all external.

As he said, nobody actually calls themselves a Canaanite. And I think this is very common in antiquity. outsiders naturally group similar-looking and sounding people together, just for ease of comprehension, put them in a tidy box for the label on top. That's what we do with people in the past. But it doesn't actually tell us anything about the people themselves. When the Bible talks about, does it only use the word sort of Canaan or Canaanites

or does the word Gaza come in at all? Or is that a much, much later terminology that comes in? I think it would be a different kind of terminology, not necessarily later, because we do have references to Gaza, Ahazah too and so on in the Bronze Age. But I think it's more that the Bible tends to be talking about specific events and specific places. And it's more interested in, for instance, Gath, which is another ancient Philistine centre.

Oh, we're coming to that. We're coming to that because there's a great blockbuster giant of a story coming from there. I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's kind of erasing Gaza. It's just nothing very important in the Bible happens there. Now, the earliest site, Joe, that archaeologists have identified is one that was dug by an Edwardian archaeologist, the great Flinders Petri. I remember my grandfather when I was about 10 years old giving me an old Victorian or Edwardian book of Flinders Beatries 10 years excavating in Egypt. And he digs this site, Tel El Ajul and finds all sorts of early stuff, doesn't he? That's right.

Basically, this is ancient Gaza. This is Bronze Age Gaza City, effectively. Unsurprisingly, this is an enormously important port. It's selling grain, olive oil, wine for the whole region. It's also an outlook for copper from the mountains. You've got evidence in the Bronze Age site for imports from local places, Syria, Jordan, the big kingdoms, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and so on, but also Crete, mycenaean grief, huge amount of material from Cyprus, just across the water.

And you also get a lot of sophisticated jewellery. and luxury items in the living areas as well. So it's not just a sort of through port. There are people who are actually profiting from all of this, actually in the city itself. And am I right in saying, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that the first sort of archaeologically verifiable name, and even a face is that of Egyptian pharaoh Thutmos III in Gaza. Is that right?

Now, tell us about Thutmose the third, because sometimes I've heard him refer to as the Napoleon of Egypt. Now, what is that all about? Right, yeah, he's sometimes called Tuchmosis the Great or something like that. So he was this kind of brilliant pharaoh. He was a great soldier, a great general, a great strategist, but he had good training because for the first 22 years of his rule, so he rules for 45 years altogether. And what, give us the years, give us the era that we're talking about. I know I went Thutmos, which is a very Essex pronunciation in retrospect. I mean, I've heard sort of Tukmosis,

took Mose. I mean, what years are we talking about? How should I, Should I say his name? I think people worry far too much about pronunciation in the past. We don't have tape recorders, unfortunately. And you can read ancient inscriptions in a lot of different ways. So I call him tutmosis. Egyptian ones only have constants, isn't that right? Yeah, a lot of them do.

Some of them only have syllables. Yeah. End syllables are always tricky. So I think we can call him Tup Moza, Tupmosis, whatever we like. I think Tate Moses is good. Let's stick with that for this podcast. But we're talking, which years are we talking about the rule of took Moses the third. So took Moses ruling in the 15th century BC. He first becomes Pharaoh in 1479.

But the crucial thing is that he has incredible training because for the first 22 years of his reign, he's actually ruling jointly with his stepmother and aunt who's called Hatshepsut. And she's one of a very, really two female pharaohs. Oh my God, I love Hatshepsut with my whole DNA and bone marrow. She's incredible. So she was famously the one who, you know, You saw her sometimes depicted with a beard, almost like one of those clip-on beards. She also, she launches trade expeditions all the way down the Red Sea. She builds incredible things all over Egypt. She's really an extraordinary character.

So he's got 22 years with her. She dies. And then he rules alone after that. And he himself has this incredible career. So he expands both south and north. So south into Nubia and north into the Levant. We're in the 1450s, BC now. He's using Gaza as a kind of forward base, is he?

Yeah, he conquers Gaza and then it's a, yeah, a forward base would be one way to put it. And as you say, it's actually the first mention of the city of Gaza in Egyptian records, which records its conquest, unfortunately. And that's when Gaza falls under, in some kind of formal sense, Egyptian control. It's not very strong at first. They have to pay an annual tribute. There's some form of military presence there. And trade is flourishing at this time.

It's not just war, war, war. Yeah, trade continues to flourish. In general, it's very useful for the great kings that their possessions in the Levant keep up good trading contacts because that's what they're profiting from. They're skimming off, essentially the profits of trade. And I read somewhere that the pharaohs put a monopoly on this fancy gals and wine. God, you're obsessed with the wine. Well, it was a big deal.

If you're going to exposition, this was the main export. God, take it. I guess I'll learn about that when I'm. So the exhibition next week. Okay. So we have this sort of sensation of a window opening, don't we, Joe? When we get the Tell Elamana letters, suddenly it's one of those moments in ancient history when we have detailed correspondence that somehow survives.

And it survives in this case because it's written on Egyptian clay tablets which have survived. And they look, according to our lovely producer, Anushka, like big rivets. Mammoth shredded weeds. Which they do. What do they tell us, Joe? Tell us about Tel Alamara letters. What do they say about Gaza? Yeah, it's okay.

This is amazing. This is an incredible archive of letters found completely by chance by a local woman digging beside the Nile in the late 19th century. And it turns out that they are the kind of correspondence archive of the Pharaoh Akanaten. And some of his father, some of his son as well. So Tel Alamana was the capital of Akanatan. Ackan, we should say, was sometimes said to be the first monotheist, isn't he? He is sometimes said to be that. Yeah, he was certainly a very curious individual.

But he's ruling in the late 14th century. He's also, as well as his interesting cultural pursuits, he's a very serious about empire as well. He has a hot wife, Nefertiti. And he has a hot wife Nefertiti, exactly. He's a very, very interesting guy, Akinaw him. This archive, it's a real mixture. It's got a lot of letters from the other great kings of the era, the King of the Hittites, the King of the Babylonians and so on, which are kind of wonderful themselves, people complaining about not.

getting RSVPs for parties and things. Amazing. But then there are the other set, about, you know, half the correspondence, is actually from Egypt's various vassal kings in the Levant. And they're asking the king for help, asking Pharaoh for help, or reporting their own news, or quite often reporting on each other, kind of jockeying the position with the Pharaoh. And we don't actually seem to have any letters from Gaza itself, though some of them, it's not clear quite where they're from, but Gaza is mentioned. in some of these letters as Azatou. And what it seems to be,

a kind of subordinate settlement then to another local king, probably Ashkelon, which is another major port to the north. We're not sure. But there are a lot of letters, or several letters, from the King of Gath in land.

And that's going to become a very big Philistine city in the next, kind of in the Iron Age. But they're very interesting because one of them mentions a rebellion of 30 towns under the control of this King of Gath. So you get the,

The sense that cities like Gath is relatively kind of small little city kingdoms could be actually very substantial and have their own mini empires, even in this very early date. And in fact, archaeologists actually found Egyptian inscriptions at Gap from this period. So you kind of get it from both sides. And is Gaza a colony or is it semi-independent? What's its position at the time of Telaimana? Yeah, does it govern itself or do the Egyptians just tell it what to do all the time?

Well, I think what you can see over time is a sort of tightening. of control. So in the early stages, the Egyptians basically want annual tribute. They want loyalty from the local kings and leaders in the southern Levant. But by the end of the Bronze Age, so kind of the next period after the Armane letters, you can really talk, I think, in terms of an occupation, there's a network of forts to protect the caravan routes and the copper mines and so on. So by the end of the period, it's quite a fortified region. And then you get this thing, which is very much at the heart of your most recent book, How the World Made the West, which is this fascinating period. And it's a bit like a sort of archaeological version of one of those

sci-fi films where there's some terrible catastrophe and there's only a bunch of people left on Linda Smart or what's that film 30 days after or whatever. It's the archaeological equivalent to that. The Bronze Age Claps. This is a period that you write so beautifully about where we see all these empires have been building up, all with scribes, all with administrations, nice little empires of their own, the whole lot are knocked in a sort of scattering of skittles in a few years. Tell us about this. Yes, this is a period of about a century or so, around 1,200 BCE, which sees the collapse or at least severe weakening of all the great powers of the Bronze Age, so including

the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. And no one knows why. This is just one of the great mysteries of antiquity. The theories from climate crisis to political rebellion, they all have some evidence in their favour. It's probably a mixture of all sorts of things. Best take on it to my mind is Eric Klein's in his wonderful book 1177, where he says what the real problem was was the extent to which these enormous empires had come to depend on each other. We really see that in the Ammana letters. So a food shortage here or a pirate attack there could really quickly become a problem for everyone. This is also the background to, some people think, to the Homeric Trojan Wars, don't they?

And sort of the idea of Odysseus going out in his boat and going around the Mediterranean, this is all this sort of world that is in collapse with warriors, seaborne warriors, with lots of swords and shields turning up on the coast and making a mischief of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we get in the Homeric epics is a sort of look back at what people then are imagining this period was like three or four hundred years earlier. but they actually include lots of stories that have just kind of be passed down through the period. So you do get a bit of a sense of what the era was like.

And I think particularly in the Homeric ethics, you get a sense of the anxieties and fears, people who are away from home, don't know if they're ever going to get back again, don't know what's happening in their absence. And that, I think, does capture something about the world in this period. You use the word Philistine. And that, to me, just the word itself is fascinating because, you know, these days it is a pejorative for somebody who doesn't have culture, who doesn't think about things. But it is part of this story and it is the name given to a people.

Now, I'm fascinated to know who were these people because some describe them as if they're sort of warrior Vikings, others describe them as if they're plundering pirates. Who were the Philistines? Well, okay, so for this, we have to think ourselves into that era of the collapse of the Bronze Age. So Egypt hangs on longer than most of the other great kingdoms. But the Egyptian records we have from that period

suggested this is a very difficult period for them as well. There are attacks on Egypt itself, rebellions in their occupied territories, and it's in all this turmoil that we first hear of these people that the Egyptians call Pellusax, somewhere in the Levant. And they're mentioned in this inscription on the Great Temple of Ramesses III at Luxor. And it describes this coalition of foreign factions who get together to attack Egypt in year eight of his own reign. And that's the year that's now probably 1177, that's the current thinking on that, 1177 BC. And so the Pellocet are one of these communities who form this coalition. There are several others, Looker, Shurden, Chequer, and so on.

But one of these communities is called Pellocet. And the inscription defines the coalition as a whole as northerners and as foreigners. And it says they're conspiring on their islands. And it also says they've been making attacks all over the eastern Mediterranean. It's not just Egypt. And some of the individual groups, though not actually the Pellocet, are also described as coming from the sea. And that's where the modern concept of the sea peoples comes from. It's a kind of modern extension to all these people of the label that the Egyptian inscriptions gave some of them.

And now who these various communities really were, where they were from, it's very unclear. They may have been pirates of some kind. Maybe it was more of a regional political coalition. but they also turn up separately in various other documents from this era, not all of them Egyptian. So they're definitely a phenomenon that are taking up attention in this era. Now, in this inscription that we mentioned, Ramesses the third mortuary temple at Medidat, Habu in Thebes,

the capital of Upper Egypt. You actually have pictures of these invaders of Egypt, as the perspective being given in these pictures. And they wear two sorts of different sort of hats, don't they? You can see them because some of they've got feathered hairdresses. and the others have got horn helmets, like sort of Vikings and Victorian picture books. And these guys, according to the inscription of Ramesses III at Medina, Habu, are defeated by the Egyptians and scent packing. And there's a kind of very self-congratulatory inscription saying their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever.

And those who came forward together on the seas, the full flame in front of them at the Nile Mouse, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore, prostrated on the beach slain, and were made into heaps of corpses from head to tail. So that's the first time we find these Pelliset or Philistines, or the word which then evolves into Palestinians being mentioned, and they're already being massacred as corpses from head to tail in the very first description that we have them. But the important point is that despite this inscription, they don't disappear. They aren't erased from history.

They continue. And in the next half, we're going to see what the Hebrew Bible has to say about these controversial Philistines. Welcome back. So just before the break, William was telling us about how this description of a massacre of the people who we would now call Palestinians, who then were called the Philistines. So they don't disappear from the record, despite this horrific fate that meets them. And they do turn up in the Bible. And here they are described, I think Joe, right in saying, as, you know, people who live in that coastal plain, the four books of the Bible that discuss them, they don't speak about them in complementary terms at all.

I mean, they are sort of denigrated, if you like, untuted, barbaric. And that's why, I mean, when we started talking about this, you know, in that term, Philistine, it's a pejorative. Even today it's a pejorative. So let's just look at what happened in the Bible and how they ended. to biblical text. So I think there are three blocks of stories in the early books of the Old Testament that mention the Philistines. And maybe if I sort of give a precy of each one and then throw it to Joe to knock back. This is taking me right back to my early Bible classes. The monks taught me in my school. Good Catholic boy. This is what you need. Right. Go for it.

Anyway. So the first appearance is in the book of Genesis. And in Genesis chapter 21, verse 34, they talk about the patriarch Abraham residing in the land of the Philistines. So you get the impression in this verse, certainly, that the Philistines are there and Patriarch Abraham, who is obviously the father of all the three monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all look back to the patriarch Abraham. So, Joe, take us through that. How does he appear in the patriarchal early texts of the Bible? Sure.

Okay, so we're in the very earliest part of the story of the Hebrew. here. This is before the Exodus to Egypt. And Abraham is originally from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia. Modern Iraq. Yeah. So his god Yahweh persuades him to move his family west of the Jordan to what the Bible calls the land of Canaan. And it promises a land there to him and his descendants. So this is the great kind of starting point for the whole story. Then when he arrives, he finds a local king called Abimelech. And Abimelech is both called the King of Gerard in the Bible, Pacific City, quite near Gaza, and he's also called King of the Philistines. And it's actually quite the odd story. So Abraham's cover story is that his wife, Sarah, is actually his sister.

So this Philistine king believes it's safe to take her for his own. But then Abraham's God comes to the king in a dream and he explains that actually Sarah's already married and that he, the king, will die unless he restores her to Abraham and makes amends. So the king basically calls Abraham in and asked what he was playing at. And Abraham says, oh, I thought I'd find godless people here who would kill me in order to get hold of my wife. So we decided to call each other brother and sister instead, which doesn't sound like a great deal for Sarah. But there we are. He also explains that she is, in fact, his half-sister. But anyway, Abby Melech, the Philistine King, gives her back straight away as soon as he hears this. And he also gives Abraham Silver and cattle and enslaved people. And he tells him he can settle whatever he

likes in his land. So two things here. One is that Abi Malik actually comes out of the story pretty well. And the other one is that he's already there. The Philistines are already there when Abraham turns up. And that, we'll go into this later, but of course has political repercussions today and we'll go into that later. Lodge that, put a little bookmark in at that idea. Okay, so the second story. Please let me channel Sister Francesca just for a moment. Can I tell you the second story is Samson and Delilah. Samson is presented as sort of the strong man. of the Israelites and Delilah as a Philistine woman. This story has been done and redone in popular culture again and again and again. Samson's birth heralded by an angel who says he's going to be

consecrated to God from the womb and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. And that is in the Book of Judges. However, things don't go as plan, do they, Joe? What happens in the 16th chapter of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible? Yeah. So, right. So the The Israelites have now gone to Egypt, come back again, and the Philistines are still there when they get back. Samson is the last of these Israelite judges or kind of generals before the Israelites have kings. And he's famously strong, right? He can slay a lion with his bare hands. He massacres an entire Philistine army with the jawbone of a donkey. As often, the story's really quite weird because Samson isn't doing this as part of a religious crusade.

He isn't really doing it on behalf of the Israelites. He's doing it as a kind of personal campaign against people he thinks have insulted him, usually in the area of women. And so he's not a very heroic figure in the Bible. But crucially, he has this incredible strength, and it depends on this vow that he's taken, or his parents have taken, to the Hebrew God, never to cut his hair. And then, this is the story, he falls for this Philistine woman, Delilah, and with the help of a bride. from some local Philistine officials. She works out what his secret is. She gets a servant to cut his hair off while he's asleep.

And then she turns him over to the Philistine officials. And now they've got no problem gouging his eyes out. Hence the phrase, I listen, Gaza. Yeah. I mean, the foolish thing they do, if they leave it at that. And they then sort of put him in prison. They put him to work actually in Gaza in the city of Gaza. They sent him to Gaza and put him to work milling grain for them there.

And of course his hair begins to grow again. So one day they take him out to their teeth. temple, the temple of their god Dagon, and they want to make him dance for the Philistines, which he does, you know, he's humiliated, but then he leans against a pillar as if he needs it for support because he's so weak now, and then he pulls the entire temple down on himself and his tormentors. And it's the equivalent of a kind of suicide bombing, effectively. But he, again, he doesn't seem to be motivated by religion, I mean, very much by revenge at this point. And more generally, at this point in the Bible, the relations between the invading Israelites, the local Philistines

are definitely on the downturn. Right. And it gets worse because the third story, again, very famous story that's been retold and told a million times there are pictures and operas and so on about this is the story of David and Goliath. Michelangelo statues. He's been done again and again. He's on aprons.

Frich magnets. Remind us of the story of David and. Goliath, William. So David Goliath is the story that Goliath, who's from Gath, which is this town that Joe mentioned earlier, which is this big Philistine city, on the border with the Israel. Israelites are up in the hills in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and Gath is the nearest sort of Philistine stronghold to them. And there's a whole lot of stuff which goes on. First of all, there's the Battle of Ebenezer, which is sometimes said to take around 1050 BC when the Philistines' crush the Israelites, destroy their capital at Shiloh, and capture the Ark of the Covenant,

the sacred symbol of Yahweh and the Israelites' most sacred object, which of course is what the first Indiana Jones movie was all about trying to re-find the Ark of the Covenant. Anyway, it's carried off to another Fandestine city called Ashdod by Goliath, and Goliath is the Philistines' massive champion. He's got armor. He's this big, strong guy. The Philistines advance into the hill country, and the Israelites produce a military commander, Saul, but he's afraid to do battle, and it's at this point that David appears. And David has a slingshot. He's just a little boy. He's a shepherd boy. And he takes these smooth pebbles and takes on Goliath single-handed. And he puts a slingshot straight between his eyes. And that's the end of Goliath.

This was the origin of the smote for me, you know, the five smooth pebbles from the brook. And then he smote him. What do we take away from this, Joe? A couple of things. So one of the things is that Goliath, I mean, he's not so much a bad man. He's just very tall and not an Israelite. And it is this interesting thing that often the detail of the Bible stories is much less kind of black and white and binary than the way that sort of people remember it. The idea of the Philistine is totally uncultured and so on. I mean, that doesn't come out of a sort of detailed, nuanced reading of all the stories in the Bible about Philistines. That's a general kind of big, broad, paintbrush idea. And that's a kind of shame in a way because some of the detail is great. And the story

of David and Goliath, I think one of the things that's really interesting here is that it's set up as an epic conflict. But we have to remember this is all very local. It's fewer than 50 kilometres from Gath, which is the hometown of Goliath to Jerusalem, where David later rules as king. And of course, it's in the nature of the Hebrew Bible to big up the events concerned, particularly big up its own heroes and so on. But this is all, this is local social drama, really. I mean, if it was on TV now, we're looking sort of call the midwife kind of scale. I mean, did the stories check out archaeologically as well? Can you look at the archaeological record and say, oh yeah, no, I mean, look, we know that there was this place in Ashdod. We know that Ash Glon was like, I mean, can you place

the story in the real historic record? Yeah, you usually can. So, I mean, the Bible's a big, sprawling collection of all sorts of different things, right? There's poems, there's stories, there's legal text, there's archival things, and it's all relating to the past and present of the Israelite kingdoms. And the present is probably in the 7th or 6th century BCE when it's all being kind of collated. That's very controversial, but that's a less controversial view than some. And the thing about the historical part is they aren't supposed to be a scholarly history, but they're a kind of origin story, like stories of the Trojan War or stories of King Arthur. in Britain. It's a way of explaining the way we live. And it's not science fiction. So these

cities really did exist. It's based on real places. It's written in the real places. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel really existed. The Philistine five Philistine cities it talks about really exist. Even some of the individuals turn up in inscriptions for the right period and so on. David's finally turned up, hasn't they? The people were looking for him for years and now definitely unequivocally he was a historical character. The House of David. The House of David. Yeah. The House of David. Yeah. I think the way to look at it is, you know, King Solomon may have existed. We don't know. But he probably didn't live with 700 wives and 300 concubines. There's this bigger sense in which it sets up for the storytelling aspect. It sets up these dichotomies between large groups, you know, us, the Israelites, them, the Philistines and so on. That doesn't necessarily reflect the way people actually living in the era it's talking about, you know, four or five hundred years beforehand, actually sort of. what was going on. Yeah.

I mean, look, this entire era that we're living in is one of febrile contest and argument. And even the archaeological record is hotly debated at the moment. So there was a recent controversial report that said Philistines were foreigners. They weren't people of the land, that they were from Greece. It was tweeted, I think, by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then it was critiqued by Israeli archaeologists. He said, no, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, what do we know is fact and what has developed as noise over whether they were people of the land or people who came from the Aegean to the land?

This is what we'd love you to clarify, Joe, because there's quite a lot of early accounts, particularly from the kind of 1950s and 1960s, which assume that the Philistines are from the Aegean. And you see a lot of that. You do not believe that. Do you think that they are local? Really, what the Bible says, too, quite clearly. I don't know where they're from, personally. I don't think we've got enough evidence to say that they aren't local, or indeed that they aren't not local. I think it's very interesting the way that modern scholars have persisted for a long time, a lot of modern scholars,

in seeing these Philistines or Pellaset as sea peoples, which is what they're almost but not quite called in the Egyptian sources, and seeing them as outsiders. But this idea really, it comes from the late 19th century. It's this theory of the Philistines as invaders or perhaps refugees from usually the Aegean, but from somewhere north. Tied up sometimes to the Trojan War in some early Victoria. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's all coming out of this era when a lot of Europeans are very concerned about the threat of invasion. We're basically talking about the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. We're talking about the years leading up to the First World War. So this is not an unreasonable...

thing to be preoccupied with. It sort of seeps in to the way they see the ancient world. From what we know about these people from contemporary sources, which are of course, you know, very, very scarce. Some of them may have been from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. So there's a group called the Looker, which are very plausibly associated with Lissia in southern Turkey, for example. Others might have been in the Levant all along. They might have been returning home from perhaps trading or piratical careers that did work out so well during the collapse of the Bronzo. when trading kind of collapses as well. Some of them are definitely on the Levantine coast in sources from the 14th century.

We don't have that for the Pellocet themselves. Ramesses inscription, the one we were talking about, that doesn't only describe a sea battle between the Egyptians and these invaders. It also talks about a land battle against people which do include the Pellisette in a place called Jahi, which is another Egyptian word for the Levant. And that's got illustrations too, and it shows warriors, but it also shows their families in Oxdrawn wagons. So it suggests a kind of revenge attack on people in their own homes

because they're not going to be taking their families on an invasion campaign with them. So there's all sorts of suggestions that they are at least by the 12th century. Some of these Pellocet or Philistines are in the Levant. Can I ask you, though, with all that nuance and all of that, you know, so couching it and we still have so much yet to know. Can we say, though, in this period, the late bronzy? that you have an Israelite identity and a Palisette, Palestinian, Philistine identity,

that these are crystallising at that time. Well, what you can say is that along with the collapse of the Bronze Age, collapse of Bronze Age power, you get this incredible proliferation of new polities and peoples and identities and so on all across the Levant. It's not just Philistines and Israelites, it's also Ammonites, Edomites, all sorts of things. And another problem is that we often don't have people's own words for the way they see themselves from this early period. We never have that for the Philistines.

So you have to look for clues that people are forming some form of communal identity or affiliation. And one possibility in terms of the Philistines is that the archaeology shows that the Philistine sites tend to have quite a large proportion of pig bones. Pork is very popular in a lot of these sites. And perhaps that's just a fashion. That's just a preference. One of the theories is that that actually shows people distinguishing themselves from their next-door neighbors. In this case, the Israelites. And of course, traditionally, pork is prescribed in the Israelite tradition and doesn't turn up to any extent in the archaeology.

So I think there you can maybe see some people who are saying, we are not like our neighbors. What they are positively considering themselves to be is really, hard to say. And in general, in antiquity, most people identify on the level, on a much smaller level than we would consider today. So the city, their clan, maybe a particular god, who only belongs to a small group of people and so on. So it's a problem for sort of looking back at the ancient history of what we would now call ethnic groups. Let's move on to the biggest excavation of a forest site, which is Gath, which is the home of Goliath. And two interesting things seem to have come out lately from what I've read in the Israeli newspapers.

Well, first of all, they seem to take a lot of hallucinetics, which is one thing. How do they find that out? I'm just, I'm just intrigued. How do they know that? Because the botany survives in the archaeological record. You've got these hallucinics, which have been turning up. But the other thing, which is very clear in the recent excavations at Gath is that Gath is a lot bigger than anything that's going on up in Jerusalem. So while we have this very full Israelite point of view given in successive books of the Bible,

all of which are not only surviving, but in every language of the world for centuries, the Philistines who have left very little writing or almost no writing, have bigger cities, and actually contrary to their reputation of being Philistine, are actually quite sophisticated. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Gaff is a very kind of big metropolis. It's about four times larger than contemporary Jerusalem. It's the largest Philistine city that we know.

And it goes back to the Bronze Age. So again, the city, wherever the Philistines came from, the city they're living in then, is an old Bronze Age city. It's got lots of this new Greek and Cypriot-style pottery we've been talking about. It's got very substantial fortifications, monumental gates, a lot of olive oil production in the city. And one thing that's really interesting is there's a lot of evidence for exchange with the Judean kingdom and with Jerusalem itself.

So Gath is on the road from the port to Ashkelon up to Jerusalem. And so any fish or that kind of thing that's being imported in Jerusalem is coming through Gap. So relations, you know, obviously the Bible's going to concentrate on the exciting bits of the story and the conflict and so on. But there's also this sort of day-to-day story where, you know, these people are trading partners. But you mentioned conflict. And at the end, at the top layers of the archaeology of Gath, we get this line. of black charcoal, of burning. And that's what we're going to be dealing with in the next episode,

where Joe is going to be coming back and telling us about what happened to these Philistine cities, because things get a bit darker in the next centuries to come, as if it's not dark enough already. A lot of smiting going on. And if you can't wait for the next episode, that's fine. You don't have to. Just join the club. Empowerpoduk.com is where we are.

Empowerpoduk. com and you can hear Joe's next episode immediately at your convenience walking the dog doing the washing up and it keeps us going if you like what we're doing keeps the lights on it's true so till the next time we meet it's goodbye from me anita arnon and goodbye from me william durampal