Befuddling to many students of the Bible is that Abraham circa 2000 b. c. dealt with the Philistines near Beersheva, at Gerar (verdant at that time during the Ice Age), befuddled in that the Philistine nation would not become a major force in the region until about eight hundred years later (after the Ice Age but now in the Negev desert), circa 1200 b. c. where now is the Gaza Strip, yet the Philistines were progeny of the Casluhim (the Kasluhet in Egyptian inscriptions), progeny of Ham though the Misraim (see Genesis 10), settled in the land between the Promised Land and Egypt, and in eastern Libya, and on the island of Crete, also as far north as the Adriatic where they were known as the Palaeste, those who acquired the Mycenaean culture evidenced in the 1200 b. c. ruins of the Philistines in the Gaza Strip.
