Goliath Revisited

Historians plainly decided to poison the lives of Jews with their findings. Ariel Toaff has barely announced that he stops any further publication of his blood libel book, here comes another embarrassment, though of a minor scale. It appears now that the Philistines were no monkeys as claimed in the Bible, but possessed a refined and sophisticated culture.

In recent years, excavations in Israel established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people.

That was for warming. Now to the real hardcore stuff. It's true that after the 10th century BC the Philistines switched to using the old Hebrew script, borrowed from their Israeli neighbors. Yet, according to two Harvard researchers who led the excavations at Ashkelon, they did not arrive in Israel as illiterate savages, but as highly refined gentlemen with their own writing. In fact, their own script may be a descendant of the venerable Linear A, popular in the Aegean around 1500 B.C.:

Dr. Cross and Dr. Stager were more emphatic about the inscription painted in red on the jar fragment made from local clay.

“Perhaps it is not too bold to propose,” they wrote, “that the inscription is written in a form of Cypro-Minoan script utilized and modified by the Philistines — in short, that we are dealing with the Old Philistine script.”

Dr. Cross said in an interview that several signs in the Ashkelon inscriptions “fit in with well-known Cypro-Minoan,” in particular from artifacts recovered at sites in Cyprus and at Ugarit, in Syria.

Source

This puts the whole story in a totally different light. The Philistines did not switch to the Hebrew script because they had none of their own, but the whole thing starts rather looking as a gesture of good will and an expression of brotherly feelings towards their Hebrew neighbors.

One can only wonder what new surprises may be waiting for us when the Philistine original script is deciphered. It may come, for example, in the form of a new version of David vs Goliath story. The new version may go that Goliath indeed came forward and positioned himself in front of the Hebrew army, but, instead of challenging the enemy warriors, he addressed them with some kind of a 'love your neighbor, make peace' message, such as "Hey Hebrews. Why we just can't have a nice peace dialog with each other?" But here David appeared and shot the well intentioned Goliath with his sling, cut the head of the poor Goliath off and put an end to the whole Oslo process before it even started.

Nevertheless Israelis should not get upset by the new findings. The Hebrews too scored some good points at Ashkelon. For examples no Protocols of the Elders and other shit were found during the excavations.