At this point, I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. I don’t intend to talk about those events on this blog, in part because I am not an expert on the present-day geopolitics of the region and, right now, a lot of public information about what is happening there is incomplete or unreliable. The first and foremost purpose of this blog is to inform and educate my readers; the last thing I want to do is misinform or misdirect them. The danger of misinformation is especially great when it comes to present-day political situations that hold serious, far-reaching impacts for a large number of people.
I do, however, wish to address a factually incorrect claim that, for years, I have seen and heard various people make in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which pertains directly to my own expertise in ancient Greece and Rome. Namely, a lot of people have claimed that the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled for twenty-one years from his accession in 117 until his death in 138 CE, was the first to apply the name Palestine to the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River when he renamed the land that was previously known as Judaea “Syria Palaestina,” supposedly specifically in order to punish the Jewish people for the Bar Kokhba revolt (lasted 132 – 136 CE).
In reality, the name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born. Furthermore, although Hadrian did combine Judaea into a province which bore the official name Syria Palaestina sometime around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, his precise motives for doing so are far from clear.
Disclaimer: the scope of this post
Before I say any more than what I have already said, I wish to make very clear that this post solely concerns the historical evidence for the use of the name Palestine in Greco-Roman antiquity. This post does not make any claims about who should have political control over any given territory today, does not endorse any present-day political organizations or structures, and emphatically does not endorse any kind of violent or military action by any person or party.
I do not purport to be “neutral” (whatever that would mean); the purpose of this disclaimer is not to present myself as neutral, but rather simply to head off bad faith interpreters who will inevitably seek to construe statements in this article about ancient history as evidence that I support specific war crimes that some group or another has allegedly committed in the past month.
I do have opinions about the Israel-Gaza conflict, which are strongly held, but I will not be sharing those opinions in this post, apart from my general position that I condemn all war crimes, attacks on civilians, ethnic cleansing, and acts of genocide, regardless of who perpetrates those acts, and I grieve the horrific deaths, suffering, and carnage that both Israeli and Palestinian civilians have faced. I feel the deepest sympathy and remorse for those who have lost loved ones to this conflict.
The claim that Hadrian invented Palestine
With that disclaimer out of the way, I will now introduce the claim that I will be debunking for the sake of those readers who have not already heard it. It is a claim that some professional scholars of the ancient world, such as the late classicist Louis Feldman, have supported, but that is far more commonly repeated in non-scholarly publications for a general audience.
To give readers a sense of what the claim is, below is a quotation from the article “The Truth About ‘Palestine’—Then and Now” by Arlene Bridges Samuels, published by the Israeli outpost of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). There are many other authors that make this claim that I could quote here, but I have chosen to quote this example because it is representative of the claims that other authors make and presents the claim very clearly in a way that readers with no background will be able to easily understand.
Samuels asserts that the name Palestine was “first coined by the ancient Greeks for the five-city area in the Philistine confederacy” and that the Roman emperor Hadrian was the first to apply the name more broadly to the entire southern Levant west of the Jordan. She declares:
“From 132–136 A.D., a Jewish messianic figure, Bar Kokhba, led a revolt against Hadrian that resulted in the deaths of more than half a million Jews in their desperate bid for independence from their pagan conquerors. But their valiant attempt was in vain against the overwhelming power of Roman legions.”
“Hadrian’s genocidal ambition intensified when he then decided to strip the Jews of their biblical name. He sought to change their identity and sever them from their ancestry by renaming the land Syria Palestina after the Philistines in the Bible—enemies of Israel, although not Arabs.”
As we shall see, like most articles with headlines that begin “The Truth About X,” Samuels’s article actually contains very little truth.
Philistia and Palestine
It is true that the Greek name Palaistínē is most likely either etymologically derived from or cognate to the Hebrew name פְּלֶשֶׁת (Pəlešeṯ), which is commonly rendered in English as Philistia. In Hebrew, this name refers specifically to the slim coastal territory controlled by the five Philistine city-states of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. Today, writers in English sometimes refer to these five city-states collectively as the Philistine pentapolis or Philistine confederacy. The map of the Levant in the ninth century BCE below shows the territory of these city-states in red.
In 604 BCE, however, the Neo-Babylonian Empire under King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered the Philistine city-states and annexed their territory. The earliest surviving Greek source that uses the name Palaistínē dates to nearly two hundred years after the Neo-Babylonian conquest and annexation of Philistia and, from the very first attestation, Greek sources clearly use this name to refer to a much broader region than just the relatively small territory that the Philistine cities once occupied.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing polities of the southern Levant in the ninth century BCE, with the territory of the Philistine city-states shown in red
The scholar David M. Jacobson proposes a rather interesting explanation for this broader usage in a 1999 paper. Jacobson notes that, ever since antiquity, the Hebrew name יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisrāʾēl), which is the source of modern English Israel, has been understood to mean “wrestler with God.” He notes that the name Palaistínē sounds very close to the Greek word παλαιστής (palaistḗs), which means “wrestler.” He therefore argues that, whoever first transcribed the name of Pəlešeṯ into Greek as Palaistínē may have deliberately adjusted the spelling to make the name also a calque of the meaning of the name Yisrāʾēl (Jacobson, “Palestine and Israel,” 68–69).
Although this argument is plausible, I do not personally find it convincing because, in my view, it is not the most parsimonious explanation of the evidence. In order to work, Jacobson’s hypothesis requires that whichever Greek first used the form of the name Palaistínē was aware not only of the name Yisrāʾēl, but also the traditional interpretation of its meaning in Hebrew. The evidence, however, does not substantiate this.
As we will see in a moment, the earliest Greek author who uses the name Palaistínē in a surviving text does not display any indication of awareness of the name Yisrāʾēl. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have had any concept of Hebrews as ethnically or culturally distinct from other groups in the region. In my assessment, it is much more parsimonious that Palaistínē is simply a Greek transcription of the name Philistia that came into use for the broader region early on and that the resemblance to the word palaistḗs is coincidental.
ABOVE: Illustration by Gustave Doré for the 1866 La Grande Bible de Tours showing how he imagined the story of the patriarch Jacob wrestling with an angel described in Genesis 32:22-31
Herodotos on Palestine
The earliest ancient Greek author who is known to have used the name Palaistínē is the historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), who uses this name numerous times throughout his work Histories, which he most likely completed sometime in the first half of the 420s BCE. Although the Histories is nominally an account of the Greco-Persian Wars of the early fifth century BCE, it contains extensive digressions about all kinds of historical, geographic, and ethnographic topics, including the history, geography, and ethnography of the Levant.
Herodotos describes the geography of West Asia in his Histories 4.39.2 and, in doing so, makes reference to “Συρίη Παλαιστίνη” or “Syria Palaistínē” as the coastal land that lies between Phoinikia (i.e., Phoenicia, in what is now Lebanon) and Egypt:
“μέχρι μέν νυν Φοινίκης ἀπὸ Περσέων χῶρος πλατὺς καὶ πολλός ἐστι: τὸ δὲ ἀπὸ Φοινίκης παρήκει διὰ τῆσδε τῆς θαλάσσης ἡ ἀκτὴ αὕτη παρά τε Συρίην τὴν Παλαιστίνην καὶ Αἴγυπτον, ἐς τὴν τελευτᾷ:”
This means (in my own translation):
“The land from that of the Persians to that of the Phoinikians is wide and great and, from Phoinikia, this headland extends through the sea along Syria Palestine and Egypt, to where it finishes.”
Later, in his Histories 7.89.2, Herodotos explicitly defines the name Palaistínē to encompass the geographic region of the southern Levant along the Mediterranean coast extending from Phoinikia to Egypt, writing:
“οὗτοι δὲ οἱ Φοίνικες τὸ παλαιὸν οἴκεον, ὡς αὐτοὶ λέγουσι, ἐπὶ τῇ Ἐρυθρῇ θαλάσσῃ, ἐνθεῦτεν δὲ ὑπερβάντες τῆς Συρίης οἰκέουσι τὸ παρὰ θάλασσαν: τῆς δὲ Συρίης τοῦτο τὸ χωρίον καὶ τὸ μέχρι Αἰγύπτου πᾶν Παλαιστίνη καλέεται.”
This means:
“And these Phoinikians in olden times used to reside, as they themselves say, on the Erythraian Sea [i.e., the Red Sea], but then they crossed over from there and are now living along the sea of Syria. And this region of Syria even as far as Egypt is all called Palestine.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original
Herodotos’s “Syrians who are in Palestine” who practice circumcision
In addition to containing the earliest surviving attestations of the name Palaistínē in Greek, Herodotos’s Histories also contains what is probably the earliest surviving reference in a Greek source to the Jewish people, whom Herodotos seems to include within the larger ethnic category of “Syrians who are in Palestine.”
For context, Herodotos devotes the entire second book of the Histories to a detailed description of the geography, history, and ethnography of Egypt. As part of his description of Egyptian history, Herodotos argues that the Kolchians, a people who inhabited a region in the eastern Black Sea in what is now mostly the country of Georgia, were of Egyptian descent (Hist. 2.104). Today, no historian actually finds this argument convincing, but Herodotos tries to support it by pointing out supposed physiognomic and cultural similarities between the Egyptians and Kolchians.
One of his main arguments is that the Egyptians, Kolchians, and Aithiopians (i.e., the people who inhabited the region south of Egypt in what is now Sudan) are the only peoples who have practiced circumcision since the most ancient time and that all other peoples in the world who practiced the custom in his own time learned it more recently from the Egyptians, the Kolchians, or the Aithiopians. In doing this, Herodotos mentions other peoples of the ancient world who practice circumcision. He writes in his Histories 2.104.3:
“Φοίνικες δὲ καὶ Σύροι οἱ ἐν τῇ Παλαιστίνῃ καὶ αὐτοὶ ὁμολογέουσι παρ᾽ Αἰγυπτίων μεμαθηκέναι, Σύριοι δὲ οἱ περὶ Θερμώδοντα καὶ Παρθένιον ποταμὸν καὶ Μάκρωνες οἱ τούτοισι ἀστυγείτονες ἐόντες ἀπὸ Κόλχων φασὶ νεωστὶ μεμαθηκέναι. οὗτοι γὰρ εἰσὶ οἱ περιταμνόμενοι ἀνθρώπων μοῦνοι, καὶ οὗτοι Αἰγυπτίοισι φαίνονται ποιεῦντες κατὰ ταὐτά.”
This means:
“The Phoinikians and the Syrians who are in Palestine even themselves agree that they learned it [i.e., circumcision] from the Egyptians, and the Syrians who are around the Thermodon and Parthenios River and the Makrones who are neighbors to them say that they learned it recently from the Kolchians. For these are the only circumcised ones of human beings and they seem to do it in the manner of the Egyptians.”
There is no evidence that dates earlier than the second century CE for any ethnic group in the region Herodotos calls “Palestine” other than the Hebrews practicing circumcision. The texts preserved in the Hebrew Bible emphatically and consistently characterize the Philistines in particular as uncircumcised.
Thus, when Herodotos mentions the existence of “Syrians who are in Palestine,” who he claims practice circumcision and say that they learned the custom from the Egyptians, the people he has in mind are most likely Hebrews, if not specifically Jews.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a relief carving from the inner northern wall of the Temple of Khonspekhrod at Luxor dating to around 1360 BCE, depicting a boy undergoing circumcision
The Jews, however, are not the only people Herodotos seems to have regarded as “Palestinian Syrians.” As we have already seen, he seems to describe at least some population of Phoinikians as living in Syrian Palestine (Hist. 7.89.2). Elsewhere (Hist. 3.5.1), he mentions that, on the road from Phoinikia to Egypt is a city called Kadytis, which he describes as a “πόλιος ἐστὶ Σύρων τῶν Παλαιστίνων καλεομένων (“city of those who are called Palestinian Syrians”). Although the identity of Herodotos’s Kadytis is not certain, the strongest candidate is Gaza, which was originally a Philistine city and was certainly not a Jewish city.
Thus, Herodotos displays no clear indication of recognizing any ethnic or cultural distinction between Hebrews and other groups inhabiting the region that he calls Palestine. As far as he is concerned, they are all simply “Syrians who are in Palestine.”
Aristotle’s description of the Dead Sea
Writing about eighty years after Herodotos, sometime around 340 BCE or thereabouts, the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira seems to describe the Dead Sea as being in Palaistínē. He writes in his Meteorologika 2:
“εἰ δ’ ἔστιν ὥσπερ μυθολογοῦσί τινες ἐν Παλαιστίνῃ τοιαύτη λίμνη, εἰς ἣν ἐάν τις ἐμβάλῃ συνδήσας ἄνθρωπον ἢ ὑποζύγιον ἐπιπλεῖν καὶ οὐ καταδύεσθαι κατὰ τοῦ ὕδατος, μαρτύριον ἂν εἴη τι τοῖς εἰρημένοις· λέγουσι γὰρ πικρὰν οὕτως εἶναι τὴν λίμνην καὶ ἁλμυρὰν ὥστε μηδένα ἰχθὺν ἐγγίγνεσθαι, τὰ δὲ ἱμάτια ῥύπτειν, ἐάν τις διασείσῃ βρέξας.”
This means:
“And if, as some people tell stories, there is a lake in Palestine, which, if one binds a human being or animal and throws them in, then it floats and does not sink under the water, then it would be testimony for the things that have been said. For they say that the lake is so bitter and salty that there are no fish at all in it and, if one soaks a himation [i.e., a kind of cloak] in it and shakes it off, then it cleans it.”
Although Aristotle does not name the “lake” he describes, the only body of water that matches his description is the Dead Sea. Thus, it is clear that Aristotle’s definition of “Palestine” extended at least as far inland as the Dead Sea.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, based on an earlier Greek bronze original by the sculptor Lysippos
The name Palaestina in Latin
By the late first century BCE, the Romans had adopted the name Palaistínē into Latin as Palaestina. In a relatively early Latin use of the name, the Roman poet Tibullus (lived c. 55 – c. 19 BCE) in his Elegies 1.7.17–18 asks the rhetorical question:
“Quid referam, ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes
alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro”
This means:
“Why should I tell how, through the packed cities,
the white dove sacred to the Palestinian Syrian flutters unharmed?”
Although Tibullus’s use of the name Palaestina is geographically ambiguous, other Roman authors before the time of Hadrian use the name in a way that clearly encompasses the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Some even, like Herodotos, refer to Jews as “Palestinian Syrians.”
Notably, the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is known today in English as Ovid, in his poem Ars Amatoria 1.416, which he composed around 2 CE, references the “culta Palaestino septima festa Syro” (“seventh-day feast observed by the Palestinian Syrian”), by which he clearly means the Jewish Shabbat.
Ovid also uses the name Palaestina with an even broader definition to refer to the land as far as the Euphrates River in his Fasti 2.461–464, which he completed and published around the year 8 CE:
“terribilem quondam fugiens Typhona Dione,
tunc cum pro caelo Iuppiter arma tulit,
venit ad Euphraten comitata Cupidine parvo
inque Palaestinae margine sedit aquae.”
This means:
“Once Dione, fleeing the terrible Typhon,
at the time when Iuppiter bore arms on behalf of heaven,
went to the Euphrates accompanied by little Cupid
and sat on the brink of the waters of Palestine.”
Thus, at least for Ovid, even what is now the country of Syria was “Palaestina.”
ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1731 in Leipzig, showing what the illustrator imagined Ovid might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)
Philon and Iosephus
Jewish authors writing in the Greek language before the time of Hadrian also frequently use the name Palaistínē to refer to the geographic area between Phoinikia and Egypt. The Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE), who died over half a century before Hadrian was born, in his treatise Every Good Man Is Free 75 describes “Palestine Syria” as the land where a large portion of the Jewish people reside:
“ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἡ Παλαιστίνη Συρία καλοκἀγαθίας οὐκ ἄγονος, ἣν πολυανθρωποτάτου ἔθνους τῶν Ἰουδαίων οὐκ ὀλίγη μοῖρα νέμεται.”
This means:
“And even Palestine Syria is not barren of kalokagathia [i.e., the Greek ideal of aristocratic beauty and cultural refinement], where a not small portion of the much-peopled nation of the Jews reside.”
Writing several decades later, but still well before the reign of Hadrian, the Jewish historian Titus Flavius Iosephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE) states in his conclusion at the end of his Antiquities of the Jews (AJ 20.259) that, in accordance with his original intent when he began writing, he has recorded “τῶν ἡμῖν συμβεβηκότων τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κατά τε τὴν Αἴγυπτον καὶ Συρίαν καὶ Παλαιστίνην” (“the things which befell us Jews in Egypt and Syria and Palestine”).
ABOVE: Illustration made in 1584 by the French engraver André Thevet showing what he imagined Philon of Alexandria might have looked like (left) and illustration by an unknown artist for William Whiston’s 1737 translation of the works of Iosephus showing what the artist imagined the author might have looked like (right) (No one knows anything about what either of these men actually looked like in reality.)
What did Hadrian really do?
By this point, I think I have established that authors writing in the Greek and Latin languages long before the time of Hadrian frequently use forms of the name Palestine to refer to the entire geographic region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and, in some cases, even apply it to a much larger area extending as far as the Euphrates River. I have also established that some ancient writers like Herodotos and Ovid probably include Jews within the larger ethnic category of “Palestinian Syrians.”
With these facts established, let’s address the story about Hadrian’s supposed punitive renaming of Judaea as Syria Palaestina in response to the Bar Kokhba rebellion that scholars like Feldman have argued for and that non-scholarly authors like Samuels repeat as fact.
In reality, all we know is that Roman inscriptions attest that, sometime around the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, the Romans combined Judaea and Galilee into a single province, which was given the official name Syria Palaestina. This reorganization and renaming may have occurred shortly before or during the revolt. There is no surviving ancient source that explicitly says specifically when or why this change happened or who proposed it (although it could only have happened with Hadrian’s approval). Any statement about why the name was changed is simply a hypothesis.
That being said, it is a reasonably strong hypothesis that Hadrian may have combined Judaea and Galilee into a single province and given it the official name Syria Palaestina, which Greek and Roman authors had long used as an informal geographic name for the region and which was less closely associated with a specific ethnic identity, at least partly in order to deemphasize the region’s historical association with the Jewish people. We do not know this for certain, but it would make sense given the context and Hadrian’s known attitudes.
On the other hand, the claim that the renaming of the province was specifically intended to punish and demoralize the Jewish people by erasing the name Judaea from the map is not well supported by evidence. There is no surviving ancient source that expressly makes this claim and there is no recorded case of a Roman emperor ever renaming a province as means of punishing a particular people group. If it happened in the case of Judaea, it would be a unique and quite strange occurrence.
Additionally, changing the official name of a province would not be a very effective method of punishment and demoralization anyway, since, when talking about places, most people in the ancient world used informal regional names rather than official province names and changes in official names had limited impact on popular usage. In fact, even after Judaea was no longer the official name of a province, various writers (including many who were quite hostile to the Jewish people) continued to use the name informally to describe the region throughout the rest of antiquity and even into the Middle Ages.
The fact that the exact time of the renaming isn’t totally clear further complicates matters. Hadrian is recorded to have visited Judaea in 130 CE, two years before the revolt broke out, and it is entirely possible that he may have renamed it then, as some scholars in the past have argued (Syme, “The Wrong Marcius Tubro,” 90). If he renamed the province before the revolt, the timing would make a specifically punitive interpretation far less likely.
I suspect that when Hadrian approved the merging of Judaea into Syria Palaestina, he probably didn’t spend much time thinking about what Jews would think of it. They probably weren’t the audience he cared about. Instead, I think it is likely that he was much more concerned with what Roman and Greek citizens of the empire—especially members of the senatorial and equestrian elite—would think. Thus, he may have approved the new name in part as a form of propaganda to signal to Roman citizens that Judaea, which had been a notoriously rebellious province in the past, would be so no longer.
Another factor that may have influenced Hadrian’s choice of name for the combined province of Judaea and Galilee is his well-documented Philhellenism (i.e., love of all things Greek). He reportedly spoke Greek just as fluently as he spoke Latin, avidly studied Greek and Latin literature, and wrote prose and verse in both languages (Kassios Dion, Roman History 69.3.1). He followed the Greek cultural practice of pederasty and famously took a Bithynian Greek adolescent boy named Antinous as his lover. He even imitated Greek fashion and was the first Roman emperor to have himself depicted in his portraits with a beard.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing marble busts of Hadrian (left) and his Bithynian Greek lover Antinous (right) on display in the British Museum
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As emperor, Hadrian channeled an enormous amount of money from the imperial treasuries into lavish and expensive gifts for the cities of Greece, especially Athens, where the crumbling remains of many of the buildings and monuments he financed still stand today, such as the Library of Hadrian (located just off Monastiraki Square, near the ancient agora) and the Temple of Olympian Zeus (which, upon its completion in 131 CE, was the largest temple in all of Greece).
Given his passion for all things Greek, it is possible that Hadrian may have given the combined province of Judaea and Galilee the official name Syria Palaestina in part because that was the name that, centuries prior, eminent Classical Greek writers like Herodotos and Aristotle had used for the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. In choosing it, Hadrian may have wanted to further connect his public image and his empire to Classical Greece and its literary traditions.
Whatever the case may be, Hadrian’s formal renaming of the province followed upon centuries of Greek, Roman, and Jewish informal use of various forms of the name Palestine to describe the region. He did not invent the name or apply it to a larger territory than what speakers of Greek and Latin had applied it to before him.
ABOVE: Photo I took when I was in Athens this summer showing the remaining part of the façade of Hadrian’s Library, with the Tzistarakis Mosque in the background
Works cited
- Jacobson, David M. “Palestine and Israel.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 313 (1999): 65–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/1357617.
- Syme, Ronald. “The Wrong Marcius Turbo.” The Journal of Roman Studies 52 (1962): 87–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/297879.
Hello everyone! This comment is here to remind everyone to please be civil and to adhere to my policy on comments.
As a clarification regarding that policy, I do not consider criticism of the state of Israel, its government, its policies, or its military actions to be antisemitic per se; commenters are allowed to make criticisms of Israel, provided that those criticisms are substantive, relevant to the subject of the post, and do not invoke genuinely antisemitic claims or assumptions (such as that all Jews somehow bear culpability for the state of Israel’s actions, etc.).
That being said, since this is an ancient history post, I wish to keep the focus of this comments section on the topic of ancient history. As such, I will not allow any comments that only pertain to present-day situations and events and that have nothing to do with ancient history. I also reserve the absolute right to not approve or remove individual comments for any reason and to disable comments for this post altogether if this comments section gets too out of hand.
Thank you for this interesting article, I learned a lot from it! I guess this (that the region was called Palestine for most of Classical Antiquity) is the reason historians feel comfortable using terms like “first century Palestine” and “Palestinian Jews” for the background of the New Testament, that some others object to.
Jacobson’s theory is very clever I think! But as you say unlikely considering Greeks do not seem to have been aware of Hebrews/Jews as an ethnic or religious group before the Hellenistic period.
What does Tibullus’ white dove refer to, I wonder? My thoughts first went to the Semiramis-legend, but is there some Hebrew tradition I have forgotten?
Also, interesting to learn that Philo and Josephus also used the term, that is new to me!
Before I had believed the explanation that Hadrian renamed the province to punish the Jews (it would fit with his other actions I suppose); goes to show why one should check scholarly opinion on a topic. That it was in line with his philhellenism, and when he visited the region, seems very plausible to me.
A minor detail, but when it comes to Antinous, I was quite surprised to see the Oxford Classical Dictionary claim his relationship to Hadrian is “open to debate “; is this really disputed by many scholars? It seems to me that denying it was paederastic is a very strained reading
The white dove reference is most likely alluding to the fact that doves and fish were considered sacred to the Syrian goddess Atargatis.
For clarification, although the claim that no one used the name Palestine to describe the entire region that is now Israel-Palestine before Hadrian is only accepted among a relatively small circle of Zionist scholars, most scholars who have published on the subject do accept some version of the hypothesis that Hadrian renamed the province in order to punish and demoralize the Jews. My point in the final section of this article, though, is that the actual evidence on the ground to support this is weak and other motives are just as likely if not more likely.
As far as I’m aware, no one today really disputes that Hadrian and Antinous’s relationship was pederastic, with Hadrian being the erastes and Antinous being the eromenos. The Oxford Classical Dictionary is outdated in this regard. What does remain disputed, however, is how old Antinous was when the relationship began and how much agency he had in it.
Thank you, dear Spencer, for the informative reply!
Good to learn more about Atargatis; now that you mention them, I remember the fish from a passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis. I suppose I should read some Lucian if I want to know about the cult in more detail.
Thanks also for the clarification. To be honest I am a bit surprised many scholars believe that, considering both that the evidence is weak and that Syme had a different theory!
I suppose we will have to wait for a new edition of the OCD.
By the way, I am a bit surprised a flame was hasn’t erupted here yet! But maybe that is coming soon, alas
Yes, Syme held that Hadrian redesignated the province when he visited it c. 129 or 130 CE before the Bar Kokhba revolt and that the renaming may have been partly responsible for triggering the revolt.
I am also somewhat surprised that a flame war has not already broken out, but one must bear in mind that I posted this late last night and it is still only mid-afternoon here in the U.S., so I suspect that a lot of people haven’t had a chance to read the post yet. I think that there are also a lot fewer people who are regularly reading and leaving comments on my blog now than there were, say, two years ago. Additionally, nowadays, the people who read my posts right when I first make them are usually reasonable, respectful people; the most inflammatory comments usually start to come in several days after I make a post, after people who are not my regular readers start to find it.
The Philistines are themselves an interesting people, a mixture of indigenous Canaanites and Aegean sea peoples, and whom we have few written records outside the Hebrew Bible (which often portrays them as antagonistic towards the Israelites).
Indeed! A lot of the archaeological evidence also doesn’t seem to completely line up with the Hebrew Bible’s portrayal of them. For instance, the texts of the Hebrew Bible describe the Philistines as primarily worshipping the male god Dagon, but, at Philistine archaeological sites, the most commonly represented deity is a goddess!
I mean it’s still possible Dagon might have been an important god to them, but of course there’s (as of yet) no major surviving archeological evidence to back it up.
Of course. We know that some people in the Bronze Age Levant definitely really worshipped Dagon and it’s entirely possible that the Philistines regarded him as an important god. My comment above was more about how the archaeological evidence doesn’t always align with the expectations one forms based on reading the Biblical texts.
That was a wild defense of Bar Kochba by Samuels, calling him “valiant” and a liberator. An opinion not shared by Judaism — our Talmud portrays him as a pretender and someone who mutilated his own followers. And i speak as a jewish person myself. To say my own opinion I think his revolt was a terrible thing that laid the groundwork for much persecution over the coming millenia.
I would love an alternate history book about if Julian the hellene’s attempt to rebuild the temple and renormalize Rome’s relationship with the Jews had succeeded. He is a better hero for the Jews than Bar Kochba ever was.
I like your writing. You are, as best as I can determine, no insult intended, intellectually honest. You state succinctly that you are not neutral, re: the conflict in Israel/Gaza, yet you have kept that opaque in your writing. I seek clarity (honesty) more than anything. If I am to hold an opinion and it differs from someone else’s, it’s OK, we can just agree to disagree but continue to learn.
Hi, but why not drawing from the Bible? There is a lot of History there, concerning the Philistines and the Jews as you know.
The origin of the word Palestina might be dubious, but certainly the Philistines lived always in Gaza, while the Jews lived since Joshua´s time in what is today more or less Israel.
Excellent, comprehensive. What surprises me most is that a renowned scholar of Josephus such as Louis Feldman would not have been aware of use of Palestine by Herodotus and even Josephus. Does he perhaps have a more nuanced view or was he simply unaware?
Feldman acknowledges that ancient authors before the time of Hadrian like Herodotos, Aristotle, Philon, and Josephus use the name “Palaistine,” but he insists that they only use it in specific reference to the narrow coastal strip of land historically occupied by the Philistine city-states and not to the entire land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. In order to maintain this insistence, however, he has to resort to some really strenuous interpretative acrobatics.
For instance, he attempts to explain away Aristotle’s reference to the Dead Sea as being in “Palaistine” by asserting that Aristotle must have been misinformed about the Dead Sea’s location and that he must have incorrectly believed that it was in this narrow strip along the Mediterranean coast (an interpretation which requires more a priori assumptions than the far more parsimonious interpretation that Aristotle was simply using “Palaistine” to encompass a broader area than the one Feldman insists it denoted). He grants that Philon and Josephus use the name in a broader sense on a few occasions, but insists that they only do so in reference to the land of Canaan before the Jews came to occupy it. This temporal restriction, however, also falls apart on closer examination.
In other words, Feldman was well aware of the existence of these references, but he was very creative at inventing explanations for them other than the obvious.