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Timeline of the name Palestine

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Frontispiece of Adriaan Reland's Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata
Adriaan Reland · Public domain

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The term Peleset is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, starting from c. 1150 BCE during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The word is transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t-w, as Egyptians did not use the consonant "l" in writing, substituting it with "r" instead, and it is generally accepted that this is an ethnonym referring to the Philistines. The Assyrians used the terms "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning in c. 800 BCE through to refer to the region inhabited by the Philistines. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term. The terms used in these inscriptions are considered cognates of the Biblical term Pəlīštīm used in the Hebrew Bible. This Biblical term, commonly translated as Philistines, is ambiguous in its original usage: the 10 uses in the Torah neither define the boundaries of the region, nor provide any meaningful description, and the detailed usage in two later books describing the inhabitants of five coastal cities has been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land", due to the Septuagint’s consistent replacement of Pəlīštīm with allophuloi (Αλλόφυλοι, 'other nations').

The ancient Greek term that forms the basis for the term Palestine first appears in the 5th century BCE when the historian Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wide region for Philistia, extending beyond the coast to the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley. Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, these examples covering every century from the 4th BCE to the 1st CE. There is, however, no evidence of official use of the name in the Hellenistic period on any coin or inscription, and it is absent from the New Testament.

In the early 2nd century CE, the Roman province called Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), the last of the major Jewish–Roman wars. A commonly held yet contested historical interpretation sees the name change as a punitive measure aimed at severing the symbolic and historical connection between the Jewish people and the land. Other Roman provincial renamings had never followed a rebellion, making this instance unique. Around the year 390, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic, and Jund Filastin became one of the military districts within the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham.

The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English, and was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. The term is recorded widely in print as a self-identification by Palestinians from the start of the 20th century onwards, coinciding with the period when the printing press first came into use by Palestinians. In the 20th century the name was used by the British to refer to "Mandatory Palestine," a territory from the former Ottoman Empire which had been divided in the Sykes–Picot Agreement and secured by Britain via the Mandate for Palestine obtained from the League of Nations. Starting from 2013, the term was officially used in the eponymous "State of Palestine." Both incorporated geographic regions from the land commonly known as Palestine, into states whose territory was named Palestine.

Etymological considerations

The English term "Palestine" itself is borrowed from Latin Palaestīna, which is, in turn, borrowed from Ancient Greek Παλαιστῑ́νη, Palaistī́nē, used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.

How the term entered the Greek is uncertain. The first known mention of the Philistines as Peleset is at the temple of Ramesses in Medinet Habu, which refers to the Peleset among those who fought against Egypt during Ramesses III's reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset's Statue. The last is the only Egyptian inscription to use Peleset to refer to a region, rather than a people. The Assyrians used the terms "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BCE through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later, to refer to the region. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term. It is likely to have reached the Greek from an Aramaic loanword.

Whilst the term was used in Egyptian and Assyrian times, prior to the time period in which the Bible is thought to have been written, scholars generally conclude that the term is cognate with the Biblical Hebrew פְּלִשְׁתִּים Pəlīštīm. The further etymology is uncertain; it is unknown whether the term was an endonym or exonym, no word for Philistia has been found in the sparse attestations of the Philistine language, and it is unknown whether the Hebrew, Egyptian, and Assyrian terms derived from a common source, or if they simply borrowed the name from one another and changed it to match their own phonological customs.

This uncertainty has engendered several speculative theories. For example, Martin Noth and David Jacobson see a derivation from παλαιστής, palaistês in the Greek form, a noun meaning "wrestler/rival/adversary". and have speculated that Palaistinê was meant as both a transliteration of "Philistia" into Greek and a direct translation of the Hebrew name "Israel" – which refers to Jacob wrestling with the angel, in line with the Greek penchant for punning transliterations of foreign place names.

In English versions of the Bible, Pəlīštīm is translated as "Philistines"; however, it is thought that the word means different things in different parts of the Bible. The word and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible, of which 10 uses are in the Torah (the first use being in Genesis 10, in the Generations of Noah), with undefined boundaries and no meaningful description, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the later Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel that contain the well known biblical story of a coastal state in conflict with the Israelites.

By the time the Septuagint (LXX) was translated, the term Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), first popularized in written form by Herodotus, had already entered the Greek vocabulary. However, the term was not used in the LXX to describe Philistia. Instead, the term Land of the Phylistieim (Γη των Φυλιστιειμ) is used from the books of Genesis through Joshua. The Septuagint later uses the alternate term "allophiloi" (Αλλόφυλοι, "other nations") from the Books of Judges onward, such that post-Judges invocation of "Philistines" in Septuagint-based translations have been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land" when used in the context of Samson, Saul and David. Rabbinic sources explain that these peoples were different from the Philistines of the Book of Genesis.

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