“The Philistines are Upon Us: The Sea People’s Impact in God’s Word,” Week Two
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration did something I had not known when I was taught US history, but which I think is pretty profound, and incredibly vital: it sent interviewers out to compile the testimonies, stories, and oral histories of remaining survivors of chattel slavery, who by that point in time would have been in their 80s and 90s, so that their memories would be preserved future generations—for us—and not lost to the obscurity of history. It was extremely difficult work that the interviewers themselves were not always the best at—for obvious reasons, the race of the interviewer, amid the deep racism of the 1930s, could impact just how candid a formerly enslaved person was willing to be. But their words couldn’t afford to be lost.
Today, that work might be called divisive, and I am certain that it was back then. But when we talk about the arc of history, whose history are we telling and respecting? Whose history is given deference and credence? What history do we call unifying, and what history is divisive? The Bible is, among many other things, a collection of historical texts, how do we read it to understand history?
Fortunately, the Bible also offers us tools in that regard. It presents an arc, first and foremost, of the history of the ancient Israelites, but interwoven in that history are stories of many other peoples, including the Philistines, with whose stories we are spending these two months. And as we prepare for the heart of this series, with vivid tales of valor and heroism, ask yourself, whose history have I been told? Whose history have I not been told? Whose voices are missing from my understanding of what has taken place in humanity’s past? For those answers also influence humanity’s shared future.
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, and we will explore some of those stories. 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 began this series last week with the story of the tamarisk tree planted by Abraham and the Philistine king Abimelech, and we turn today to two brief excerpts from Exodus and Joshua on the presence of the Philistines across the ancient history of the tribes, from the patriarchs to the judges.
What we see in both of those excerpts is a Philistine presence, first on the Sinai peninsula in Exodus, then in Canaan proper in Joshua, all very likely along the Mediterranean coast. In Exodus, the presence of the Philistines is offered up as a reason for the Israelites taking the long way around the Sinai peninsula. Tradition says this longer route took forty years, but what is more likely—and what the archaeological record tends to suggest—is that it did not take forty years, and over the course of decades the Israelites slowly conquered Canaan from within rather than via an external invasion.
I bring that distinction up because that external invasion is how the Philistines are often understood in the Bible, as marauding outsiders from the sea, and again, the archaeological record would seem to suggest that. I’ll talk about it more in a future sermon, but there is a year—1177 BCE—that really marked the devastation of the Sea Peoples after the empires of the day from Egypt to the Hittites had been weakened by successive famines and natural disasters, making them particularly vulnerable to an invasion by a people of whom they knew little, and whose battle tactics would be unknown.
So what the Sea Peoples accomplished—a rapid, widespread incursion—is sort of retconned and attributed to the Israelites under Joshua, even though the Israelite conquest of Canaan was likely much slower.
Why? Why present the conquest of Canaan this way? Because the arc of history, how we tell it and what is included—and what gets excluded—has always been an expression of value. Whose stories are we telling, and how are we telling them? Remember when I spoke last week on the importance of memory, of the act of remembering as a spiritual discipline—I said that we build memorials and monuments to horrors and celebrations alike. But which horrors, and which celebrations? Who decides it? Why do they decide it? The power to remember is one of the most potent powers of all.
Which is why this weekend is so important. Not because the Civil Rights Movement could ever be reduced down to one person, because it cannot and must not, but because how we remember it is an expression of both values and power.
I make a regular habit of reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, which was written in response to an open letter by several other (all white) clergy entitled “A Call for Unity,” which demanded that the Civil Rights Movement not come to Birmingham in the name of an ephemeral unity. And I think this is important to ask when we enter the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity—unity on whose terms? Just as we need to ask, who is deciding what constitutes history, we need to ask, who is deciding what constitutes unity?
For Rev. Dr. King, a unity that papers over injustice and tension is not unity at all. True unity, deep unity, comes from the presence of justice. He concluded his letter with a fervent wish that white Christians reevaluate the Civil Rights Movement anew, saying:
I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime outrage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths…they will be the old, oppressed, battered, Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willing to go to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when theses disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy.
The unity I pray for, the arc of history that I hope we will choose to remember, is rooted in the knowledge that civil rights were not simply gifted to other Americans out of sheer goodwill. Over many years, Black Americans had to struggle for and demand their civil rights precisely because their white neighbors repeatedly and steadfastly refused. That is not unity, that never was unity. And if all we do is reduce the Civil Rights Movement down to the single sentence of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, we ignore all of that historical context that it was not simply about individual judgment, but of widespread, society-endorsed hatred. And hatred is true unity’s polar opposite. It may create unity against an agreed-upon object of hatred, but that is not true unity.
Yet with the justice that Rev. Dr. King believed the universe bends towards does indeed come unity. Because I think that when true justice is present, we do not have to create objects of our hatred and targets of our bigotries to collectively dislike together, as a shared experience in prejudice. Unity that is predicated on such an experience will not produce the fruits of the spirit of which Paul and James, the brother of the Lord, write of, and to which are to aspire.
So, in this moment in our shared history, battered and worn down from two years of a pandemic, centuries of racial wounds that have never truly healed, and divisiveness driven by leaders who would love nothing more than to see us disunited, may we be the people of whom our denomation’s founders spoke—the people for whom unity, true, deep, and lasting unity, is our polar star.
May that star guide us still, like the magi of old.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
January 16, 2022