Who were the Canaanites?

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Accepted Answer

The Canaanites were the peoples of the land west of the Jordan before Israel and beside it: townsfolk of the coast and the valleys who spoke a Semitic tongue of which Hebrew itself is a dialect, and worshipped El, Baal, Asherah and Anat. The name is older than the Bible: a letter from Mari of the eighteenth century BC may already use it, the Amarna letters of the fourteenth call the land Kinahhi, when it was an Egyptian province, and the stele of Merneptah about 1208 BC names Canaan beside Israel. Genesis makes Canaan a son of Ham, cursed by Noah, and lists his sons from Sidon and Heth to the Jebusites and Amorites, with a border “from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza”. The map's point for Canaan stands in the hills of Galilee. The Bible uses the name in a narrow and a wide sense. To the spies “the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan”, while Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites hold the hills; elsewhere they are one of the seven nations “greater and mightier than thou”, to be driven out. Judah “could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron”; Manasseh left Beth-shean, Taanach, Dor, Ibleam and Megiddo, “but the Canaanites would dwell in that land”, and Israel “put the Canaanites to tribute”. In Deborah's song “then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo”; and the people “took their daughters to be their wives… and served their gods”. Because Canaanites traded, the word came to mean a merchant: Hosea's “merchant” is in Hebrew a Canaanite, and Zechariah's last line, “there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the LORD”, is read both ways. The Canaanites did not vanish: the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon were Canaanites who stayed on the coast, and the “woman of Canaan” who came to Jesus near Tyre is Mark's “Syrophenician”. What they believed is known from Ugarit on the Syrian coast, where tablets found from 1929 preserve the myths of Baal, El, Asherah and Anat of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. Whether Israel came from outside the land or from within it is debated. The Bible tells of a conquest; many archaeologists since the 1980s see the first Israelites as mostly hill-country Canaanites who settled new villages in the twelfth century BC, when Merneptah first names Israel; others defend an entry from outside, dated to the fifteenth or the thirteenth century. Even the name is argued over: Lemche held that no one ever called himself a Canaanite, and Rainey answered from the Amarna letters that the people of Canaan did.