Roots--land names

Randall Buth ButhFam at compuserve.com
Sun Jan 7 16:41:16 EST 2001


shalom,

>The word Philistine means "belonging to [the land of] Palestina. Palestine
>was named after one of the tribes of the Sea Peoples called the PRST
>(through an orthographic change this would be changed to PLST) who settled
>in that area/the Sea Peoples came from Crete and tried to settle in Egypt
>but were repelled by Ramesses III ca. 1190 B. C. They then settled along
the
>coast of what today is called Palestine.

Maybe 'belonging to [the land/tribe] of Philistia' would be more accurate.
(i.e. Palestine is/was not Philistia, see below.)

With questions on etymology and historical roots
I suppose one should add a note on Greek and potential anachronisms.

While some Greek writers did occasionally refer to the coast of
Kana`an/Yehud/Israel/Ioudaia with variants of Philistia, 
the name PALESTINA only entered the country lists in 135 AD/CE as a Roman
renaming of the province of Judea after the BarKosiba rebellion. 

In line with this, you will notice that in NT (=1st century Greek) only two
names are used:
Judea  (Lk 3.1) and
'land of Israel'(Mt2.21, 10.23?).
Which is of some anecdotal interest for the list.

For more infomation, a fairly extensive article on the Greek names for
Philistia and Israel was written by Louis Feldman in the early 1990s.

Randall Buth
Chair, Hebrew Language
Jerusalem University College
Buth at jerusalemschool.org



More information about the B-Greek mailing list