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“Canaan” is inconsistently used in the Bible and in other ancient sources as a geographical term. In texts from the second millennium B.C.E., Canaan generally means the territory encompassed roughly by the modern countries of Lebanon and Israel. It is used in this sense in the Amarna Letters, the 14th-century B.C.E. correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and various Babylonian, Palestinian and Syrian rulers. The Egyptian province of Canaan was the southern part of the Levant, and included the cities of Byblos, Sidon, Tyre and Gaza, the administrative capital of the province. Canaan is distinguished from northern Syria, called Amurru (from which the biblical term Amorite is derived, though that too is used with several senses in the Bible), and Apum (Damascus). But the Amarna Letters themselves are inconsistent, since Ugarit on the north Syrian coast can apparently also be considered part of Canaan, although texts from Ugarit itself do not regard it as such.
Modern scholars have often used the term Canaanite in its broadest sense. Thus it can designate the inhabitants of the territory extending from Syria to southern Israel along the coast, and as far inland as Damascus, Ammon, Moab and Edom. These regions shared a linguistic bond, as well as a broader cultural one marked by continuities in ceramics, mythology, views of kingship, and legal and literary traditions.
The Bible defines “the land of Canaan” in Numbers 34:1–12; Deuteronomy 34:1–3; Joshua 12:7–8; and Ezekiel 47:15–20 as the territory east of the Mediterranean from the “wadi of Egypt” south of Gaza to central Lebanon. The northern and eastern limits of this region vary, and in any case appear to be idealized, but in general they are the Jordan-Rift Valley on the east and Lebo-hamath (modern Lebweh in the Lebanese Beka Valley) in the north, corresponding roughly to the limits of the Egyptian province of Canaan toward the end of the second millennium. The Canaanites are the people who inhabit this region, although the Bible also seems to use the term for one of the specific groups found there, as in Numbers 13:29.
What happened to these Canaanites? With Egyptian loss of control of western Asia by the mid-12th century B.C.E., smaller national entities emerged, including not only Israel, but Tyre and Aram on the north and Ammon, Moab and Edom east of the Jordan. Each of these principalities developed its own indigenous culture within the Canaanite matrix, and similarly, distinct but related languages emerged on the north end, much as the Romance languages developed from Latin in Europe after the collapse of the western Roman Empire. And so, in a sense, the Canaanites disappeared. But the words “Canaan” and “Canaanite” survive in scattered texts from the last half of the first millennium B.C.E. and into the first half of the first millennium C.E., with a specialized sense, roughly equivalent to what the Greeks called “Phoenician.”
By the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., the cities on what is now the coast of Lebanon had established independent status. These city-states included, from north to south, Arvad, Tripoli, Byblos (Gebal), Beirut, Sidon, Zarephath, Tyre and, at times at least, Akko, Dor and Joppa further south. Until its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E., Tyre dominated the region. The history of Tyre is documented in Josephus, the Bible, the Assyrian Annals, a number of inscriptions, and Herodotus (fifth century B.C.E.) and other classical sources.
Greek texts from Homer onward call the inhabitants of this region Phoenicians, a name derived from the Greek word for reddish-purple. Among the many commodities traded by the coastal cities was a reddish-purple dye made from the murex, or Mediterranean rock whelk, native to the eastern Mediterranean. This expensive colorfast dye, and fabrics colored with it, were highly prized in antiquity. The Greeks named the region Phoenicia and its inhabitants Phoenicians after their word for the color, phoinix. Modern 045scholars have adopted the Greek terminology.
Another important local product was cedar, from the mountains directly to the east, mentioned in Egyptian texts as early as the mid-third millennium B.C.E. and in such biblical passages as 1 Kings 5:1–12 when Solomon ordered cedar from King Hiram in Tyre to build the Temple. These snow-capped mountains, known as the Lebanon (from the root meaning white), formed a natural boundary on the east for the coastal cities. The mountains, and powerful Syrian states, prevented expansion in that direction.
The Phoenicians thus were impelled westward, and became the dominant maritime power of the region. Phoenician inscriptions are found throughout the Mediterranean as far west as Spain, and Phoenician sailors are reported to have circumnavigated Africa. The Phoenicians were also maritime mercenaries, forming, as Herodotus tells us, an essential part of the Persian navy in their wars against the Greeks. The ships of Tyre and its sister cities ventured far in their search for markets and commodities; Ezekiel 27, a satiric lament over Tyre, envisions that island city as a great ship constructed of materials from various countries, whose widespread commerce is described in detail.
In addition to cedar and purple dye, two Phoenician exports have had an enduring impact. One was the alphabet, not of course a commodity to be sold but an item of culture borrowed by the Greeks early in the first millennium B.C.E. The name and shapes of the letters of the Greek alphabet are Phoenician in origin, and Herodotus in fact calls letters “Phoenician writing.” The other export was papyrus, which was manufactured in Egypt but reached the Greek world by way of Phoenicia, as the Greek biblos shows: It means both “papyrus” and “book” (in the latter sense it is the source of the word “Bible”), and is derived from the name of the Phoenician city of Byblos.
This Phoenician mercantile activity is reflected in later biblical usage of the term “Canaanite.” In biblical texts generally datable to the mid-first millennium B.C.E., the term Canaanite often has the specific meaning of trader or merchant, which is how many modern translations in render it. These texts include Proverbs 31:24, where the “valiant woman” demonstrates her initiative and care for her family in a variety of commercial transactions, including selling her fabrics “to the Canaanite,” probably an itinerant Phoenician trader. In Isaiah 23:8 and Ezekiel 17:4, in contexts dealing with Tyre and Phoenicia, the word “Canaanites” is roughly synonymous with merchant and trader. By extension it can have the same meaning without any geographic reference at all, as in Hosea 12:7 (12:8 in Hebrew); Zephaniah 1:11; Zechariah 14:21; Job 41:6 (40:30 in Hebrew); and elsewhere.
There is also a scattering of evidence to suggest that the Phoenicians at times referred to themselves as Canaanites. Coins minted in Syrian Laodicea (modern Latakia) in the second century B.C.E. describe that city as “in Canaan.” Another example is further removed, and thus shows the tenacity of the term; it comes from North Africa in the fifth century C.E. Augustine reports that when the inhabitants of the villages in the vicinity of Carthage were asked their nationality, they said that they were Canaanites. Chronologically between these two examples is the woman in the New Testament from the region of Tyre. Mark 7:26 calls her a Syrophoenician, but Matthew 15:22 identifies the same person as “a Canaanite woman.”
So while at least some Canaanites became Phoenicians, they continued to retain a memory of their origins, designating themselves as Canaanites for well over a thousand years.
“Canaan” is inconsistently used in the Bible and in other ancient sources as a geographical term. In texts from the second millennium B.C.E., Canaan generally means the territory encompassed roughly by the modern countries of Lebanon and Israel. It is used in this sense in the Amarna Letters, the 14th-century B.C.E. correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and various Babylonian, Palestinian and Syrian rulers. The Egyptian province of Canaan was the southern part of the Levant, and included the cities of Byblos, Sidon, Tyre and Gaza, the administrative capital of the province. Canaan is distinguished from northern Syria, called Amurru […]
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