Levant

Levant is a name for the lands along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a European word, not a biblical one: English took it from French in the late 15th century. The French levant, "rising", is the present participle of lever, "to raise", and refers to the sun rising in the east. Archaeologists and historians use the name for the region's ancient history. The region takes in the land the Bible calls Canaan, a name that in its earliest occurrences refers to a region along the Levantine coast.

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Extent

Definitions of its extent differ. Reference works name different modern lands: one dictionary calls the Levant a former name for the area now occupied by Lebanon, Syria and Israel; another entry lists Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey; and a third gives Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Cyprus, with south Cilicia in Turkey in its narrowest sense. Margreet L. Steiner and Ann E. Killebrew, editors of "The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant" (2014), count Cyprus in the Levant as well, because of the island's close ties with the mainland in culture, economy and often politics.

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Scripture's names for its parts

Scripture names parts of the region. Genesis traces the borders of Canaan "from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza" (Genesis 10:19). In the covenant with Abram, the LORD gave Abram's descendants the land "from the river of Egypt to the great River Euphrates" (Genesis 15:18). In Joshua 1:4 the territory reaches from "the wilderness and Lebanon" to the Euphrates River and west "as far as the Great Sea". Lebanon's cedars and the skill of the Sidonians in logging appear in 1 Kings 5:6. David placed garrisons in Aram of Damascus (2 Samuel 8:6).

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The land and its peoples

The Levant is a land bridge between Africa and Eurasia, and it lay between the empires of Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Persia. In the south of the region, a coastal plain runs between the mountains and the sea, and east of the central hills the land drops steeply into the Jordan Valley.

More than two dozen monumental temples of the Bronze and Iron Ages, Canaanite, Phoenician, Aramean and others, have been found in the Levant. In the Iron Age its peoples included Israel, the Aramean states, Phoenicia and Philistia, and the Philistines had arrived on its coast. The powers that shaped its cultures included Egypt, the Hittites, the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the Persians. Egypt ruled much of the Levant from around the start of its New Kingdom, which began in 1570 BC, and had vassal rulers there. Sennacherib, king of Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, marched his army to the Levant in 701 BC.

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Levantine archaeology

The archaeological study of the region is known as Levantine archaeology. In the introduction to their handbook, Steiner and Killebrew decided against writing it as a handbook to biblical archaeology. On the Levant's archaeological timeline, the Middle Bronze Age runs from 2000 to 1550 BC, the Late Bronze Age from 1550 to 1200 BC and the Iron Age from 1200 to 586 BC.