Why did the Romans change the name of Judea to Palestine?

A deliberate slight or something more prosaic?

Around the time of the Bar Kochba Revolt (the precise timing remains unclear), the Romans changed the name of the province of Judea to Palaestina. To be more precise, the regions of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and Idumea now became part of a larger province known as Syria Palaestina. It is commonly believed that the Romans changed Judea’s name (which literally means ‘Place of the Jews’) as a way of severing the Jewish connection to the land, and that they chose Palestine because it was derived from the Philistines, an ancient enemy of the Jews. While the former is a reasonable hypothesis, there is no evidence for the latter.

The Greek scholar and traveller Herodotus was the first to use the term Palestine to describe the land, in the second half of the fifth century BCE: “The region I am describing skirts our [Mediterranean] sea, stretching from Phoenicia along the coast of Palestine-Syria till it comes to Egypt, where it terminates.” There’s some debate as to which parts of the land he was referring to. Some argue he was referring to it all, possibly including areas in the Sinai and north and east of the Jordan. Others think he was referring specifically to the coastal plain. Either way, from then on, Palestine became a commonly used geographic term in the Greco-Roman world.

At first glance, it seems obvious that Palestine is connected to Peleshet (‘Land of the Philistines’) – the biblical term for the land of the Philistines, which embraced the five towns of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath (Goliath’s hometown), and Ekron. But the Philistines were defeated by the Babylonians in the late seventh century BCE. Some were exiled to Babylon (like the Jews two decades later following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem); then they vanished from the historical record.

By the time Herodotus was writing, then, the term Palestine had lost its specifically ethnic connection to the Philistines. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible, which was written in Alexandria between the second and third centuries BCE, Pelishtim (Philistines) was transliterated as Philisieim rather than translated as Palaistanoi (Palestinians), even though we know the latter term was available.

Because of this, David Jacobson, an associate fellow at the University of London, suggests that Palaistine and Palaistinoi weren’t exclusively related to the Philistines (Josephus was actually the first to refer to the Philistines as Palaistinoi). He provocatively argues that Palestine actually meant Israel, noting that the word Palestine is remarkably like the Greek palaistes, meaning “wrestler,” “rival,” or “adversary,” the meaning of Israel derived from the Biblical episode in which Jacob wrestled with an angel (Genesis 32:25-27). In the Septuagint, the Greek verb epalaien (“he wrestled”) is used to describe Jacob’s struggle with the stranger. For the Greeks, Jacobson notes, a wrestling contest against a divine adversary would have made a deep impression, as it was their most popular sport and a key part of Greek culture and education.

An obvious objection to this is that the full meaning of Israel is “wrestler with God.” But, in the Greek world, place-names with the generic name for god (theos) are very rare before the Christian era. The only example of such a place is Theodosia, on the north coast of the Black Sea, at the edge of the Greek world. Jacobson writes: “It is thus easy to understand how the Greeks, who had heard stories about the Israelite patriarchs, might have thought of Jacob/Israel as a great hero-wrestler who had stood up to an ethereal adversary who was unknown and unknowable.” The Greeks also loved puns. Both palaistes and Palaistine share seven letters in a row, including a dipthong. He concludes: “In Greek eyes, the people of Israel were descendants of an eponymous hero who was a god wrestler (a palaistes); the name wrestler also puns on the name of a similar-sounding people of the area known as Pelsehet.”

Whatever one thinks of this, it’s a learned and entertaining theory. And either way, the important thing to understand is that the name Palestine didn’t have the connotations it does for (some) Jews today. Josephus and Philo used it, as did rabbis in the midrash, and the Jerusalem Talmud was commonly known as the Palestinian Talmud, at least in English. Nor did the renaming of the province as Palestine mean that Judea fell immediately out of use – Jerome and many other scholars continued to use the name.

In fact, Judea wasn’t the only province to be renamed during this period. In 106, the Nabatean Kingdom, which included the far south of today’s Israel, the Sinai Peninsula, much of Jordan and the northwestern Arabian Peninsula (and even, for a brief period, Damascus), was annexed by the Romans, becoming part of a new province called Arabia Petraea. In both cases, the Romans replaced a specific ethnic etymology with a more commonly known geographical name. Changing the earlier name was clearly intended to remove its existing ethnic connotations, but the chosen replacement was not specifically intended as a slight.

India offers an example of a similar phenomenon. Like Palestine, the term India can also be traced to Herodotus, referring to the name of the Indus River, which derives from the Sanskrit Sindhu. Like Palestine, it was a commonly known term; also like Palestine, there is little evidence that its inhabitants used it to describe themselves until much later. Herodotus even described all the people living east of Persia as Indian, even though he knew nothing more about the land. More recently, the BJP has pushed to change India’s name to Bharat, a Sanskrit term found in scriptures from around 2,000 years ago. In both cases, these were initially geographic terms that came much later to acquire national-ethnic connotations. This remains the case even if one accepts the more traditional relationship between Palestine and Philistia, as by the time of Herodotus there were no Philistines left to speak of.

Most importantly, the contestation of the word Palestine is a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even as recently as the pre-state period, Jews in the land had no objection to the term. Whatever its precise origins or meanings, and irrespective of the reasons for it being chosen to replace the name Judea, Palestine should not be viewed as the adversary of Israel, but as an important part of the history of the land.