01x01 - Delilah's People

[bunniefuu]

[music]

I'm going on an adventure.

Unzip the archeology. Make it naked.

[music]

bringing history and archaeology to the street.

That's what we're doing

[SIMCHA] What do you know about Delilah?

Only heard a little bit about her. That she sounded pretty sexy.

I don't really know the story...

...but what I remember from it, that she's a whore?

That she hung out with a guy named Samson.

He had long hair.

[SIMCHA] He had long hair? -Yeah and he was strong ...

So he fell in love with Delilah.

You know what happens when you fall in love with a woman?

Then in the night she cut his hair and then he was without power.

[SIMCHA] She sold him out. -She did.

In the end...

...Women, what're ya gonna do?

[SIMCHA] Samson was a Jew. Delilah a Philistine...

...probably the most famous Philistine.

They were lovers...

.but the Bible says their tribes were great enemies.

Today calling someone a Philistine is an insult.

You say they lack culture.

But why do we peg Philistines this way?

In the last few years...

...dramatic discoveries have been made...

...Philistine cities excavated...

...right where the Bible says they should be...

...and what they've dug up raises many questions.

So this is what we want to know: Who were the real Philistines?

Why were they such great villains?

And how did they disappear?

This is one of the finds...

...forcing us to reconsider who the Philistines were.

This is ancient Ashkelon.

It's a port city and it's a port city mentioned in the bible.

Time of the Philistines.

I mean we're talking six hundred to twelve hundred...

...before the Common Era.

You know thirty two hundred years ago...

That's when the stories of Samson are taking place.

David and Goliath.

This is an ancient site...

...and when the Philistines got here from somewhere...

People don't realize they're Greek and when they came here...

...the sea is right over there, they came here.

Look at this, this is a huge, huge city.

And the amazing thing is...

...it's just where the Bible said it would be.

At this, the gate is still there, an actual gate.

It's probably the oldest excavated gate in the world.

Possibly Samson and Delilah walked through it.

They would have walked through this gate.

[SIMCHA] Before Samson and Delilah...

...or any other Philistine walked through the gate...

evidence suggests that they came from somewhere else.

The Bible says the Philistines first show up around BC.

But where were they before that?

Where did the Philistines come from?

Professor Carl Ehrlich is an expert on Biblical

archaeology from York University.

...his digs include Gath:

hometown of the giant at the wrong end of David's sling...

...the Philistine Goliath.

The Philistine people...

...the people of Delilah, the people of Goliath.

In the general public...

...people think that these are Bible people...

...so they must be Semites.

But in a scholarly community...

...whenever I've heard them referred to...

...it's always Aegean people...

...people from the area of modern-day Greece.

Which is it? Are these guys Greeks or Jews?

Are they eating souvlaki or falafel?

Definitely eating souvlaki.

We've discovered that...

...when a site becomes Philistine...

...there's a change in diet from one in which...

...sheep and goats provide the major source of meat...

...to one in which pork and beef are much more common.

-Philistines are eating pork?

Philistines are eating pork, yes.

Which again seems not to be indigenous to that region.

So they, they show up from the Aegean area...

...maybe Cyprus, maybe Crete. -The speculation is that...

Philistines are one of a number of roving bands of sea

peoples who plied the Eastern Mediterranean world.

[SIMCHA] three thousand years ago the Sea People appeared.

Delilah's great, great,

great, great, great grandparents.

what drove these roaming Greeks into the sea?

Dr. Trude Dothan excavated the cities.

These sea people;

the Philistines,inhabited on the coast of Israel.

I met her in Ashdod. A modern town...

..named after the three thousand year-old Philistine village...

...that once stood here.

Now, something happened.

A catastrophe and there are many explanations for that.

What was it?

We see in Greece cities like Mycenae, like Tiryns, were destroyed.

The famous cities with the wonderful ...

around BC something happens. Massive destruction.

A flourishing civilization...

...something dramatic happens to destroy it.

And then a Dark Age.

[SIMCHA] Which catastrophe...

the sea people from Greece south to Egypt and the coast...

...of what is now Israel?

Earthquake? Plague?

Invasion?

No one knows for sure.

ut there's one piece of evidence on the Philistines...

...from the days of catastrophe.

They made it to the shores of Egypt there were battles.

is the Egyptian mural giving us our first snapshot...

...of Delilah's family tree.

These are blown up depictions...

...made out of the only images...

...of Philistine warriors that we have.

And they come from Egypt from the time of Ramses II ...

...before the Common Era, some years ago.

And you can see they're wearing...

...feathered headgear of some sort.

They're wearing kilts...

...and they have fringes at the corner of their kilts...

...which probably signified some kind of religious tassels.

Some kind of holy knots if you will.

[SIMCHA] This is how the Egyptians saw the Philistines.

It's not much to go on.

What we know about Delilah's clan comes from the Bible.

And it ain't a pretty picture.

But why?

Is the Philistines bad rep a bum rap?

[SIMCHA] I've come to the...

...Albright Institute in East Jerusalem...

...to meet Philistine expert Professor Sy Gitin.

Let's start with this. They have a bad rep.

To call someone a Philistine today is not exactly a compliment.

Why is that?

They were the "other" in the story between the Israelites.

And they were the bad guys.

But were they the bad guys?

To understand why the Philistines are pictured in a negative way.

Who wrote the Bible?

It wasn't the Philistines.-Right.

[SIMCHA] Just how sophisticated was the Israelite culture...

would later brand the Philistines as the great boors of history?

Dr. Aren Maier excavates Philistine sites...

including town sites like this one in Tel Aviv.

He's helping bring the Philistines into focus.

Were the Israelites hillbillies compared to the Philistines?

Yes they were.

Really?

The Israelites were a bunch of dishevelled...

...barely cultured people living in the hills,

and the Philistines came...

...with a much more sophisticated culture.

We're comparing their cities to the Israelite hamlets.

We're comparing their pottery, which is much bettered made.

We're comparing their metallurgy, which is better.

We're comparing their temples.

We're comparing evidence of political organization,

Evidence of m*llitary capabilities... The list goes on and on.

Yeah, so okay.

So the Israelites coming to this place...

is like the Beverly Hillbillies showing up in Beverly Hills.

To a certain extent yes.

They eat on the billiard table.

-[laughs] Yeah.

So the Philistines are looking at them and going...

...they're calling them Philistines.

Are you telling me that the Philistines...

...were calling the Israelites a bunch of Philistines?

Probably something equivalent to that yes, absolutely.

[SIMCHA] Most of what we know...

...about Philistine material culture...

...comes from pottery and small religious figurines.

They show Greek and Egyptian influences, how

cosmopolitan the Philistines were compared to the Israelites.

We don't know many things.

what they used for everyday life is really on a very high level.

The repertoire of the decorations is amazing.

Maybe they were great in kitchen pottery...

...but maybe they weren't such nice people.

Not necessarily the rich and the high cultures.

They're nice people you know. They definitely had power.

They had a monopoly on iron.

Israelites had to come down to Philistine to sharpen their iron tools.

And it was a monopoly,

which of course gave them a lot of power.

And then they had the chariots,

and then they had the m*llitary build up.

Very m*llitary.

That's two Apache helicopters.

They're going back from the Gaza strip.

You have to realize that...

...the Bible records fighting along this very area.

David and Goliath...

...the Philistines and the Egyptians fought here.

This was the strategic route...

...called the Way of Horus by the Egyptians.

And it was called the Pelishtim:

the Way of the Philistines in the Bible.

We are talking about things that happened years ago.

We've got apache as*ault helicopters...

...coming back from Gaza.

Which is just down there,

which was a Philistine site as well.

And this was an Israelite site area over there...

and you have Israeli helicopters coming back from that area...

back because of a terror att*ck two days ago.

It's incredible.

[SIMCHA] Around BC...

...technology was leaping from the Bronze to the Iron Age.

Philistines were mighty enemies...

...because they knew how to make iron.

Israelites didn't.

It's hot and we haven't eaten and the car won't start.

[speaking Hebrew]

It's moments like this that I think about the Philistines.

Think about it.

They lived right here, right where we are now.

And they had a monopoly on iron,

and it says in the Bible...

...that the Israelites had to go to the Philistines ...

...to sharpen their iron tools.

And I felt pretty helpless...

...waiting here for the battery guy.

It's very similar to the Philistines situation.

The Philistines had the Israelites by the nuts and bolts.

And Delilah had Samson by the... Well, um ...

The Samson and Delilah story, the very sexy story...

He is like turned on by Delilah, let's face it.

And ...

I think you're turned on by Delilah.

I think she sounds sexy, I read the Bible I'm excited.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now I just wanna understand this, here's a very sexy story.

You dig up one of the Philistines cities,

and correct me if I'm wrong...

...but you found some giant penises.

No we didn't find some giant penises.

Giant penises. No, is that correct?

No.

We found two ceramic vessels in the shape of a ... penises.

-You did? -Yup.

In fact.

I'm afraid to ask. How big are they?

I would say smaller...

...than what we would think is average today.

Really?

I understand now why Philistine women...

...are attracted to Israelite men.

But ... what do you think it is, seriously?

It probably was something to do with-

-You're going to say fertility right?

-Well fertility, probably because...

...life is full of aspects of fertility.

You wanna have children.

Ancient religion was so interconnected...

...with everyday life that everything you did...

...was interconnected with your religious beliefs.

Just like a devout Jew or devout Muslim...

doesn't do anything without saying a blessing...

Connecting it to his everyday life with his worship of his god.

In ancient times, that was very, very clear.

And sexuality, fertility, procreation,

was all very, very intimately connected.

-This is an Israelite four-horned altar.

I think the horns have a certain fertility significance.

We talk about the bull...

...the horns of a bull having the bull:

the bull is a sign of fertility in antiquity.

So basically what you're saying is...

...that these alters the horns...

...because it's related to fertility,

it's the same basis as the concept of horny.

It relates to fertility that's right.

And that's where the term "horny" comes from.

I think so, yes.

We'll have to check it in an analogical dictionary.

But why do you guys always talk...

...in such complicated ways?

When you say, you know horny, people get it.

They would get it. Absolutely, they would get it.

[SIMCHA] Were the Israelites and the Philistines...

...really so far apart?

Enemies are often intimates.

Cross-fertilization,

not just between Samson and Delilah took place.

Even the mighty Samson seems more Greek than Jewish.

It is just so unlike anything else we have in the Hebrew Bible.

We've got a hero, a judge of Israel...

...who never interacts with Israelites.

He's always hanging around...

...and messing around with Philistine women...

...and partying and then breaking all his vows.

It's only his death that he finally acknowledges and mentions God

...and becomes this big Israelite hero.

But he's always acting on his own...

rather than acting with a tribe or with anyone else.

So there's that:

that Samson really is a Hercules type of figure.

And there's some people argue...

...that maybe Samson comes from Greek mythology.

Samson really is a transplantation of the Greek Hercules...

...into an Israelite context.

[SIMCHA] Samson, the Herculean Jew.

The Bible says he toppled a Philistine temple with his bare hands.

Sounds like a miracle.

But what does the archaeology say?

Okay, what I want to know...

a Philistine temple right here, correct?

Mmhmm.

And it's got pillars,

just like in the Samson story.

Correct? -Yes.

And the Samson story says Samson was a guy like me...

...strong guy, you know, work's out a lot.

And then he pushes these pillars...

...and ka-boom, the whole temple goes down right?

Yes.

We've got the architecture...

...we've got the site, we've got the archaeology.

Is it feasible, plausible?

Yeah, absolutely. -You're kidding.

ays is that story is not negated by the archaeological remains.

To say that, that proves the story?

I mean... if that's what you're-

No.

I'm not in to that.

I'm just saying here's a beautiful story.

This guy is hot for this girl.

He gets into trouble. They take out his eyes.

They tie him to the pillars, two pillars.

He prays to god.

Pushes the pillars. Kills his enemies.

Here you have a temple from that time...

...Philistine, and what's in the middle of it?

Two pillars.

it says, hey, this is not just- This fits.

This fits in very nicely...

...with what we know about the Philistines' story.

And you guys always try to avoid that cause you're...

afraid you're going to be called non-academic,

and a religious fanatic?

First of all, I'm called that all the time...

...but that doesn't bother me.

[SIMCHA] So pushing over the temple was possible.

Is it also possible...

...that the Israelites and Philistines...

...weren't really so far apart after all?

So the Israelites and Philistines were enemies...

...but there was give and take.

They shaped each other's cultures.

Samson, the Jew, seems a little Greek...

and the Philistines picked up a few Israelite habits.

I think its evidence at Ekron in the seventh century...

that there were some Israelites who came to settle...

and brought their craft of making four horned limestone altars...

...made possibly in Ekron,

but certainly used by the Philistines.

It's part of Philistine tradition.

And the Philistines are adopting it.

So, when Samson is with Delilah...

...not only is Samson taking on Delilah's kind of stuff...

.but Delilah's actually learning from Samson...

...to burn incense on the four horned alter.

I don't think we can say that because again:

Samson and Delilah appeared or years...

according to the biblical history on the chronology...

...earlier than these altars.

There are no altars in the archeological record like this..

...at the time of Samson and Delilah.

Or maybe Delilah wasn't burning, but her grandchildren.

Or her great, great, great,

great, great, great grandchildren.

They may have, yes.

Who claimed Samson as grandpa.

[SIMCHA] Grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles...

...kissing cousins...

...the family tree branches out pretty quickly.

ture morphing into multi-culture isn't a modern invention:

the ancient Near East was always a blend of peoples.

The Philistines melded...

...with their Canaanite and Israelite neighbours.

If you take the theory...

...that the Philistines are...

...essentially a mixed ethnic group...

...that contains a strong Aegean element...

..they seem to have acculturated very quickly...

...to Canaanite material culture and language.

[SIMCHA] Cultures merge and at the end of the day...

...we all end up pretty much in the same place.

But when it comes to how Delilah,

or any other single Philistine met death...

we have very little archaeological evidence and a bit of a mystery.

I have a big problem.

We found wonderful sites...

...but we did not find in Ashdod,

nor in Ashkelon, nor in Akron...

...the cemeteries that belonged to the cities.

And this is one of the things that are very important...

...if you talk about skeletons.

If you found a skeleton...

...we'll know what Delilah might have looked like.

Yup, exactly. What her bone structure was.

But you haven't found one yet.

You'll call me first when you do?

Blond or not, I'll call you.

[SIMCHA] A few decades ago...

housands of Philistine skeletons were uncovered.

But they're gone now,

reburied and never properly studied.

What we know of ancient Philistines...

...comes from their enemies the Israelites.

and again today, Israeli politics have silenced the Philistines.

Preventing the Philistine bones from telling their own story.

Due to the political pressure...

...put on by the ultra-orthodox groups...

There has been a statute that...

...any human bones found in archaeological excavations...

...are not considered archaeological finds...

...and they have to be turned over...

...to the ministry of religious affairs.

Because of respect for the dead.

Because they're suspected of being Jewish

and they have to be reburied.

And that includes anything...

...from proto human remains from half a million years ago...

down to remains which can be proven to be Islamic or Christian...

...from a generation ago.

And it's a ludicrous situation

But you are a religious guy,

and you still think it's ludicrous?

Absolutely.

You can study your past very respectively.

We bury these people...

...but its another thing to close your eyes,

and make believe it doesn't exist...

...make believe there weren't people living here.

puts us somewhere in a very dark and medieval light.

[SIMCHA]So on a personal level...

...there isn't much to go on for the end of the Philistines.

As a culture, as a people...

we know they pretty much disappear about six hundred B.C.

Babylonian armies were sweeping through the land...

...but before they hit the Philistines,

Delilah's folk wrote a farewell letter.

There is a text.

Something called the Sakkara Papyrus...

...or the Adon Letter...

...which is a letter written in Aramaic on papyrus...

was sent from the King of Ekron to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Because the Pharaoh of Egypt at that time...

...was the patron of the Philistine cities.

It said: "Dear King...

The Babylonians have reached Aphek...

which is just outside of present day Tel Aviv...

...about days march from Philistine...

And if you don't send some troops to help us, we're lost."

Well, the Pharaoh didn't send any troops...

...and the Babylonians came and destroyed the city.

[SIMCHA] So, back to our first question:

who were the real Philistines?

Well they were a cosmopolitan culture...

...sophisticated and entrepreneurial...

...the opposite of what Philistine means today.

They had superior technology,

m*llitary, and political organization.

And why did they disappear?

Part of the reason...

...is that in the th century BC...

...Nebuchadnezzar sacked their cities.

He marched the Philistine nobility to Babylon.

The few Philistines,

who weren't marched off to be slaves,

lost their national identity.

They were so cosmopolitan, so open to other cultures,

that the survivors after the Babylonian att*ck...

...simply blended with their neighbours.

They vanished from the world stage...

...and their enemies, the Israelites,

got the last laugh and the last word...

Making the Phillistines to be the biggest boors of the Bible.

We've seen, today's archaeologists are re-writing that history...

...restoring the Philistines' reputation.

Anyway, I think things went well.

You asked good questions.

Not always, but most of the time.