It was more than 250 years since David had cut off Goliath’s head, but Philistia was still very much a part of Canaan in the days of Amos.
The “sea peoples” had originally migrated to Philistia from Crete (Amos 9:7). The Bible describes their migration in the days of Moses. With a little archaeology and historical knowledge together with certain passages of Scripture, we can piece together a rough sense of who the Philistines were. In the days between Joseph’s slavery in Egypt and the exodus, the Minoan civilization was rising to greatness on the island of Crete (the “smile” of the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey). Success and expansion drove some of their sailors to distant shores, and when Crete and its great city Knossos (the New York of its time) fell, outposts of its “sea peoples” became refuges for fleeing Minoans and Greeks of all kinds. Some of these refugees left Greek-style pottery in southwestern Canaan, and Moses himself tells us that the giant Canaanites who lived there, the Avvites “who lived in villages as far (south) as Gaza” were destroyed by “the Caphtorites coming out from Caphtor (Crete)” and who “settled in their place” (Deuteronomy 2:23).
The giants of the green coastlands didn’t vanish overnight. David faced all “six cubits and a span” (9’ 9”) of Goliath. The culture seems to be one where a lot of “new Philistines” (Greek immigrants) fought side-by-side with “old Philistines” (eight- and nine-footers) who acted as champions in the army. One of David’s men killed Goliath’s incredibly strong brother Lahmi (1 Chronicles 20:5), and David’s brother killed another huge Philistine “with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—twenty-four in all” (1 Chronicles 20:6). All of these giants were from Gath. For centuries, a remnant of the old, incredibly tall Anakim lived in an evidently symbiotic culture with the fresh and warlike Greek sailors. Their pottery intermingles in the archaeological record just as we would expect from the Biblical record. When the womanizing Samson fell for the Philistine beauty Delilah, we can assume she was a “Greek” Philistine (one can hardly picture the lusty Samson drooling over an eight-foot tall Amazon with twelve fingers and toes without such a detail meriting a verse or two in Judges). After David’s time, the giants aren’t a part of the story anymore, and maybe they all died out, leaving a colony of Cretans to people the Pentapolis (“the five cities”). It is to the Philistines that Amos now turns his attention:
6 This is what the LORD says:
“For three sins of Gaza,
even for four, I will not relent.
Because she took captive whole communities
and sold them to Edom,
7 I will send fire on the walls of Gaza
that will consume her fortresses.
8 I will destroy the king of Ashdod
and the one who holds the scepter in Ashkelon.
I will turn my hand against Ekron,
till the last of the Philistines are dead,”
says the Sovereign LORD. (NIV)
Four of the five Philistine cities are mentioned here. Amos condemns them for slaving. The Philistines raided the Judean foothills and sold merchants, shepherds, farm families, and whole villages into slavery in Edom, which was like a clearing house. Once the slaves got to Edom, they would be sold all over the known world, and perhaps beyond. In the book of Joel, the people of Tyre, Sidon and Philistia are condemned for selling Israelites into slavery to the Greeks and to the Sabeans (Joel 3:4-8). We will see that Amos also condemns Tyre for this (Amos 1:9).
The Philistine city of Gath isn’t mentioned here. Later in the book, he will mention Gath as if it had been destroyed or captured (Amos 6:2). We should remember that Amos prophesied in the days of King Uzziah of Judah, who “went to war against the Philistines and broke down the walls of Gath” (2 Chronicles 26:6). It’s likely, then, that this part of Amos’ book was written during or after his king’s campaign to the west.
If we go back to the time when my parents were young, we would see victories the Lord handed to our nation in past: “For three sins of the Fuhrer, even for four…” Perhaps the prophet would have mentioned the imprisonment and murder of something like six million of Jews in the holocaust. But we don’t have to point fingers at the Nazis to see sins clearly. The Lord punished those sins in the past and far away. Will he leave our sins unpunished here, today?
God did not forget the Philistines or their slavery. We have more than enough sinfulness in our own lives to merit eternal damnation. We need to stop pointing out fingers into the past and begin to point our fingers at the mirror and whoever we see there. We need God’s forgiveness, and in Jesus we have it. In Jesus, we have holiness, comfort, citizenship in heaven, and peace.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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