Canaan

• 1. Introduction

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  Canaan is the land that a worried governor named Rib-Hadda had in mind when he wrote to his Egyptian overlord in the 14th century BC. "If the king neglects Byblos, of all the cities of Canaan, not one will be his." The warning survives among the Amarna letters, a collection of diplomatic correspondence addressed to the pharaoh Akhenaten. Rib-Hadda wrote as though Canaan were a prize that an Egyptian king could hold or lose. Yet nobody has ever agreed on where its borders ran. Egyptian scribes, biblical authors and Greek writers each used the name in different ways. Scholars still argue about whether the people who lived there ever used the word for themselves. This documentary follows the trail of that name. It asks where the word came from, who lived behind it, and how a province of Egypt became a Promised Land. It also asks why a place that drops out of the ancient record for centuries still turns up in hymns and in modern politics.

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• 2. Name Of Uncertain Meaning

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  The Amarna letters spell the name Kinâḫna, while the Hebrew form is Kənaʿan. From Hebrew it passed through Koine Greek and Latin into English. English speakers have pronounced it with an opening "kay" sound since about 1500, a change tied to the Great Vowel Shift. The earliest Greek spelling comes from Hecataeus, who lived from about 550 to 476 BC and wrote it as Khna. A Phoenician form also appears on coins from Berytus dated to the 2nd century BC.

  Egyptian scribes used other labels for the same ground. Retjenu was their usual name for Canaan or Syria, and they split it into a lower and an upper part. The strip between Ascalon and Lebanon, reaching inland to the Sea of Galilee, they called Djahy. In the 2nd millennium BC, Egyptian texts also used Canaan itself for an Egyptian-ruled colony. It was bounded by the Mediterranean on the west, the neighbourhood of Hamath in Syria on the north, and the Jordan Valley on the east. In the south, a line from the Dead Sea to around Gaza closed it off. Those limits broadly match the Hebrew Bible, though Egyptian writers also counted the coastal city of Qadesh in northwest Syria.

  What the name originally meant is unclear. An early explanation derives it from a Semitic root, knʿ, meaning to be low, humble or subjugated. Some scholars take that to mean "lowlands", in contrast with Aram, which would then mean "highlands". Others propose that it meant "the subjugated" and named Egypt's province in the Levant. That would work like Provincia Nostra, the first Roman colony north of the Alps, which eventually became Provence.

  In 1936 Ephraim Avigdor Speiser offered a more colourful idea. He connected Canaan to a Hurrian word, Kinaḫḫu, apparently a term for the colour purple. If he was right, Canaan and Phoenicia were synonyms, both meaning "Land of Purple". Tablets found at the Hurrian city of Nuzi in the early 20th century appear to use Kinaḫnu for red or purple dye. Kassite rulers of Babylon were laboriously making such dye from murex molluscs as early as 1600 BC. On the Mediterranean coast, the Phoenicians produced it from a byproduct of glassmaking. Purple cloth became a famous Canaanite export, and the book of Exodus mentions it. The cloth of Tyre was known far and wide, and the Romans linked it with nobility and royalty. The Greek word for purple seems to lie behind the name Phoenicia, though nobody can say whether the word came from the place or the place from the word. Robert Drews notes that Speiser's proposal has generally been abandoned.

  The hunt for the first written mention is just as unsettled. The Ebla tablets, dated to about 2350 BC, speak of a "Lord of ga-na-na". Some scholars read this as a title of the god Dagon, "Lord of Canaan", but the reading is disputed. Jonathan Tubb allows that it may be a third-millennium reference, yet he places the first certain one in the 18th century BC. A letter from the time of Shamshi-Adad I, found in 1973 in the ruins of Mari, says that "the brigands and the Canaanites" were stationed at a place called Rahisum. Scholars dispute whether the word meant people of a particular region or simply people of foreign origin. Drews therefore points to a different record as the first certain cuneiform reference. It is the statue of King Idrimi of Alalakh, from the 16th century BC. After a popular uprising against his rule, Idrimi fled with his mother's relatives to "the land of Canaan" and began preparing to win back his city.

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• 3. Between Great Powers

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  In the 14th century BC, the interests of the Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni and Assyrian empires converged or overlapped on Canaan. Egypt's grip had once been firmer. Under Thutmose III, who ruled from 1479 to 1426 BC, the regular presence of the Egyptian army kept Amorites and Canaanites loyal. Yet his reports noted a troubling newcomer, the Habiru, known in Egyptian as 'Apiru. They seem to have been mercenaries, brigands or outlaws who hired themselves out to any local mayor, king or princeling willing to pay. The Habiru look more like a social class than an ethnic group. One analysis finds that most were Hurrian, mixed with Semites and a few Kassite and Luwian adventurers. Their appearance in Canaan seems tied to Mitanni, a state north of Assyria ruled by a charioteer aristocracy called the Maryannu.

  The province grew restless under Amenhotep III. Aziru, son of Abdi-Ashirta, tried to extend his power into the plain of Damascus, and Akizzi, governor of Katna, reported it to the pharaoh. In the reign of Akhenaten, who ruled from about 1352 to 1335 BC, father and son shifted their loyalty to the Hittites under Suppiluliuma I. They had first feared the Hittites. Then they made a treaty with the Hittite king and attacked the districts that stayed loyal to Egypt. Loyal governors such as Rib-Hadda of Gubla sent touching appeals for help. The pharaoh, absorbed in his religious innovations, was too busy to attend to them.

  The letters preserve the voices of the princes themselves. Zimrida, king of Sidon, reported: "All my cities which the king has given into my hand, have come into the hand of the Habiri." Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem pleaded for troops: "If (Egyptian) troops come this year, lands and princes will remain to the king, my lord; but if troops come not, these lands and princes will not remain to the king, my lord." The princes also slandered one another. Etakkama accused Namyawaza of surrendering the king's cities, while Namyawaza wrote that "I and my warriors and my chariots" were "at the disposal of the (royal) troops".

  Outsiders wrote about Canaan too, mostly as a place they needed to cross. Burna-Buriash II complained that his merchants had been detained in Canaan and then robbed and killed in Hinnatuna by the rulers of Acre and Shamhuna. He demanded compensation because "Canaan is your country". Tushratta addressed a letter "To the kings of Canaan", asking that his messenger be given safe entry into Egypt.

  One letter from Abimilku shows the pharaoh asking for intelligence. The king had instructed him: "write to me what you have heard from Canaan." Abimilku answered with news from places as far apart as Ugarit, Damascus, Sidon and Danuna in eastern Cilicia.

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• 4. Deep Roots

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  Around 4500 BC a people that archaeologists call the Ghassulians arrived in Canaan from a homeland nobody can identify. They brought a fully developed tradition of metalwork. Their copper pieces resemble artifacts of the later Maykop culture, so some scholars think the two represent branches of one original tradition. The Ghassulians mined malachite at Wadi Feynan, and all the copper was smelted at sites of the Beersheba culture. Much of what is known about later periods comes from 20th century excavations at Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, En Esur and Gezer. At the end of the Chalcolithic, the urban settlement of En Esur rose on the southern Mediterranean coast.

  By about 2300 BC, Ebla, where people spoke an East Semitic language called Eblaite, had been absorbed by the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great and Naram-Sin. That empire collapsed in 2154 BC, and newcomers arrived using Khirbet Kerak pottery, which came from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris. DNA analysis likewise shows that between 2500 and 1000 BC, populations from the Chalcolithic Zagros and the Bronze Age Caucasus moved into the southern Levant. The first cities of the region arose in this era, and En Esur and Megiddo were among the major sites. Their people kept regular contact with Egypt to the south and with Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to the north. The era ended with the cities abandoned and a return to farming villages and semi-nomadic herding, though craft specialists kept working and trade routes stayed open.

  Ancient DNA has begun to describe the people themselves. A 2017 study of five Canaanite samples found that about half of their genome came from local Neolithic populations. The other half came from eastern migrants related to Chalcolithic Iranians, who arrived roughly 5,000 years ago. A 2020 study found that Canaanites from about 2500 BC to about 1000 BC were genetically similar to one another across what is now Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. The same study warns that this does not prove direct descent for any modern group. A 2022 study estimated that the local Neolithic share of ancestry, mostly Natufian, fell by about 8 percent each millennium. Even so, that older ancestry kept contributing to later peoples.

  Around 2000 BC urbanism returned, and the region divided among small city-states, of which Hazor seems to have been the most important. Around 1650 BC, Canaanites invaded the eastern Nile delta and, as the Hyksos, became the dominant power there. Excavations show that the region's prosperity peaked in this period under Hazor, which was at least nominally tributary to Egypt for much of the time.

  Tel Kabri holds the remains of the most important Middle Bronze Age city of the Western Galilee. It is the only Canaanite city that can be excavated in its entirety, because nobody built another city over it after it was abandoned. Its palace was decorated with frescoes in the Minoan style, a sign of influence from Crete.

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• 5. Merchants And Farmers

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  Since about 3100 BC, most Canaanites lived in walled settlements on the plains and the coast. Mud-brick fortifications ringed them, and farming hamlets nearby fed them. Around the small market towns, peasants grew local garden crops, olives, grapes for wine and pistachios, while wheat and barley covered the wider fields. Shepherds stayed with their flocks through the wet season. In summer they brought the animals back to graze on the harvested stubble, closer to water. The Gezer calendar and the biblical cycle of the year both preserve this rhythm.

  Canaanite myth mirrored the geography. A storm god, called Teshub by the Hurrians and Ba'al Hadad in the Semitic Amorite or Aramean tradition, struggled against Ya'a, Yaw or Yam, the god of the sea and rivers. The story captures a polarity between the coastal towns and the farming interior.

  One account holds that the whole system was a response to long stable stretches of climate, broken by short bursts of change. In stable times, coastal cities grew into city-states of merchant princes, profiting from their position between Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hittites and Minoan Crete. Inland kingdoms specialised in farm products. When the climate shifted fast, commercial farming gave way to subsistence crops. Herders became year-round nomads and wandered north to the Euphrates or south to the Egyptian delta. Chieftains sometimes raided settlements and rewarded their followers from the spoils or from tariffs on merchants. It has been suggested that the Patriarchal tales of the Bible reflect such social forms.

  When the weather steadied and trade resumed, it revived first along the coast, in the Philistine and Phoenician cities. To avoid the heavy tariffs there, a second route ran from Kadesh Barnea through Hebron, Lachish, Jerusalem, Bethel, Samaria, Shechem and Shiloh. It then crossed Galilee to Jezreel, Hazor and Megiddo. A third route ran from Eilat and Timna through Edom, Moab and Ammon to the Aramean states of Damascus and Palmyra. Philistines, Tyrians, Judah and Israel all tried, mostly without success, to control the interior trade. Eventually the wealth drew powerful neighbours, who levied tribute, taxes and tariffs.

  Ugarit, at Ras Shamra in Syria, complicates the picture. Archaeologists consider it quintessentially Canaanite, although its Ugaritic language does not belong to the Canaanite group proper. A letter from its king to Ramesses II mentions money paid to the "foreman of the sons of the land of Canaan". Jonathan Tubb takes this to suggest that the people of Ugarit did not think of themselves as Canaanite.

  Western Aramaic, one of the two lingua francas of Canaanite civilization, is still spoken in a number of small Syrian villages. Phoenician Canaanite, by contrast, disappeared as a spoken language around 100 CE.

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• 6. The Long Retreat

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  In 1275 BC, Ramses II fought the Hittites to a stalemate at Kadesh, and Egypt's hold on Canaan began to slip soon afterwards. The Hittites took over the northern Levant. Ramses, absorbed in his own building projects, let control dwindle. He still campaigned hard in Canaan, and his forces pushed into Moab and Ammon. There a permanent fortress garrison was named simply "Rameses". Around 1290 BC, Seti I is said to have defeated the Shasu, Semitic-speaking nomads who lived just south and east of the Dead Sea. Under Ramses' successor Merneptah, a stele claimed the destruction of sites in the southern Levant, including a people known as "Israel".

  Egypt's withdrawal was a slow process that lasted some one hundred years, from the late 13th century BC to close to the end of the 12th. Its likeliest cause was political turmoil inside Egypt rather than the Sea Peoples, since there is little evidence that they destroyed much around 1200 BC. Egyptian garrisons at Deir al-Balah, Ascalon and Tel Mor were abandoned without destruction. Others met violence. The garrison at Aphek was destroyed, likely in warfare, at the end of the 13th century. Radiocarbon dates place the destruction of the Egyptian gate complex at Jaffa between 1134 and 1115 BC. Beth-Shean was partly destroyed in the mid-12th century, possibly by an earthquake.

  The evidence for a violent catastrophe around 1200 BC is thinner than often assumed. At Lachish, a temple was ritually terminated and one house burned near two ovens, yet the city was later rebuilt on a grander scale. Most of Megiddo shows no damage. The monumental buildings of Hazor were destroyed in the mid-13th century BC, long before the Late Bronze Age ended. Ashdod, Tel Dor and many other sites were not burned at all. Archaeologist Jesse Millek has shown that trade in Cypriot pottery largely ended around 1300 BC, and Mycenaean pottery around 1250 BC. Both ended before the supposed catastrophe. Trade with Egypt continued afterwards, and so did the import of tin and of lead from Sardinia. Ann Killebrew adds that Jerusalem was a large walled settlement between about 1800 and 1550 BC and again between about 720 and 586 BC. In the centuries between, it was a small, unfortified town.

  Around 1194 BC, Ramesses III is said to have built a temple to the god Amen in a place called Pa-Canaan. Scholars dispute whether that meant the city of Gaza or the whole Egyptian-occupied corner of the Near East.

  By the Early Iron Age, Israel and Judah dominated the southern Levant. Philistine city-states held the coast, Moab, Ammon and Aram-Damascus lay east of the Jordan, and Edom lay to the south. The Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the entire region during the 10th and 9th centuries BC and held it for three hundred years. Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty made a failed attempt to regain a foothold, and Assyria went on to conquer Egypt itself. Between 616 and 605 BC, civil wars and an alliance of Babylonians, Medes, Persians and Scythians brought Assyria down. The Neo-Babylonian Empire inherited the west until it collapsed in 539 BC and the region passed to the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great conquered it in 332 BC. Rome and then Byzantium followed, until the Arab conquest in the 7th century AD.

  The last known Egyptian reference to Canaan is a small statuette of an "Envoy of the Canaan and of Peleset, Pa-di-Eset, the son of Apy". It is dated to 900-850 BC, more than 300 years after the previous known inscription. During the period from about 900 to 330 BC, the dominant Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid empires make no mention of Canaan at all.

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• 7. Canaan In Scripture

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  The Hebrew Bible names Canaan and the Canaanites some 160 times, mostly in the Torah and in the books of Joshua and Judges. Canaan is first a person, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah. When Ham "looked upon" the drunk and naked Noah, Canaan was cursed with perpetual slavery. The phrase sometimes carries sexual overtones in the Bible. Interpreters have proposed offences ranging from castration or rape to maternal incest. Some readers judge from the surrounding verses that Canaan himself committed the crime. Another suggestion is that the Hamitic story reflects Egyptian colonisation of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, since the Bible counts the Egyptians as Hamites.

  The Table of Nations makes Canaan the ancestor of other peoples. These include Sidon, his firstborn, and the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites. Its borders run from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, then inland toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha. Other passages give different lists, one with ten names and another with only six. It has been argued that "Canaanite" works as a figure of speech covering both the broad Canaanite nation and one tribe within it. The Bible also calls the inhabitants Amorites and Hittites. John N. Oswalt observes that Canaan is the land west of the Jordan, distinguished from the area east of it. In Scripture, he says, it "takes on a theological character" as "the land which is God's gift" and "the place of abundance".

  Yahweh promises the land to Abraham in Genesis and delivers it to the Israelites, his descendants. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings tell of the entry under Joshua after the death of Moses. The renaming of the Land of Canaan as the Land of Israel marks the conquest. The Canaanites are one of seven nations said to have been driven out, alongside the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. One of the 613 commandments prescribes that no inhabitants of the cities of six of these nations be left alive.

  Archaeology complicates the story. Biblical scholar Mark Smith, citing archaeological findings, suggests "that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature." Ann Killebrew likewise finds the biblical account of Canaan's origins problematic, since evidence suggests the Israelites were a subset of Canaanite culture. Other scholars suggest that the Israelites came from the Shasu and other seminomadic peoples south of the Levant. Volkmar Fritz sees real differences in material culture, and explains the similarities by long contact between nomadic Israelites and Canaanites. David Frankel reads a passage in Chronicles as hinting at an established Israelite presence, mainly of Ephraimites, before Joshua's conquest.

  In 738 BC the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Israel. In 586 BC the Kingdom of Judah was annexed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire, after a siege of Jerusalem that lasted either eighteen or thirty months.

  The New Testament uses "Canaan" only twice, both times in Acts, while paraphrasing older stories. Matthew calls a woman in an exorcism story Khananaia, a Canaanite woman, where Mark calls her Syrophoenician. The King James Version names one disciple Simon the Canaanite. By the Second Temple period, which ran from 530 BC to 70 AD, the Hebrew word had become less an ethnic label than a synonym for "merchant", as in Job 40:30 and Proverbs 31:24. The Septuagint, from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, mostly writes Khanaan. On two occasions, in Exodus 16:35 and Joshua 5:12, it renders Canaan as Phoenicia.

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• 8. Echoes Of Canaan

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  Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the first two works of Western literature, are where the Greek name Phoenicia first appears. It does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, but it turns up three times in the Book of Acts. Philo of Byblos later built the old name Khna into his mythology as the ancestor of the Phoenicians: "Khna who was afterwards called Phoinix". Quoting fragments attributed to Sanchuniathon, he relates that Byblos, Berytus and Tyre were among the first cities ever built, under the mythical Cronus. He credits their inhabitants with fishing, hunting, agriculture, shipbuilding and writing. Coins of Beirut, then called Laodicea, carry the legend "Of Laodicea, a metropolis in Canaan". They date from the reign of Antiochus IV, who ruled from 175 to 164 BC, and from his successors until 123 BC.

  The old name also crossed the sea. Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC, and Canaanite-speakers who emigrated there passed the name down to the Punics of North Africa. They used it as a self-designation, Chanani, into Late Antiquity. Saint Augustine records that the Phoenicians called their homeland Canaan. He also records that the rustic people of Hippo kept the self-designation Chanani. Some scholars argue that the language Augustine calls Punic may have been Libyan, since "punic" in Latin also meant non-Roman.

  Modern usage splits the family tree. Archaeologists and historians commonly call the Levantine peoples before 1200 BC Canaanites, and their Iron Age descendants on the coast Phoenicians. Jonathan Tubb puts the wider point sharply: "Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites, and Phoenicians undoubtedly achieved their own cultural identities, and yet ethnically they were all Canaanites."

  Greek writers coined another name for much the same ground. Herodotus used Palaistinê around 480 BC, a term derived from the Philistines or perhaps the Aegean Pelasgians, and it covered roughly Canaan without Phoenicia. From 110 BC the Hasmoneans extended their authority over much of the region, and the wider area became known as Judaea. The Roman Republic conquered Judea in 63 BC. Around 130-135 AD, after the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt, the province of Iudaea was joined with Galilee as Syria Palaestina. Circumstantial evidence links Hadrian with the change, but the exact date is uncertain. The reading that it was meant to complete a dissociation from Judaea is disputed.

  Canaan itself became shorthand for a promised land. The hymn "Canaan's Happy Shore" asks, "Oh, brothers, will you meet me, on Canaan's happy shore", to a tune later used in The Battle Hymn of the Republic. In Israel, David Ben-Gurion noticed the contradictions between secular and biblical records of Jewish indigeneity to Canaan, which the Declaration of Independence nonetheless affirmed. He argued that Abraham's migration to Canaan was a "reunion with indigenous Hebrews who shared his theological belief". He also argued that not all Hebrews joined Jacob's family in Egypt.

  In the 1930s and 1940s, some Revisionist Zionist intellectuals in Mandatory Palestine founded an ideology called Canaanism. It sought to create a unique Hebrew identity rooted in ancient Canaanite culture rather than in a Jewish one.

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