well, in a way he mentions the philistines, since the greek palaistine comes from various egyptian (peleset), hebrew (peleshet), and assyrian (palashtu/pilistu) words all meaning "land of the philistines."  most english bibles translate the hebrew peleshet as "philistia," but it's the same exact word as "palestine" comes from.

sorry, i'm not quite sure what you mean here.  strictly speaking, "palestinians" and "philistines" are basically just two different english transliterations of the same ancient word.  that's all i'm saying.  i'm not arguing that the philistines actually existed nor that the LXX or the masoretic texts are "reliable" in any historical sense.  truth be told, herodotus isn't very "reliable" in any historical sense--not by our standards, anyhow.  all i'm saying is that by using the greek palaistine, herodotus seems to take it for granted that the philistines existed, or at least didn't bother to question it.

i also don't see how you can make an argument that hebrew was based to any significant degree on greek, since the two languages have remarkably different grammars (i studied both as part of my religion and classical studies majors in college).  i'd be willing to consider phoenician as a common (though tenuous) link between the two.  and of course biblical hebrew is a liturgical language.  humans have always invented liturgical languages.  medieval church latin was never spoken by the majority of european christendom, the sanskrit of the vedas was passed over by the hindu population in favor of dialects like bengali and pali, classical arabic is derived almost exclusively from the quran, and everybody knows only the amish attempt to use king james english.  sacred language is a necessary part of humanity's concept of the sacred in general (i think eliade would be with me on this one), but that doesn't just automatically negate the historical significance of those words.

We find Philistine in the Greek Septuagint which means they were two different words to the Greeks and therefore the English also uses two different words. As our only original sources of the two words are Greek we cannot accuse them of confusing themselves.

Regardless of his reliability unless he was an impish Galifrayan he did not choose a name from 2400 years in his future just to upset Zionists. I am only reciting his usage of the name. Either it was their name or at least the Greek version of their name or a time traveler revealed it. The usual claim is that Palestine was a name invented by the Romans in 135AD. That is obviously nonsense betraying a remarkable lack of academic knowledge of the region or deliberate deception, i.e. lying, propaganda, isreality.

As he makes no mention of the GREEK name Philistine found in the Septuagint he cannot be doing that.

Hebrew is Greek, Joseph Yehuda, Beckett Publications, Oxford, 1982. Preface Saul Levin. I found it for downloading with a google search as a scan of the book not as a text.

It is hardly my idea. I simply note there is no Hebrew before the Masoretic save in some Dead Sea Scrolls and in both cases they are written using Aramaic script. All other inscriptions found in bibleland use Phoenician script and with the present dating of the Amarna letters they are in Aramaic. There are not enough inscriptions of a sufficient length in either script to establish there was ever an independent Hebrew language in the region. Yet is shows up in liturgical usage after centuries of Greek rule in a region where the people speak Aramaic.

And? Obviously this hebrew has many Greek elements even down to the definite articles being Ho and Ha and no indefinite articles. Factually no archaeologist has found the least indication of a propserous literate culture around Jerusalem prior to the arrival of the Greeks so obviously they did not write down these stories and obviously such a backwards culture is not going to invent Greek literary forms before the Greeks invent them nor is the "old testament" credited with the invention of Greek literary forms. I have another article posted here on anachronisms going into this a greater detail.

Nony, I'm not anti-palestinian.  I'm not anti-anything, actually. I know what Philistine means, and it is not... terribly flattering, but it certainly doesn't mean "inferior person". (I've never been all that fond of art museums myself, and culture, to me means "what other people enjoy&quot

I do not wish to give the impression I know more than I do. I do not read Greek much beyond my knowledge of scientific terminology. However I have been through as many translations as I can find of sources in Greek which mention Philistines and it is always Philistine.

Let me first point out there are in fact only two sources, the Septuagint and Antiquities by Josephus and the latter is clearly drawing upon the Septuagint (and stories which are not currently known as part of it) for his material.

I have not found the text in Greek and then tracked down the actual Greek word used for Philistine to verify it. However given the number of sources I have checked, some before Zionism was invented, I would have to assume there has been an incredible conspiracy to always render Palestine and Phlistine into English. Eventually I will find a Greek text and verify this beyond question but at the moment I think it is beyond a reasonable doubt.

BTW: Aphrodite is Aphord eye t ee, so it is also Philist eye n ee similarly Palest eye n ee

220 AD is after the DSS in "hebrew" but both are written using Aramaic script, as does modern Israel, 2nd c. BC is the time frame the Septuagint stories would start to be created so finding a part of it is hardly surprising but I am unfamiliar with so I will have to get back to you. I always appreciate leads to what I have not found.

I have no problem with an absense of vowels in a phonetic language. I think it is given way too much importance. One only needs have the same word pronounced all around just Britain too see how worthless spelling out vowels is. The same word all over the English speaking world including all over the US only makes the problem more obvious. Adding vowels is only for agreement on the written word not on the spoken word.

The book I suggested is exhaustive in listing Greek prefixes as Hebrew suffixes and things like that. Many "hebrew" words are little more than Greek words spelled backwards or written left to right but read right to left however you would like to express it. I am not a linguist. The author is an interested amateur. The preface is written by a linguist who obviously recommends the book.

But the bottom line is there is no evidence "hebrew" was ever a spoken language. When the Judeans appear in history they are speaking Aramaic. Their "sacred" texts are written using Aramaic script. The inscriptions found in the region, including the mentions of Yahweh and his Ashara are in Phoenician script. There are simply not enough non-biblical samples to establish an independent "hebrew" language outside of liturgical writings and all of those date from after the Septuagint.

In all literate societies the most common written material is contracts and agreements. Next is government decrees and least common is religious. In bibleland nothing must is found prior to the Greeks and even after the Greeks, are we to believe the only significant work to survive is religious? It is easy to say YES if one is religious. Atheists have a real problem with divine intervention.

One can speculate, choose to believe, in favor of any religious tradition but that is not rational. There is no evidence of any Hebrew ever much less a proto version. There is also no evidence for any babylonian captivity either. One of these days I will get around to writing a single article exposing the nonsense all four supposed bits of evidence for it.

In that matter of linquistics there is the problem. Greek is an Aryan or post WWII Indo-European language whereas Hebrew is supposedly a Semitic language. The mixture of the two is more like pidgin Greek or pidgin Aramaic put into written form. I have come across explicit statements that before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered it was widely believed Hebrew was in invented liturgical language. And still beyond a few letters written in it, the DSS are all liturgical.

It is also fairly well known that the sum total of the different words in pre-modern Hebrew had only about 1/3 the number of different words needed for a functioning language. The first thing the Zionists had to do was invent the other 2/3rds of the words before inventing the words to cover the advances in civilization since the 1st c. Imagine a language without the word for lightning but only thunder or maybe vice versa, it has been a while.

I find it important to make a point of no evidence of any captivity as it is little more than hand waving to explain the sudden literacy and Zoroastrian influence resulting in the imaginary creation of the Old Testament and monotheism. The reality is this entire babylon thing is just the believers in retreat trying to salvage what they can from the discrediting of the all the bible stories prior to the supposed captivity. "Well... all the previous was bullshit but after this point it is completely true!" Sorry but is it all nonsensical. It is trying to salvage as much as possible after giving up the giggley parts even though there is NO evidence for what they are trying to salvage.

As above, absent any evidence Hebrew was ever a spoken language it is at best a pidgin language committed to writing.

well, maybe not compelling evidence.  there is jesus's utterance on the cross which is given in hebrew in matthew and in aramaic in mark.  the hebrew was obviously written to connect it to psalm 22, so we can dismiss the idea that jesus was making conversation.  then there is the passage in the talmud that says that rabbi judah hanasi, who compiled the mishnah in 220, only ever spoke hebrew, along with his entire household, including the maids.  it was definitely a language of the religious elite, but even if we take it for granted that there are strong connections with greek (once again, after having worked with both languages, i don't, but i acknowledge there are at least a few scholars who do), that's still no hard evidence that the language didn't develop organically.  in the end, the idea that hebrew was formed artificially by some mysterious group of elites based on koine greek is at least as speculative as the idea of a hypothetical spoken proto-hebrew.

i agree with you, just as there are no classical arabic inscriptions predating the quran.  that doesn't automatically mean the language was invented by muhammad, nor does it mean that no form of arabic was spoken before the quran was written.  along the same lines, the fact that we have no examples of "biblical" hebrew predating the second century C.E. does not automatically mean a group of rabbis pulled it out of thin air.

if your only argument, however, is that hebrew would not have been spoken by the "israelites" of the hebrew bible, whoever they were and wherever they came from, then yes, i agree with you.  i also say that's nothing new or shocking to most bible scholars who aren't bound by a religious agenda.

correction, there is no extra-biblical evidence.  if you consider the bible completely worthless as any kind of historical evidence, fair enough, but i would say that in itself is an irrational prejudice, especially considering it's unlikey the babylonians would have bothered trumpeting their conquest of such an insignificant people anyway. 

it's hardly fair to take it for granted that a people cannot be trusted at all to know where they came from.  if we follow this logic, we have to discount everything that historians at least tentatively accept about the ancient histories of almost all peoples, especially peoples who were not empire-builders.  in the ancient world, almost all peoples recorded their origins either in scripture or epic poetry.  of course such evidence is suspect, but until any contrary evidence is found, it is the only evidence we have.  even archeological evidence, which is lauded so universally, is usually interpreted in the light of this kind of evidence.  

but if you want to throw out everything the jews say about themselves, fair enough.  precisely where do you propose they came from, and what is your evidence? 

Quotes from a gospel? The first mention of a gospel is from around 120AD and the first mention of four of them in by inference from a word used from about 180AD. As the gospels themselves are not a credible source it is not reasonable to create arguments based upon them. The gospels are in the same category as the Septuagint. No one knows who created them, when they were created or why they were created. We can guess but there is no evidence. All we know about all of them is from religious traditions about them and those traditions do not have who, when or why answers either. Fully realizing all of it is baseless and starting over is the only credible approach to discussing them.

We know by about the 1st c. AD the Septuagint had been translated into the Hebrew as most of the books are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. One can take the incomprehensibility of the "hebrew" in some of the books as an indication the language was still developing.

As to the claim of some rabbi adopting a liturgical language full time is rather extreme but those folks were always religious fanatics. It appears an essential job skill.

It appears to me from the evidence Arabic spread with Islam and that it was other than a local language of east shore of the Red Sea is not in evidence. That it spread to all that WE CALL Arabia is about as likely as we know it spread to North Africa. What we call Arabia is Arabia Deserta which by our is implicitely all of Arabia. It was not all considered A. Deserta back then. Even today, were it not for present day political boundaries the east coast of Arabia should really be considered part of Persia.

As there is no evidence any Israelites or Hebrews ever existed that first sentence cannot be said. We know only that the bible stories first appear in Greek in the Septuagint talking about people and events for which there is no evidence. With that there is no way to distinguish the stories from tales of the Land of Oz or Atlantis.

As I see it these bible scholars are more like Star Trek fans who who rationalize the discrepencies and contradictions in the original series save they pretend they are not working with a poorly editted collection of fiction.

Until there are archaeological confirmation of the bible stories they are worthless as history. On top of that much of what has been discovered makes the bible stories impossible. One has to face the reality and deal with it as is.

Consider Egypt and the huge quantity of archaeological evidence. When they find an inscription it is reasonably taken as regarding the people who built the buildings. When it comes to bibleland there is not one single thing found which suggests anything like the civilization described in the bible stories and quite often finds make the stories impossible.

It is not prejudice on my part. It is dealing with reality. It would be fascinating to actually find a modest civilization in bibleland which could have "aggrandized" itself into the bible stories but not even that has been found. Percentagewise bibleland is the most dug place in the world as all civil construction counts as a dig when nothing is uncovered. Think what it would be like to find a civil recounting of these stories -- Solomon gripiong about warring priests for example.

Pardon? Who might you be talking about? I cannot think of an origin story that does not have gods involved and most all of them claim they were always where they lived when creating their origin stories. And those are the ones we know of because of writing they left thousands of years ago when they were closer to their origin.

When it comes to bibleland even believers are willing to eliminate the parts they can no longer claim with a straight face. In the case of the bible that means all of the origin has been shitcanned in favor of possibly nomads who settled the hills. So even in the case under discussion there is no knowledge of their origins.

I can only go on what is in evidence. Jews came from Judaea. That is what Jews means. I see no mystery there. They do not appear in real history until Pompey arrives in the region. The only stories which remotely connect with the real history of the region are Maccabes. Therefore that is where they started. The question then becomes where they got the Yahweh cult and that too was imposed by the Maccabes and was modestly spread to Galilee and Iodumaea by his son and grandson by military conquest. This reads like a real origin else an entire history funnels down to the Maccabes before it starts to spread again. Yet this "spread again" requires conquest to force them to adopt circumcision and Judean customs. Obviously these conquered people did not have these customs nor circumcize before conquest. That fits in nicely with no mention by Herodotus.

Yes, it is quite true those questions are largely unanswered for many ancient writings but I do not wish to recite the differences right now although I can show the answers are largely known. Rather let me point out essentially none of those "unknowns" is filled in with religious traditions which give "answers" to those questions without the least physical evidence.

The Iliad is a useful example here. For centuries the opinion was that it was a fanciful as the Odyssey and only after whathisname found (the wrong) something did people think it might be based upon a real event. It was only in the last year or so that a wall was found at the right age and of the right circumference to match the time it took to drag a body around it. There are still huge questions left as to the extent of the poetic license in this poetry with the majority holding most of it exercises that license.

OTOH, the Septuagint started with a religious tradition of the inspired word of god describing real events with believers kicking and screaming all through the retreat and retaining everything that is not explicit BS. That is the major difference I am trying to emphasize.

If the Septuagint had always been taken as was the Iliad and if acceptance of any part of it were based upon what has actually be found by archaeologists none of it would be taken seriously today.

I see nothing self-evident at all. I see nothing more historical in it than any historical fantasy written today. And from all the archaeology we know all the good parts are BS. Only the creationist style believer tries to retain anything prior to Isaiah or "second temple" period.

The Hebrew language is really quite simple to address, the oldest known samples of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls dating roughly late 1st c. BC to early 1st c. AD. These are written in the Aramaic script which is also used by modern Israel. Older sources from bibleland itself use the Phoenician script and even though described as "proto or paleo-Hebrew" are only called Hebrew because of where found and when dated and if the Septuagint says the Jews ruled that area at that time. The only inscription ever found which are close to "confirming" the Septuagint are mentions of the two gods of the land, Yahweh and Ashara. To me that is an absolute contradiction of the religious traditions about the Septuagint stories.

No. I suggest it is a local pidgin of Aramaic and Greek. We do know both languages were spoken in the region since Alexander. It is simply a working amalgam of the two that naturally arose among those who were dealing with the Greeks. It may have arose in the big cities that saw a lot of Greeks. There was no standardization of languages in those days. Standarizing a language across a country was not only an invention of the 19th c. AD it was only first possible in that century.

I am not wedded to this idea. The problem is there is no other source of "hebrew" older than those DSS nor is there any mention of it as a language by anyone. There are no earlier examples of it other than the bible-based "proto" identifications which could as easily and perhaps better called proto-Phoenician or proto-Aramaic.

Even the name is grossly misleading. Way back when in the dim, dark past of only about one century ago it was a common religious tradition that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament. There in Exodus the people are first called Hebrews for some unexplained reason. Moses was a Hebrew. Therefore he wrote in Hebrew. Therefore the language is called Hebrew. So just using that name biases the discussion. Overcoming the built in biases has to be overcome to discuss this subject.

So how are we to explain a "language" that suddenly appears in history without antecedents?

How are we to explain a written language of a people from a region which shows none of the other signs of being a literate culture?

One could debate for a long time just how much Greek is to be found in it. That book I mentioned may be the work of a crackpot but from what I have read he is not and does have his ducks in line and constructs a case as a lawyer should. He gives more examples that can be dismissed as coincidence. On top of that Greek and "hebrew" are supposed to be two different language families so any admixture at all has to be explained. If the explanation is to be exposure to Greek influence then the language arose after Alexander. QED

I am not into selling my conclusions rather to establish the facts which are in evidence. I do speculate from that but the facts in evidence rule. At times there is a problem with what is claimed to be facts as is the case with these supposed older examples of proto and paleo. The oldest examples of what they are supposed to be paleo of are in the DSS which is roughly around the year "zero." Now of someone wants to claim something from 1050BC is a paleo of that then it is like looking at English from 1066 AD and claiming it is paleo modern English. We do have many examples of that and it is also "paleo" Danish, Swedish and German as well as English. You can do the same with any modern language to similar laughable conclusions. This it not the way lanuages evolve. It does not describe the real process we can map in detail from records over the last 1000 years.

Examples from a mere six centuries ago, comparable to 600BC and the year zero are almost equally laughable.

So here we have a region whose only signs of literacy are found in bibleland cities which have an identified culture clearly not related to the bible stories. And these signs are not that great indicating more the work of circuit riding scribes rather than an indigenous culture. That is they are mostly letters of communication between the cities and mainly to Egypt. An indigenous culture has mostly contracts, followed by government decrees with religious documents the least common. If we are to accept a bibleland origin of the OT then we have the religious documents the most common, no government decrees, and a few contracts so simple unimportant that they are literally written on broken pottery, that is, nothing special developed for contracts. How do we explain bibleland being an entirely different type of literate culture that only produced religious texts? Where did this wealth come from? Scribes in most cultures have to earn a living which is one reason for so many contracts. If only religious documents were produced and NO government documents despite a long line of "kings" recounted in the religious stories, then who was supporting a staff of full time people doing nothing but copying and preserving these bible books?

The biases are very difficult to overcome. We tend to think of everyone being able to read and write and cannot readily imagine a culture where reading was rare and writing a profession like lawyers today. Also when we think of that culture we are biased by Cecille B. DeMille type images of bibleland. Even interior shots with walls made of large stones in the background are misleading. Not one single building connected with this bible culture has been found. All the previous "discoveries" from times when there was no critical evaluation have been discredited save for a few diehards -- the fake biblical archaeologists.

A few years back I heard Mel Gibson was thinking of making movie on the Samson story. This was back when he was in the middle of the Jesus movie controversy and part of his hype was the meticulous research so that everything was authentic including all props, clothing and things most producers had made generic. Check the Roman military gear for a better idea of what it was like at that time. Anyway shortly after hearing this I realized that would be impossible for any OT story as there is absolutely nothing to support any prop of interest. How did their soldier dress? No idea whatsoever. What did their building look like? Same problem. What kind of decorations were there? No idea.

Egypt has a rough outline of how it will parcel out the rights to archaeologists to dig what and where for the next century. It also believes there will be a few centuries more left to dig after that. In bibleland everything of interest has been dug and the couple left are known to be associated with other identified cultures.

By what magic does one conjure "HEBREW" into existence?