Where does the name "Palestine" comes from?
Where exactly does the name "Palestine" come from? The earliest records we have can be traced back to the Egyptian word "Peleset" around 1150 BC, which referred to a neighboring region of people whom most historians generally identify as the Philistines. The Philistines were believed to be a seafaring people who migrated from the eastern Mediterranean to the southern Levant region around the 12th century BC. They began to decline and disappear as a distinct people from the 8th and 6th centuries BC from conquest and assimilation. The Hebrews called the Philistines "Plištīm" or "Pelishtim" and referred to the region they occupied as "Peleshet." Both the Hebrew "Peleshet" and the Egyptian “Peleset” are derived independently but refer to the same geographic region and the people that inhabited them, the Philistines. In Biblical times, the Philistines occupied primarily the coastal regions in what today is southwestern Israel, incl...