To this day the term “Canaanite” evokes a cursed, condemned people. Such is understandable from a surface reading of the Old Testament. But who are the Canaanites?

Mary Ellen Buck’s Cascade Companions volume, The Canaanites: Their History and Culture from Texts and Artifacts, provides an accessible exploration into what can be known about the Canaanites.

Very little comes from the people who are called Canaanites; the definition can be expanded in ways which will make many of us uncomfortable. “Canaanites” are the inhabitants of the area of the Levant we know today as Israel and Lebanon and parts of Jordan and Syria. The term does not start showing up in Akkadian or Egyptian records until the Middle Bronze Age, but DNA evidence from Early Bronze Age skeletons demonstrate connections with later Bronze and Iron Age Canaanites, attesting to their antiquity in the land. The author explores the evidence we have regarding Canaanite city-states under the Egyptian Empire of the New Kingdom/Middle to Late Bronze Age as well as the archaeological and textual evidence for the Iron Age Canaanite kingdoms of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Phoenicia, and, yes, Israel and Judah. She concludes with some late examples of speaking of Canaanites in the New Testament and by Augustine, and with the evidence of continued DNA connections between Canaanites and modern Lebanese populations.

We may find it uncomfortable to associate the Israelites with Canaanites: after all, was not Canaan cursed in Genesis? Was Israel not to confess they were descended from wandering Arameans? And yet Classical Hebrew is most assuredly a Canaanite dialect, not an Aramaic one. While the Genesis author goes out of his way to demonstrate how Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob descend from purely Mesopotamian/Aramean stock, eleven of the twelve sons of Jacob would have married Canaanite women (and we know for certain Judah did), and Joseph married an Egyptian. Even if the Israelites only married within their tribes while sojourning in Egypt, they would continue to manifest almost 50% Canaanite DNA!

Furthermore, the witness of Israelite history reinforces the conclusion: they lived among and acted like Canaanites. Each Canaanite kingdom had its patron god (Chemosh for Moab; Milkom for Ammon; Qos for Edom), and they believed in El, Baal, Mot, Astarte, etc. as well; Israel confessed YHWH as their God, and they also served the Canaanite pantheon as well, which is what Moses and the prophets condemned.

It may make us uncomfortable, and the assertion that the multiplicity of Canaanite kingdoms was only a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age phenomenon also might challenge us in some ways, but the Israelites pretty much were no different from the Canaanites around them, and thus they suffered the same fate as the people around them. They only truly became distinctive as a result of the exile they endured.

While the author would thus challenge some of the ways in which Genesis portrays the nations/kingdoms around Israel and Judah, she does note an interesting climatological/historical detail: much of Canaan experienced significant drying for a few hundred years after the 4.2 Kiloyear event, and what had been mostly a farming society turned to shepherding. This would include, and feature, the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob according to the textual era (ca. 2150-1850 BCE), a time in which they all were pastoralists.

This is a great resource which well compiles a lot of good information about the Canaanites, and provides an invitation to re-assess the “Canaanite” like we are invited to re-assess the “Pharisee”: what is involved in how those groups are portrayed, what motivates the caricature, and how we can avoid mischaracterization and slander. ( )