philistine [OE] There is no reason to believe that the Philistines were philistines. In biblical times, during the 11th and 12th centuries bc, they were a people who occupied the southern coast of Palestine and who frequently came into conflict with the Israelites. The first book of Samuel tells the story of David and Goliath, a Philistine giant, and Judges relates Delilah’s betrayal of Samson to the Philistines. In the late 17th century students in the university town of Jena in Germany, bearing these passages in mind, started using Philister (German for ‘Philistine’) as an insulting name for a townsperson or non-student. By the 1820s English travellers had made this German university slang familiar, and people began to use philistine for ‘an uncultured person’. The word itself goes back to the same root as Palestine.