The Sea Peoples and Bronze Age Collapse
The Bible does not name them as the Sea Peoples. It names them as the Philistines, and one chapter says, almost in passing, that they came out of Caphtor — Crete. The book of Amos, eight centuries later, would still…
Biblical Narrative
The Bible does not name them as the Sea Peoples. It names them as the Philistines, and one chapter says, almost in passing, that they came out of Caphtor — Crete. The book of Amos, eight centuries later, would still remember it: 'Have I not brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?' (Amos 9:7). The God of Israel, the prophet insists, is also the God who moves Philistines from islands. The migration that other ancient sources describe as catastrophe, the Hebrew Bible remembers as one of many divinely-directed peoplings of Canaan.
By the time the Israelites settle in the highlands, the Philistines are already on the coast — five city-states arranged in a pentapolis: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. They are the chief antagonists of the era of Judges and the early monarchy. They have iron when Israel does not (1 Samuel 13:19-22). They have a champion who stands nine cubits tall and dares Israel's army at the Valley of Elah. They capture the Ark of the Covenant at Eben-ezer, place it in the temple of their grain-god Dagon, and find their idol shattered before it. They are the foreign neighbor who shapes Israel's first kings: Saul dies fighting them on Mount Gilboa; David wins his name killing their giant.
The biblical tradition is unusually candid about the Philistines' technological superiority. 'Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel,' the chronicler says of the days of Saul, 'for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears.' Israel must come down to the Philistines to sharpen plowshares and mattocks. This is the Israel that emerges from the wilderness: technologically poorer, militarily outclassed, hemmed against the foothills by a confederation of five wealthy coastal cities whose names will, by simple irony of language, give the land itself its eventual Greco-Roman name — Palestina.
What the Bible does not tell, but what the world around the Bible was reeling from, is that the Philistines themselves were refugees. They had not always lived on the coast of Canaan. They had arrived there in a storm, in the same storm that ended the Bronze Age civilizations, and the world that the Israelites entered was a world that had just been broken.
Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?Amos 9:7
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Around 1177 BCE — a date that historian Eric Cline has made famous as 'the year civilization collapsed' — the Late Bronze Age international system fell apart. Within a window of perhaps fifty years (c. 1200-1150 BCE) the Hittite Empire vanished, the great Syrian port city of Ugarit was burned and never reoccupied, the Mycenaean palace civilization of Greece collapsed, Cypriot cities were destroyed and rebuilt, and Egypt was left fighting for its life. The cause was not a single event but a cascade: drought, earthquake-storms in the eastern Mediterranean, internal rebellions, the breakdown of the trade networks that had tied palace economies together — and into that vacuum, mass movements of peoples by sea and land.
These migrant groups are recorded in Egyptian inscriptions as 'the foreign peoples of the sea' — what modern scholarship calls the Sea Peoples. They are named in two great battle-reliefs at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III: in the eighth year of his reign (c. 1177 BCE) Ramesses III turned them back from the Nile Delta in a combined land and sea battle, and his scribes recorded the names of nine groups — the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh, and others. Among them, almost certainly, were the people the Bible calls Philistines: Peleset becomes P'lishtim by regular Semitic phonology.
The archaeology of the Pentapolis is decisive. Excavations at Ekron (Tell Miqne, by Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin), Ashkelon (by Lawrence Stager), Ashdod, and Gath (Tell es-Safi, by Aren Maeir) have revealed an early Iron I horizon dated c. 1175 BCE in which a sharply non-Levantine material culture suddenly appears: locally-made Mycenaean IIIC:1b pottery (a hallmark of Aegean style), megaron-style hearth buildings, distinctively Aegean-form loom-weights, abundant pig and dog bones (foods unknown in highland Israelite sites), and significant consumption of imported wine. The Philistines are, by every measure, an Aegean diaspora that crash-landed on the Levantine coast in the chaos.
The collapse and the migrations together created the geopolitical vacuum into which Israel emerged. With the Egyptian empire withdrawing from Canaan, the Hittite empire gone, and the great Bronze Age city-states destroyed or weakened, small new polities — Israel in the highlands, Philistia on the coast, Aramean kingdoms in the north, Phoenician cities surviving on the coast — could form for the first time in centuries. The Iron Age I world is the world after the catastrophe; the Bible's narrative of Israel's emergence is, archaeologically, a story set in the ruins.
It was not just the end of the Bronze Age. It was the end of an interconnected, cosmopolitan world: a globalization that took thirteen hundred years to build collapsed in less than a century, leaving behind the smaller, more fragmented, more local Iron Age in which the biblical Israel could emerge.Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014)