The Israelites again did things that the Lord saw as evil, and he handed them over to the Philistines for forty years.
2 Now there was a certain man from Zorah, from the Danite clan, whose name was Manoah. His wife was unable to become pregnant and had not given birth to any children. 3 The Lord’s messenger appeared to the woman and said to her, “Even though you’ve been unable to become pregnant and haven’t given birth, you are now pregnant and will give birth to a son! 4 Now be careful not to drink wine or brandy or to eat anything that is ritually unclean, 5 because you are pregnant and will give birth to a son. Don’t allow a razor to shave his head, because the boy is going to be a nazirite for God from birth. He’ll be the one who begins Israel’s rescue from the power of the Philistines.” (Common English Bible)
“The Philistines are Upon Us: The Sea People’s Impact in God’s Word,” Week Three
If I say the term “plague doctor,” you probably know what I mean—and it’s not a doctor working in the midst of the current pandemic. The medical caregivers of the Middle Ages were not doctors in our modern sense of the term—germ theory, and the modern medicine built upon it, were still centuries away—but the practitioners tasked with caring for the victims of the bubonic plague are known as plague doctors. And they are instantly recognizable—a robe meant to cover as much of their body as possible, a hat to cover their heads, and a mask that covered as much of their face as possible, with a beak filled with herbs, flowers, and other nicer smells to ward off the stench.
The plague killed anywhere from a third to over half of the population of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in just several years in the 1300s. If you caught it, you were very likely dead within a week, maybe two. It was the most devastating pandemic in human history.
And yet, it had help. Not just from the vermin and ticks that spread the plague to humans, but from a massive famine that had occurred about thirty years prior and a decade of war between England and France. The combination of famine and war had left Europe especially vulnerable to a catastrophic pandemic like the plague.
That is often the course of major catastrophes—there is another catastrophe which precedes it to almost soften up the target for the devastating blow to follow. It was the case with the plague, and it was the case when the Sea Peoples, the Philistines arrived en masse on the Mediterranean shores.
This is a new sermon series for a new year, and it represents a labor of love on a topic I had been hoping to preach on for a while, and I think now is an especially relevant moment to scratch that proverbial itch: the cataclysmic impact of the Philistines upon ancient Israel in the Tanakh, or Old Testament.
You are likely already familiar with the Philistines, one of the Sea Peoples, as the martial opponents of famed Biblical heroes like Samson and David. What I always found interesting about the Philistines is how they seem to quite literally show up on Israel’s shores one day, wreak absolute havoc, and then we essentially never hear of them again.
So, much like in the song (forgive me) Cotton-Eyed Joe, we ought to ask of the Philistines, where did you come from and where did you go? These, I think, are important questions not simply for the sake of ancient history, but for the sake of the themes the stories of the Philistines evoke, of God’s providence and guidance in the face of overwhelming adversity that materializes seemingly overnight. I see in all of that echoes of the circumstances of our pandemic, as covid-19 materialized in just a few short months and has been a lethal threat to the world ever since. Questions around God’s grace and care in that circumstance are more than warranted, they are vital, and so I think the stories of the Israelites and the Philistines can act as a Biblical mirror of sorts for our own selves.
We return to this series, and will stay with it through February, by spending time with the Samson and David narratives, in which the Philistines figure prominently. And we begin with the angelic heralding of the birth of Samson, with a lot of story elements that should be familiar to us like the infertility experienced by Manoah and his wife simultaneous with the finding of divine favor. But in order to really do this angelic appearance justice, we need to take a step back and realize what has happened in the intervening years since the rise to prominence of the Israelites in Canaan.
Moses, Joshua, and Caleb were divinely selected and led the Israelites in an at least partially united front (I say partially because they all were also subjected to revolts and mutinies, even attempted coups). As Israel went from being led by them to the judges, it backslid from unified status to a loose confederation of tribes that operated more or less autonomously.
The exception to that would be when a powerful external threat appeared, and a singularly gifted and charismatic leader arose by popular acclaim to lead the tribes as a unified nation until the threat abated. We know those leaders as judges.
The judgeship of Israel, because it rested on the abilities and gravitas of the judges themselves, was not a hereditary monarchy. It wasn’t quite a full meritocracy or democracy either, but it was certainly closer to that those the subsequent monarchy would be. And like the monarchy, the judgeship relied on strength of will and character—an effective judge like Deborah could unify enough of the tribes to keep all the tribes relatively safe and secure. Ineffective judges, just like ineffective kings, couldn’t.
Which brings us to the circumstances surrounding the rise of Samson. Even before Samson is born, his arrival is not only determined, but necessitated because the Israelites have been handed over to the Philistines. But how, and why? The why is supplied by the writer of Judges: the Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, and the protection of the Lord left them. In between bondage in Egypt and falling to the Assyrians and Babylonians, this was a genuine rock bottom for Israel.
But the rise of the Philistines was never just about the Israelites. On the stage of the entire ancient Near East, the Israelites were always supporting cast members while the starring roles were taken by Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, Babylon, Cyprus, and Greece at Mycenae. Ancient Israel functioned in many unfortunate ways as the rope in a perpetual tug of war between those powers, with Egypt on one side of the rope and many of the other empires on the other. They were used to either being the rope in the game of tug-of-war or being one of the teams in tug-of-war. That was the way of things.
And then, in 1177 BCE, the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, one by one, began to collapse in the face of the invasions by the Sea Peoples, with only Egypt surviving after a Pyrrhic victory over the Sea Peoples left the empire a shadow of its former self. For every other nation along the coast of the Mediterranean, they were, as Judges 13 puts it, handed over to the Sea Peoples for a time. After centuries of tug-of-war, the Sea Peoples came in and played javelin or frisbee instead. It was a rout.
The classicist Eric H. Cline devotes an entire book to trying to explain why, and it was pivotal in inspiring this entire series. He explains that the Sea Peoples were the right invaders for the right time after a series of natural disasters, famines, draughts, and human error all combined to create a moment when the nations of the ancient Near East were vulnerable to an invader with whom they were not familiar, and against whom they had relatively little experience in battle.
And here, finally, is where Samson—or the foretelling of his birth here Judges 13—enters the story.
Because Samson’s martial prowess came primarily from his divine strength, he did not have to be an anti-Philistine specialist—as the writer of Judges goes on to document, Samson could slay a thousand Philistine warriors with simply a donkey’s jawbone. That is both a commentary on the sheer force of Samson’s physical capacities and his lack of tactics in his use of those capacities. Scripture does not depict a Samson who fights the Philistines with a skillset specific to the Philistine ways of combat, because he did not need to be that warrior. He simply overpowers them in strength.
Prior to Samson’s birth, the Israelites had already lived under Philistine dominion for forty years. And prior to Samson’s birth, Israel had gone twenty-five years since its last judge who was a great champion in combat, Jephthah the Gileadite (the very same who gave up his daughter).
The short shrift offered to the three judges between Jephthah and Samson offers us one hypothesis: that during this intervening period of twenty-five years, the tribes had been weakened enough after Jephthah’s death that Israel, like every nation around it save for Egypt, fell quickly to the Philistines. A rock bottom had been reached, and it took several decades to begin to climb out of that hole.
It is tempting to imagine Israel falling in a fell swoop to the Philistines, especially if you associate it as the writer of Judges does with divine wrath, just as it is tempting to imagine Canaan falling in a fell swoop to Joshua before. But the truth is almost always more complex, and it is likely that Israel, like the nations around it, had been weakened by the same natural disasters, the same draughts and famines, and possibly the same weak human rulers, as no judge between Jephthah and Samson was deemed worthy of more than a footnote by the writers of Scripture.
Which brings us back to today—we will mercifully skip back over the medieval plague for now. We may not have been weakened by a literal famine to make us even more vulnerable to the covid pandemic in the way that famine weakened Europe to the plague, but we have weakened ourselves through a spiritual famine. We have not loved our neighbors as we have loved ourselves. We have put our wants and desires ahead of protecting the least and most vulnerable among us. And so, so many have paid a price, with their physical health, their mental health, their livelihoods, or their lives.
We have done evil in the sight of the Lord, as the verdict in Judges reads, and as Paul famously reminds us, the wages of sin is death. We have suffered during this pandemic much more death than we had to…preventable death, tragically avoidable death.
The good news, in Judges and across Scripture, is that God does not stay silent in the face of our suffering. God continues to speak to us and seek to guide us. A God who is ever present does not give up on us or abandon us.
Back then, after the year in which civilization collapsed, God appeared to a woman whose name has been lost to history to tell her that a champion would arise, that he would be a nazirite from birth, and that he would be the one to end the destruction wrought by the invaders from the sea.
How will God appear to you, to lead you—and us—from the destructions that plague us today into a tomorrow built upon hope, life, and love.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
January 30, 2022