Who Were the Hethites in the Bible, and Are They the Same as the Hittites?

The Hethites of Genesis are local Canaanites descended from Heth, son of Canaan (Genesis 10:15), a distinct people within the broader Canaanite population. Most English Bibles call them Hittites or 'sons of Heth' (Genesis 23:3), but some translations, such as the Christian Standard Bible, use 'Hethites' for this group, as Bryant Wood has proposed. Their presence is notably highlighted when Abraham purchases the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite, emphasizing their established settlement in the land (Genesis 23:10).

In contrast, Hittite imperial texts originate from Hattusa in Turkey, where the Hittite Empire flourished. This empire was a major power in the ancient Near East, as its battle with Ramesses II of Egypt at Kadesh (c. 1274 BC) and the peace treaty the two powers made about 1259 BC show. Aharon Kempinski proposed that Anatolian Hittites migrated into Canaan in the early twelfth century BC, but that view would move Abraham to the thirteenth or twelfth century BC and finds little support in the archaeological record. The Anatolian Hittite state did not yet exist in Abraham's day, and the Hittites of Genesis bear Semitic names such as Ephron, Zohar, Beeri and Elon.

Archaeology answered earlier skepticism about the name Hittite by uncovering a major empire in Anatolia, but no archaeological evidence has yet been found for an enclave of Anatolian Hittites living in Canaan, and scholars such as Harry Hoffner and Bryant Wood treat the sons of Heth as a separate, Canaanite people. Scripture lists the Hittites among the peoples of Canaan whom Israel faced in the conquest (Joshua 3:10; 9:1-2; 11:3), and some remained in the land, living alongside Israel into the reigns of David and Solomon (Judges 3:5-6; 2 Samuel 11:3; 1 Kings 9:20-21). Long before the conquest, Esau's marriages to Judith and Basemath, Hittite women of the land, made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 26:34-35; 27:46), an early picture of the pressure on Abraham's family to remain distinct from the peoples of Canaan.

The relationship between the biblical Hethites and the Anatolian Hittites remains one of the more tangled identification problems in biblical archaeology. The Hittites of Hattusa ran a major empire from central Anatolia with vassal states extending into northern Syria. Bryant Wood's answer is that the Hebrew text itself keeps the two groups apart: the singular form names the Canaanite sons of Heth, while the plural form, as in 'the kings of the Hittites' (1 Kings 10:29), names the Hittites of Anatolia and northern Syria.