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“Was Jesus a Palestinian?”

The word “Palestine” has an interesting etymology. It appears five centuries before Christ in the secular history of the Greek Herodotus as Palaistínē [Παλαιστίνη]. The similarities to our modern noun are obvious. The Greek word in turn derives from pᵊlištî, a Hebrew word that appears as early as Genesis.

Other ancient languages like Akkadian and Egyptian had similar constructions, so it’s probable Hebrew simply transliterated it from another local tongue as “Philistine”. To the Hebrews it meant “immigrant”, to the Egyptians “sea people”.

From Caphtorites to Syrophoenicians

The original Philistines were not Arabs, and they had no ethnic relationship to the people currently living in Gaza or the West Bank.

According to the Bible, the original inhabitants of modern Palestine were Caphtorites who eradicated the Avvim living in Gaza and settled their cities before Israel conquered Canaan. Secular scholars do not generally dispute this. Centuries later, after Nebuchadnezzar carried off the Caphtorite Philistines into captivity, Phoenicians moved south from Tyre and Sidon and inhabited the region. Later writers of the Old Testament refer to these Phoenicians as “Philistines” too, strongly suggesting the term never denoted ethnicity, but simply referred to the current inhabitants of a particular piece of geography west of Israel. Ethnically, these would have been Sidonians [ṣîḏōnî] or Tyrians [ṣōrî], but geographically they were Philistines, or proto-Palestinians.

Thus, to Greeks five centuries before Christ, the area became Palaistínē. Well, part of Palestine anyway.

Shifting Territory

This gets confusing. It’s not just the residents of Palestine who changed multiple times over the centuries. The territory designated by the name also changed. In biblical parlance, Philistia was not just ethnically but geographically distinct from Canaan, and later from Israel/Judah. The Philistines were enemies of Israel for centuries. They disputed borders and raided each other’s cities. Nobody confused one with another.

Herodotus changed all that, or at least his writings reflect the changing usage. He used Palaistínē to refer to all the coastal lands stretching from Phoenicia to Egypt, including part of Syria and likely part or all of Israel’s God-given territory. In his day, the inhabitants of the area were Phoenicians, Syrians and probably Judeans. Though Herodotus does not specifically associate Jews with Palaistínē, he does refer to some of its population being circumcised. The fact that he does not specifically mention Jews, Judea or Israel should not surprise us. The Jews had only just returned from exile, and Herodotus was hundreds or thousands of miles away, writing for people who had no interest in the subject.

A century later, Aristotle referred to the Dead Sea as being within Palaistínē, which pretty much conclusively proves he too considered Judea within that territory.

Greek and Roman Usage

So then, by the fourth century BC, the term Palestine had expanded to designate not just the Mediterranean coast but also several hundred kilometers inland. Remember, Palestine was never an ethnic concept. Italians are not Greeks or Germans, but all three live in continental Europe. Like Europe, Palestine comprised more than one ethnic group for most of its history. This usage was still going on in the second century BC. Polemo of Ilium is cited.

Roman writers followed the Greeks in using the name Palaestina to refer to the whole land of Israel, including the former Philistine territory on the coast. Ovid calls the Jewish Sabbath a Palestinian custom, and in the first century AD, Philo referred to Israel as Palestine. However, this appears to have been largely a convention of historians rather than cartographers or politicians, which makes sense because the historical usage of the term was neither political nor ethnic. Roman maps from the first century make no mention of Palestine, but distinguish Syria from “Iudaea”, or Judea, as scripture refers to it.

“Palestine” Then and Now

Calling modern Arabs living on the Gaza Strip or West Bank “Palestinians” is consistent with thousands of years of traditional, non-ethnic usage of the term: they are residents of an area historically known as Palestine. We should not object to calling certain Arabs “Palestinians” from that angle. However, to the extent the term has been rebranded to fool American college students into thinking “Palestinian” is a distinct ethnicity with generations of exclusive territorial rights, it should be pointed out that from the perspective of the language at least, Jews are every bit as Palestinian as Arabs and always have been.

So was Jesus a Palestinian? Only in the sense that he lived and ministered within territory that some of his non-Jewish contemporaries referred to as Palestine. There is no indication in scripture that he or any of his fellow Jews thought of themselves that way.