A week ago I connected the origins of Islam to genetics. By coincidence, an ancient DNA paper came out yesterday which speaks to particular historical points in the Hebrew Bible.

Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines:

The ancient Mediterranean port city of Ashkelon, identified as “Philistine” during the Iron Age, underwent a marked cultural change between the Late Bronze and the early Iron Age. It has been long debated whether this change was driven by a substantial movement of people, possibly linked to a larger migration of the so-called “Sea Peoples.” Here, we report genome-wide data of 10 Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Ashkelon. We find that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European-related admixture. This genetic signal is no longer detectible in the later Iron Age population. Our results support that a migration event occurred during the Bronze to Iron Age transition in Ashkelon but did not leave a long-lasting genetic signature.

The most likely scenario has long been that the Biblical Philistines were a composition population, made of Aegean folk who mixed with the local Canaanite substrate. These results confirm that.

That might seem revolutionary, but anyone who reads about the history of the Bible knows that all likely or plausible points are contested. Establishing that the Philistines were indeed associated with the migration of Aegean “Sea Peoples” though a genetic connection between them and Southern Europeans at least narrows the window of argumentation.

A bigger issue is one mooted by many Biblical scholars: what were the origins of the Israelites? The standard narrative implies they were exogenous, with Abraham being from Ur (southern Mesopotamia), with a sojourn in Egypt. But most non-fundamentalist scholars believe that the Hebrews emerged organically out of the Canaanites. The relevance of genetics is clear then: at some point in the near future the origins of the people of Judaea will become more clear. My bet is that it does turn out that they’re mostly Canaanite, though I wouldn’t be surprised by some exogenous signal, as one sees with the Philistines, who by the time of genotyping seems to have been heavily Levantine, and eventually were likely absorbed..

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