Conventional wisdom tells us that today’s modern Jewish people are descended from converts to the faith. An ancient form of Judaism is known to have been practiced well before the Bronze Age Collapse, as evidenced by a complete lack of pig bones in the region around Judea starting around 1300 BC, but the Israelites didn’t show up until around 1000 BC. The original population is not well known to us - the so-called Jebusites.
Is it possible that it was the Jebusites who fought the Philistines, and their stories later told by the converts? Is it possible the Philistines, who lived in the land and built cities, and who are said to have disappeared to parts unknown, are those same first converts? The Philistines were Mycenaean Greeks, after all, and modern Ashkenazi Jews have a lot of Greek and Armenian DNA.
Do these two puzzle pieces fit together?
To add to that question:
In 'A History of Christianity' Diarmaid MacCulloch writes:
'From an early period, the Children of Israel were also called 'Hebrews' [...]. What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and o the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value.'
Can someone maybe elaborate on that? I am by no means an expert on early Jewish history, but it certainly seems interesting and quite fitting to the question. If I am not mistaken early Christianity grew in a very similar climate.
If true it also answers /u/ummmbacon . The 'conventional wisdom' that the Hebrew people weren't a completely ethnically homogeneous group, so they must have had converts.
Diarmaid MacCulloch uses the following as his source: Naaman, N.: Habiru and Hebrews: The Transfer of a Social Term to the Literary Sphere