Avvites Erotic

The Avvites were an ancient people of the southern Levant. They are remembered only in the Hebrew Bible, as villagers on the coast near Gaza before the Philistines took that land around the 12th century BCE, and no living community traces its descent from them.

Everything we know about who they were comes from one memory kept by other people: someone lived near Gaza before the Philistines did. Deuteronomy records it almost as a footnote. The Caphtorim, newcomers from Caphtor, destroyed the Avvim who lived in hazerim and settled in their place. The word is usually read as unwalled villages, though some translators take it as a place name. Caphtor is generally identified with Crete or the wider Aegean, and the Caphtorim with the Philistines. The note belongs to a short run of similar asides about earlier peoples who were pushed out: the Emim by Moab, the Horites by Edom, the Zamzummim by Ammon. In the case of the Avvim, the newcomers were not Israel's kin but strangers from across the sea.

The Book of Joshua muddies the picture. Its list of land not yet conquered names the five Philistine lords of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron, then adds the Avvites in the south, as if they had not disappeared after all. The Greek Septuagint translates their name the same way it translates the Hivites, a sign that ancient readers were already unsure who they were. A town called Avvim also appears among the settlements of Benjamin, but any link to the coastal people is guesswork.

The Avvites of Samaria

The same Hebrew name also belongs to a second group, with no known connection to the first. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century BCE. Afterward, according to 2 Kings, the Assyrian king brought settlers from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim into the towns of Samaria. The people of Avva made images of Nibhaz and Tartak, gods almost unknown outside that verse. No one has securely located Avva. It may be the Ivvah that an Assyrian envoy later named among cities whose gods had failed to save them. These Avvites are never mentioned again as a separate people. Still, the chapter describing their arrival became the basis for later Jewish polemic casting the Samaritans as foreign transplants, a reading the Samaritans themselves reject.

Neither group left a word of its own. No inscription, pottery style or burial has been tied to either one, and nothing is known of their speech. What survives is the name and what it still tells us: the land the biblical writers described was already layered with earlier peoples, and some of them are remembered only because someone else replaced them.