Ashdod was probably the foremost city of the confederation in the time of Philistine supremacy; for it heads the list in 1 Sam. vi. 17, and it was to the temple of Dagon in Ashdod that the ark was brought after the battle of Aphek or Ebenezer (1 Sam. v. 1). Hebrew tradition recognizes the Philistines as immigrants into Canaan within historical times, like the Israelites and the Aramaeans (Amos ix. 7), but unlike the Canaanites. They came, according to Amos, from Caphtor (comp. Jer. xlvii. 4), and Deut. ii. 23 relates that the Caphtorim from Caphtor displaced an earlier race, the 'Avvim, who were not citydwellers like the Canaanites, but lived in scattered villages. The very name of Philistines probably comes from a Semitic root meaning “to wander”; the Septuagint calls them ’Αλλόφυλοι, “aliens.” The date of their immigration cannot be determined with certainty. We are scarcely entitled to take Gen. xxi., xxvi., as proving that the inhabitants of Gerar in patriarchal times were identical with the later Philistines, and the other references in the Pentateuch and Joshua are equally inconclusive. The first real sign of the presence of the Philistines is when the Danites, who in the time of Deborah were seated on the sea-coast (Judges v. 17), were compelled—obviously by the pressure of a new enemy—to seek another home far north at the base of Mount Hermon (Judges xviii.). This marks the commencement of the period of Philistine aggression, when the foreigners penetrated into the heart of the Israelite country, broke up the old hegemony of Ephraim at the battle of Ebenezer, and again at the battle of Mount Gilboa destroyed the first attempt at a kingdom of all Israel. The highest power of the Philistines was after the death of Saul, when David, who still held Ziklag, and so was still the vassal of Gath, reigned in Hebron, and the house of Saul was driven across the Jordan. But these successes were mainly due to want of union and discipline in Israel, and when David had united the tribes under a new scep⅛e the Philistines were soon humbled. After the division of the kingdom the house of Ephraim appears to have laid claim to the suzerainty over Philistia, for we twice read of a siege of the border fortress of Gibbethon by the northern Israelites (1 Kings xv. 27, xvi. 15); but the Philistines, though now put on the defensive, were able to maintain their independence. Philistia was never part of the land of Israel (2 Kings i. 3, viii. 2; Amos vi. 2), and its relations with the Hebrews were embittered by the slave trade, for which the merchants of Gaza carried on forays among the Israelite villages (Amos i. 6). On the other hand, the trading relations between Gaza and Edom (Amos, ut supf probably imply that in the 8th century Judah, which lay between the two, was open to Philistine commerce (comp. Isa. ii. 6); Judah under Uzziah had reopened the Red Sea trade, of which the Philistine ports were the natural outlet. Soon, however, all the Palestinian states fell under the great empire of Assyria, and Tiglath-Pileser, in 734 b.c., subdued the Philistines as far as Gaza. But the spirit of the race was not easily broken; they were constantly engaged in intrigues with Egypt, and had a share in every conspiracy and revolt against the great king. Of two of these revolts, first against Sargon in 711, and afterwards against Sennacherib on Sargon’s death (705), a memorial is preserved in Isa. xx., xiv. 29 sq. In the latter revolt Hezekiah of Judah was also engaged: it was to him that Padi, kinglet of Ekron and a partisan of Assyria, was delivered for custody by the rebels. In 701 Sennacherib inarched westward and reduced the rebel cities of Ascalon and Ekron; kinglets faithful to his cause were established in both places, and the territories of these Philistine princes and of those of Gaza and Ashdod were enlarged at the cost of Judah. The Philistine war of Hezekiah spoken of in 2 Kings xviii. 8 was probably undertaken to regain the lost territory after the disaster of Sennacherib’s army. Under Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal the inscriptions still speak of the cities of Philistia as governed by kinglets tributary to Assyria; and, as the power of Nineveh declined and the monarchs of Egypt began to form plans of aggrandizement in Syria, the Philistine fortresses were the first that opposed their advance. According to Herodotus (ii. 157) Psammetichus besieged Ashdod for twenty-nine years, from which we may at least conclude that the Shephelah was the scene of a protracted conflict between the two great powers. The prophecy of Zephaniah ii. 4 sq. has by some been held to point to these events; but most recent writers prefer to connect it with the invasion of the Scythians, who in the reign of Psammetichus ravaged the Phoenician coast and plundered the famous temple of Aphrodite Urania (Astarte) at Ascalon (Herod., i. 105). The next king of Egypt, Necho, also made war in the Philistine country and smote Gaza (Jer. xlvii.), an event recorded also by Herodotus, who gives to Gaza (Ghazzat, Assyrian Khaziti) the name of Cadytis (Herod., ii. 159, comp. iii. 5). Amidst all these calamities Philistia, like the other countries of Syria in the Assyrio-Babylonian period, must have lost great part of its old individuality. The Philistine towns continued to be important, and Gaza in particular became a great seat of international commerce —Herodotus estimates Cadytis as being almost as large as Sardis—but we can hardly speak further of a Philistine people. After the captivity Nehemiah speaks not of Philistines but of Ashdodites (iv. 7), speaking an “Ashdodite” dialect (xiii. 24), just as Strabo regards the Jews, the Idumeans, the Gazans, and the Ashdodites as four cognate peoples having the common characteristic of combining agriculture with commerce. In southern Philistia at least the population was modified by Arabian immigration. In the time of Cambyses the Arabs touched the sea immediately south of Gaza (Herod., iii. 5), and this perhaps had something to do with the fact that Gaza was the only Syrian city that resisted Cyrus, just as the Persian and Arab garrison of Gaza offered to Alexander the only resistance that he found on his march from Tyre to Egypt.

We have still to consider the much-vexed question of the origin of the Philistines. That they were a Semitic or at least a thoroughly Semitized people can now hardly be made matter of dispute. The short list of proper names derived from the Bible has been considerably enlarged from the Assyrian monuments, and suffices to prove that before as after the captivity their language was only dialectically different from that of the Israelites. The religion too was Semitic, and of that older type when the gods were not yet reduced to mere astral powers, but had individual types and special relations to certain animals. Thus Ekron had its local “Fly-Baal” (Baal-Zebub, 2 Kings i. 2 sqf, the fame of whose oracle in the 9th century B.c. extended as far as Samaria. The more famous Dagon, who had temples at Ashdod (1 Sam. v.; 1 Mac. x. 83) and Gaza (Judges xvi. 21 sqf, seems to have been more than a mere local deity; there was a place called Beth-Dagon in Judaea (Josh. XV. 41) and another on the borders of Asher (Josh. xix. 27). The name Dagon seems to come from JΙ, “fish,” and that his idol was half-man half-fish is pretty clear from 1 Sam. v. 4, where, however, the text is hardly sound, and we ought probably to read, omitting one of two consecutive nuns, “only his fish-part was left to him.”

There are two other views about Dagon. (1) Philo Byblius (Müller, Fr. Hist. Graec., iii. 567 sq.) makes Dagon the inventor of corn and the plough, whence he was called Ze<>s ’Apórpios. This implies an etymology of a very improbable kind from the Hebrew and Phoenician pT, “corn.” But it is probable that, at least in later times, Dagon had in place of, or in addition to, his old character that of the god who presided over agriculture; for in the last days of paganism, as we learn from Marcus Diaconus in the Life of Porphyry of Gaza (§ 19), the great god of Gaza, now known as Marna (our Lord), was regarded as the god of rains and invoked against famine. That Marna was lineally descende<l from Dagon is probable in every way, and it is therefore interesting to note that he gave oracles, that he had a circular temple, where he was sometimes worshipped by human sacrifices, that there were wells in the sacred circuit, and that there was also a place of adoration to him situated, in old Semitic fashion, outside the town. Certain “marmora” in the temple, which might not be approached, especially by women, may perhaps be connected with the threshold which the priests of Dagon would not touch with their feet (1 Sam. v. 5; Zeph. i. 9). (2) Schrader (K. A. T., 2ded., p. 181 sq.) identifies Dagon with the Assyrian god Dakan, and believes that the word is Accadian. We are here in a region of pure conjecture; the attributes of Dakan are unknown, save only that Berosus speaks of an Assyrian mermangod Ώδάκων.

To the male god Dagon answers in the Bible the female deity Ashtoreth, whose temple spoken of in 1 Sam. xxxi. 10 is probably the ancient temple at Ascalon, which Herodotus regarded as the oldest seat of the worship of Aphrodite Urania. This Ashtoreth is the Derketo of Diodorus (ii. 4) and Lucian (De Dea Syr., 14), the Atargatis of Xanthus (Fr. Hist. Grace., i. 155), whose sacred enclosure and pool were near Ascalon, and whose image had a human head, but was continued in the form of a fish. The association of Ashtoreth with sacred pools and fish was common in Syria, and the sacred doves of Ascalon mentioned by Philo (ed. Mangey, ii. 646) belong to the same worship. Of the details of Philistine religion in the Biblical period we know almost nothing. Their gods were carried into battle (2 Sam. v. 21), a usage found among other Semites; their skill in divination is alluded to in Isa. ii. 6, and we have already seen that oracles were a feature in their shrines. The whole record shows a religion characteristically Semitic in type; and it is also noteworthy that at the earliest date when the Philistines appear in history the great sanctuaries are all on the coast with deities of a marine type. This raises a presumption that the Philistines came from over the sea, and that Caphtor, their original home, was an island or maritime country. In point of fact the Philistines must have entered their later seats either by sea or from the desert between Canaan and Egypt. In the latter case they come from Egypt, for a city-building people, which supplanted a race of villagers, cannot have been a tribe of Arabs. And so the theories about the origin of the Philistines reduce themselves to two, one class of writers holding that Caphtor must be sought across the Mediterranean, another placing it in the Delta. Ancient tradition gives no help; for it takes Caphtor to be Cappadocia, led, it would seem, merely by a superficial similarity of the names. Of the two main theories the former is that which has recently found most support, and it has a definite point of attachment in the fact that the Philistines, or apart of them, are also called in the Bible Cherethites (1 Sam. xxx. 14; Ezek. xxv. 16; Zeph. ii. 5), while David’s Philistine guards are in like manner called the Cherethites and Pelethites (2 Sam. viii. 18, xv. 18, &c.). Cherethites (Krêtïm) can hardly be anything but Cretans, as the LXX. actually renders it in Ezekiel and Zephaniah, and Caphtor would thus be the island of Crete, —an identification which seems to satisfy the conditions of a reasonable hypothesis. For, though the points of contact between Crete or Cretan religion and the Philistine coast which have been sought in Greek and Latin writers (chiefly in Steph. Byzant., s.v. “Gaza ”) are very shadowy, there is no doubt that Crete had an early connexion with Phoenicia and received many Semitic inhabitants and a Semitic civilization before the Greeks gradually asserted themselves in the Aegean and forced back the tide of Semitic influence (for details, see the article Phoenicia). These facts give a reasonable explanation of the settlement on the Philistine coast within historical times of a maritime people, cognate to the Phoenicians in so many points and yet having certain distinct characters, such as would naturally be produced in a place like Crete by the grafting of a Semitic stock and culture on ruder races not Semitic (the Eteocretans). The opposite view, which places Caphtor in the Delta, rests on more complicated but less satisfactory arguments. There were certainly many Semites in the Delta of Egypt, and so long as the history of the Hyksos (who were no doubt Semites) remains in its present obscurity it is always possible to suppose that their expulsion from Egypt explains the settlement of the Philistines in Canaan. But it is very questionable if the dates will fit; the name Caphtor is connected with the Delta by no historical testimony, but only by elaborate hypotheses, as that Caphtor may mean in Egyptian Great Phoenicia, and that this again may have been a name for the Egyptian coast, where there was a large Semitic population; and the characteristic Philistine peculiarity of uncircumcision, intelligible enough on the Cretan theory, is scarcely conceivable in a race which had been long settled in Egypt. The mainstay of the Egyptian hypothesis is found in Gen. X. 13, 14,—verses which belong to the older part of the chapter (see Noah), and reckon in the very obscure list of descendants of Mizraim or Egypt “Casluhim (whence came forth Philistini) and Caphtorim.” This account places Caphtorim in some relation to Egypt, but not necessarily in a very close relation, for the Ludim, who are also made descendants of Egypt, are scarcely different from Lud or Lydia, which appears at ver. 22, in the later part of the chapter, in another connexion. But further, if the text as it stands is sound, it gives a nèw account of the origin of the Philistines, which can be reconciled with the other Biblical evidence only by making Casluhim a halting-place of the Philistines on their way from Caphtor to Canaan. Accordingly the advocates of the Egyptian theory propose to identify Casluhim with the arid district of Mount Casius on the coast of the Egyptian desert. But this is false etymology. Mount Casius is named from the temple of Jupiter Casius, that is, the well-known Semitic

God Vïp, whose name as written in Semitic letters has no possible affinity to Casluhim. And in truth the statement that the Philistines came from Casluhim, presented without a hint as to their connexion with Caphtorim, which is mentioned immediately afterwards, lies under strong suspicion of being a gloss, originally set on the margin by a copyist who meant it to refer to Caphtorim. In this case the original author will have meant Caphtorim to denote, or at least include, the Philistines (who, as they are not Canaanites, and had close relations with Egypt in historical times, fall readily enough under the Egyptian group), and tells us nothing about the origin of the race.

Literature.— Hitzig, Urgeschichte . . . der Philistäer, 1845, where the ιjow untenable hypothesis of a Pelasgic origin of the Philistines is maintained.; Ewald, Gesch. des V. Israel, i. 348 sq.; and in general the books on Hebrew history and commentaries on Gen. X. and on Amos. A useful monograph is Stark’s Gaza und die philistäische Küste, Jena, 1852. For the Assyrian evidence see especially Schrader, Keilinschriften und Altes Testament, 2d ed., Giessen, 1883. ·