756 PHILISTINES 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 Avar 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 inscrip tions still speak of the cities of Philistia as governed by kinglets tributary to Assyria ; and, as the power of Nineveh declined and the nionarchs 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 Zeph- aniah 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). 1 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 Philis tines 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 immedi ately 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 re sistance 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 sq.), 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 sq.), 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 Ji, " fish," and 1 The reference to Necho and Gaza is not in the Septuagint of Jer. xlvii. 1, and it would be more natural to think of Chaldaja as the enemy from the north whom Jeremiah describes. 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) 1 hilo Byblius (Mu ller, Fr. Hist. Graze., iii. 567 sq.) makes Dagon the inventor of corn and the plough, whence he was called Zei)s Aporptos. This implies an etymology of a very improbable kind from the Hebrew and Phoe nician pi, " 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 Diaccnus in the Life of Porphyry of Gaza ( 19), the great god of Gaza, now known as Mania (our Lord), was regarded as the god of rains and invoked against famine. That Mania was lineally descended 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 lie 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 ; Zcph. i. 9). (2) Schrader (K. A. T., 2d ed., 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 merman- god &5d.Kwv. 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 Dca Syr., 14), the Atargatis of Xanthus (Fr. Hist. Graze., 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. 2 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. 3 Of the details of Philistine religion in the Biblical period we know almost nothing. 4 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 2 The name Atargatis is a later compound, of which the first half is the Aramaic form of Ashtar ( Attar), and the second is SJiy. 3 The Aphrodite of Gaza in Marcus, Vit. Porph., 59, is rather Aphrodite Pandemos. She gave oracles by dreams in matters relating to marriage. 4 Schrader thinks that traces of Jehovah (lahveh) worship among the Philistines are to be found in the Philistine names Padi, Mitinti, Sidkii, &c., on the Assyrian inscriptions (see also Friedrich Delitzsch, Wo lag das Parodies ? p. 162 sq. ). It is probable enough that Sidkfi at least is a shortened form of a name in which the second element was that of a god ; but such Phoenician names as Kalba (side by side with Kalbclim), Ilanno, Abda or Bodo, &c., show that the shortening does not in the least imply that the divine name was lahveh. 5 The expression " isle " (or coastland, Hebrew ""X) of Caphtor in Jer. xlvii. is generally cited as conclusive to this effect ; but in the context it is by no means clear that it means anything more than the coastlaud of Philistia.
