Canaan

Canaan is the Bible's name for the land west of the Jordan River, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 17:8). The Bible gives no single definition of its extent: at times the name covers a wide area reaching across Palestine and Syria, and at times only a strip of coast on the Mediterranean. It is the land where the patriarchs lived as foreigners, and the land the LORD brought Israel out of Egypt to receive (Exodus 6:4; Leviticus 25:38).

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The Name and the Table of Nations

Canaan is first the name of a man: a grandson of Noah and a son of Ham, whose brothers were Cush, Mizraim and Put (Genesis 9:18; 10:6). After Ham saw his father's nakedness, Noah cursed Canaan: "A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers" (Genesis 9:22-25). He also declared that Canaan would be the servant of Shem and of Japheth (Genesis 9:26-27). The curse fell on Canaan, not on Ham, though a later reading, the so-called "Curse of Ham," was used to justify the enslavement of Black people. Genesis 10 makes Canaan the father of Sidon his firstborn and of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites, and says that the Canaanite clans later scattered (Genesis 10:15-18). The same chapter traces the borders of Canaan from Sidon toward Gerar and Gaza, and toward Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 10:19). In the Bible both the people and the land take their name from this ancestor (Genesis 10:15-18).

The Land Promised to Abraham

Abram left Haran for the land of Canaan at seventy-five and entered it in 2091 BC (Genesis 12:4-5). At Shechem, where "the Canaanites were in the land," the LORD appeared to him and said, "I will give this land to your offspring" (Genesis 12:6-7). In the covenant of Genesis 15 the LORD gave Abram's descendants the land "from the river of Egypt to the great River Euphrates," the land of ten peoples from the Kenites to the Jebusites (Genesis 15:18-21). God later promised Abraham and his descendants "all the land of Canaan" as an eternal possession (Genesis 17:8). Isaac and Jacob lived in the land after him, and Abraham made his servant swear not to take a wife for Isaac "from the daughters of the Canaanites" (Genesis 24:3; 31:18; 37:1). When famine reached Canaan, Jacob's sons went to Egypt to buy grain and met Joseph, and in 1876 BC Jacob and his whole family went down to Egypt (Genesis 42:5, 7; 46:6).

A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey

The LORD promised to bring Israel up out of Egypt "to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey," the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites (Exodus 3:8). The spies sent into Canaan told Moses that it was indeed "flowing with milk and honey," but that its people were strong and its cities large and fortified (Numbers 13:2, 27-28). Numbers 34 sets the land's borders from the Wilderness of Zin and the Brook of Egypt in the south, along the Great Sea, to Lebo-hamath in the north and down the Jordan to the Salt Sea (Numbers 34:2-12). The land east of the Jordan, already given to two and a half tribes, lay outside them (Numbers 34:13-15).

Practices Israel Was Not to Follow

The Law forbade Israel to follow "the practices of the land of Canaan," among them giving children "to be sacrificed to Molech" (Leviticus 18:3, 21). Deuteronomy says the nations "even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods" (Deuteronomy 12:31). Israel was to destroy their places of worship on the high mountains, on the hills and under every green tree, with their altars, sacred pillars and Asherah poles (Deuteronomy 12:2-3). It was not to practice their divination, omens, sorcery, spells, mediums or inquiring of the dead, "the detestable ways of the nations" (Deuteronomy 18:9-11).

The Command and Its Reason

Deuteronomy names seven nations in the land "larger and stronger" than Israel: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites (Deuteronomy 7:1). Israel was to devote them to complete destruction, make no treaty with them, show them no mercy and not intermarry with them (Deuteronomy 7:2-3). In the cities of the land nothing that breathed was to be left alive, "so that they cannot teach you to do all the detestable things they do for their gods" (Deuteronomy 20:16-18). The LORD would drive the nations out "little by little" (Deuteronomy 7:22). Scripture grounds the judgment in the nations' own wickedness: "the iniquity of the Amorites" had first to be complete, the land would vomit out the nations that defiled it, as it would Israel if Israel did the same, and Israel went in "not because of your righteousness" but to keep the LORD's oath to the patriarchs (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 18:24-28; Deuteronomy 9:4-5).

Israel in the Land

Israel came out of Egypt in 1446 BC and began the conquest of Canaan about 1406 BC under Joshua, though some date the Exodus to about 1250 BC (1 Kings 6:1). The campaigns included the fall of Jericho, the conquest of Ai and the conquest of Hazor (Joshua 6:20; 8:19; 11:10-11). Some Canaanites were spared: Rahab and her father's household lived on among the Israelites, and the Hivites of Gibeon, who won a treaty by deception, were made woodcutters and water carriers (Joshua 6:25; 9:3-27). Joshua took the hill country, the Negev and the foothills, and thirty-one kings were defeated west of the Jordan (Joshua 10:40; 11:16; 12:7, 24). Yet when Joshua was old, the LORD told him that "very much of the land remains to be possessed," including the territory of the five Philistine rulers, counted as Canaanite, and the land of the Sidonians (Joshua 13:1-6). Scripture also sums up that the LORD gave Israel the land He had sworn to their fathers and gave them rest, and that "not one of all the LORD's good promises to the house of Israel had failed" (Joshua 21:43-45). Judges 1 tells how the tribes failed to drive out the Canaanites of Beth-shean, Taanach, Dor, Megiddo, Gezer, Acco, Sidon and other towns, and the Jebusites of Jerusalem, whose fortress of Zion David later captured and made the City of David (Judges 1:21, 27-33; 2 Samuel 5:6-9). When Israel grew stronger it put Canaanites to forced labor, but "never drove them out completely" (Judges 1:28; Joshua 16:10). In one study that set the conquest account of Joshua 9-12 beside Assyrian, Hittite and Egyptian military records, the account was read as modeled on ancient Near Eastern records, which use hyperbolic language. At Bochim the angel of the LORD said the peoples left in the land would be "thorns in your sides" and their gods a snare (Judges 2:1-3). The Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, intermarried with them and "served the Baals and the Asherahs" (Judges 3:5-7). Solomon later made their descendants forced laborers and himself followed "Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians" (1 Kings 9:20-21; 11:5).

Canaan in Later Scripture

Psalm 106 says Israel did not destroy the peoples as commanded but mingled with them and sacrificed sons and daughters "to the idols of Canaan," so that the land was polluted with blood (Psalm 106:34-38). Ezekiel tells Jerusalem, "Your origin and your birth were in the land of the Canaanites" (Ezekiel 16:3). In an oracle against Tyre, Isaiah speaks of "the strongholds of Canaan" (Isaiah 23:8, 11). He foresees five cities in Egypt that would "speak the language of Canaan," that is, Hebrew (Isaiah 19:18).

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Canaan in Its World

Canaan sat between Egypt, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, where Asia opened onto the Mediterranean, so it was drawn into the ambitions and struggles of its neighbors. Towns in southern Canaan stood at key points on the trade routes running along the coast and inland to the hill country. Scripture names its regions as the Arabah, the hill country, the foothills, the Negev and the seacoast (Deuteronomy 1:7). Canaan never became one state: it was divided into small units, city-states each usually ruled by its own king. The pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty conquered the land, and Egypt then ruled Canaan as a province.

The Gods of Canaan

The name Baal, a common Semitic word meaning "lord," was used for the West Semitic storm god; in its most important Old Testament use, it refers to the leading active god of the Canaanite pantheon, the god who controlled rain and fertility, whom Israel served along with the Ashtoreths (Judges 2:11-13; 10:6). In the texts from Ugarit, a city in Syria that was not itself part of Canaan, Baal is identified with Hadad, El is the head of the pantheon, and El's consort is Athirat, the goddess the Bible calls Asherah, whose name also marks the poles Israel was to burn (Deuteronomy 12:3). Ahab king of Israel married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, served Baal, built him a temple in Samaria and set up an Asherah pole (1 Kings 16:31-33). In Ahab's day Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, where "the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the sacrifice" (1 Kings 18:19-38). It fell to the prophets to separate the worship of Baal sharply from the worship of the LORD.

Canaan in Texts and Archaeology

One proposal connects the name Canaan with kinahhu, a Hurrian word for reddish purple. Outside the Bible the name appears in the Amarna letters, clay tablets found in 1887 at Amarna in Egypt, the city of the pharaoh Akhenaten, and written almost entirely in Akkadian. Most of them were sent to the pharaoh by Canaanite kings. Alice Mandell, in her 2025 series on the Amarna letters for TheTorah.com, reads Canaan in them as "the whole geographic region east of Egypt where the pharaoh enjoyed varying degrees of control." Among the letters are those of Abdi-Heba, the ruler of Jerusalem, who complained to Akhenaten of the Habiru (Apiru), a name for landless people outside the settled social order rather than for one ethnic group.

At Ras Shamra in Syria, the site of ancient Ugarit, a farmer's chance find led to the excavation of a tomb in 1928; from 1929 the French Mission de Ras Shamra, led by Claude F. A. Schaeffer, uncovered clay tablets written in Akkadian cuneiform and in an alphabetic cuneiform script. These Ugaritic texts include tablets about the god Baal, among them the Baal Cycle.

The Proto-Sinaitic script, among the earliest known alphabetic writing, is known from inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, and its language was probably an early dialect of Canaanite. The Phoenician alphabet and the early Hebrew script both descend from it, and the Greeks learned alphabetic writing from Phoenician merchants.

The Merneptah Stele, from the reign of Merneptah (1213-1203 BC), the successor of Ramesses II, says "plundered is Canaan with every evil." James K. Hoffmeier, in a 2007 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, calls its mention of Israel "the first reference to Israel in a Pharaonic period text." The excavator W. M. Flinders Petrie found it in western Thebes in 1896.

Egyptian records name the Philistines among the "Sea Peoples" who attacked Egypt in the eighth year of the pharaoh Ramesses III, and a group known by that name settled along the coast south of Dor.

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Later History

In later history the Canaanites were confined to the coast that came to be called Phoenicia, the Greek equivalent of the name Canaan, whose cities included Tyre and Sidon. Its people made purple dye from the murex shellfish that were plentiful along that coast. Because the Canaanites, and especially the Phoenicians, were traders, the Hebrew words for Canaan and Canaanite also came to mean "trader, merchant," where the BSB reads "merchants" (Zephaniah 1:11; Proverbs 31:24).