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Concept
Philistine language
Summary
The Philistine language (ˈfɪləstiːn,_ˈfɪləstaɪn,_fəˈlɪstən,_fəˈlɪstiːn) is the extinct language of the Philistines. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survived as cultural loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine five cities ("Pentapolis"), or the ’argáz receptacle, which occurs in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else, or the title padî.
To judge from inscriptions alone, it could appear that the Philistine language is simply part of the local Canaanite dialect continuum which includes Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite, Ekronite and Phoenician. For instance, the Ekron inscription, identifying the archaeological site securely as the Biblical Ekron, is the first connected body of text to be identified as Philistine, on the basis of its location. However, it is written in a Canaanite dialect similar to Phoenician and Hebrew.
There is not enough information about the language of the Philistines to relate it confidently to any other languages. Possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, support the theory that immigrant Philistines originated among "sea peoples". There are hints of non-Semitic vocabulary and onomastics, but the inscriptions, not clarified by some modern forgeries,Joseph Naveh, "Some Recently Forged Inscriptions," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research" (Summer 1982:53–58). are enigmatic: a number of inscribed miniature "anchor seals" have been found at various Philistine sites. On the other hand, evidence from the slender corpus of brief inscriptions from Iron Age IIA-IIB Tell es-Safi (Tell es-Safi inscription) demonstrates that at some stage during the local Iron Age, the Philistines started using one of the dialects (either Phoenician or Hebrew) of the local Canaanite language and script, which in time masked and replaced the earlier, non-local linguistic traditions, which doubtless became reduced to a linguistic substratum, for it ceased to be recorded in inscriptions.
Official source
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