From time-to-time, I teach a course in historical linguistics, which is among my favorite subjects. One of the topics we spend a fair amount of time discussing is what’s called “Sound Shift,” which describes how similar vowel and consonant sounds move around over long stretches of time. For those of you familiar with Germanic languages (including English), this is what lies behind “Grimm’s Law” (also called “Rask’s Rule”).
Historically, consonant sounds tend to move around in these groups: /g/, /k/, /h/; /d/, /t/, /th/; and /b/, /p/, /f/. This is why dent- becomes “tooth” in English (/d/ becomes /t/ and /t/ becomes /th/; the /n/ dropped out for some reason) and gen- becomes “kin” (/g/ becomes /k/), and so forth. (Apologies in advance to the specialists among our readers: I am glossing over loads of subtleties for a general audience). Some linguists call these tendencies the “secret decoder ring” for cross-language vocabulary building.
As I watched the news this weekend, a particular report on the current situation in Israel caught my eye. The reporter was based in Ashkelon. I looked at my wife and asked what century it is, remembering Judges 14:18 ff’s description of Samson’s actions in Philistine territory.
The roots of the Middle East’s conflicts are millennia deep. This is even more apparent when we realize that the biblical Philistia / Philistines have been sound-shifted over the centuries to Palestine / Palestinian. Scholars and partisans may argue about whether the term is geographical or genetic, but the reality is that the history of the region is long and complicated. What is easy is this: we should pray for peace in a region that knows little of it.
November 19th, 2012 | 1:58 pm
The Philistines (p’lishtim in biblical Hebrew) were non-Semitic migrants to what is now Gaza; they came by sea from the Greek islands. By the time of the Second Temple, they had long since disappeared. After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in the Second Century CE, the Romans sought to completely destroy Jewish culture in what had been called Judea up till then and renamed the terriroty “Palestine,” deriving the made-up name from the name of the Israelites’ long-since vanished enemies of a thousand years before, as recorded in, e.g., Judges and Samuel. Thereafter, the name “Palestine” continued to be used, and was ultimately adopted by the Arabs of the land when they became nationally conscious in response to political Zionism in the early 20th century. But there is no historical connection between the Palestinian Arabs of today and the Philistines of circa 1000 BCE. That is not to say that today’s Palestinians are not connected to the land – clearly, they are (in fact, they are probably largely of Jewish descent) – but to say that today’s Israel/Palestinian conflict is a continuation of the Israelite/Philistine conflict of 3000 years ago (the historical facts of which are quite murky, needless to say) is just silly.