Place · Land of Israel / Judea
Canaan
A historical region of the southern Levant. It has no point coordinate because its boundaries varied and the chapter treats it as a broad landscape.
No verified coordinates
Statements linked to this place
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Canaan was continuously inhabited from prehistory and holds some of the oldest known settlements, such as the site of the later city of Jericho, occupied as early as 9000 BCE. The Bible acknowledges that people lived there before the Israelites, and literary and archaeological evidence confirms it.
Canaan's cultures were always tied to the region's topography: a coastal strip in the west, fertile valleys and rugged hills in the interior, and desert to the east and south.
Contested interpretation
Unable to verify the biblical account, many recent scholars favor another explanation, at odds with the Bible: the Israelites did not come from outside, neither from Mesopotamia nor from Egypt, but Israelite culture arose within Canaan as an offshoot of the local indigenous culture. On this hypothesis, the Bible's effort to set Israel apart from the Canaanites is historically misleading.
Community: Canaanite city-states
During the Late Bronze Age, about 1550 to 1200 BCE, city-states including Hazor, Megiddo and Jerusalem dominated Canaan. Their kings controlled nearby territory and sometimes fought each other, yet all answered to Egypt's king because Canaan belonged to his empire. Discovered at Egyptian El-Amarna in 1887, letters addressed to Egypt's king by Canaanite rulers from Tyre, Shechem, Jerusalem and elsewhere reveal the difficulty of governing Canaan. Egypt stationed a governor in Gaza but relied mainly on quarrelling local kings. The correspondence also illuminates the Canaanite language from which Hebrew developed.
Community: Highland villagers
What archaeology has found is the rapid growth of settlements in Canaan's central highlands in the period associated with Joshua: previously sparsely inhabited, being hard to farm and short of water, they were settled using terraced slopes and cisterns. The settlements seem new and multiply after about 1200 BCE.
Nothing clearly identifies these settlers as immigrants from Sinai or Egypt: their houses and pottery scarcely differ from local forms. The claim that they had been nomads also fails. Without using the biblical Exodus and conquest as a premise, the evidence instead permits seeing them as Canaanites driven by social or economic pressures into rugged country beyond city-state control.
Most ancient Israelites lived in villages (one estimate gives 66 percent of Canaan's population between 1000 and 500 BCE); towns were tiny by today's standards, and Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE probably had 1,000 to 2,000 inhabitants. The center of social and economic life was not the palace or temple but the house, probably occupied by the nuclear family.
Community: Philistine coastal communities
The Philistines reached Canaan's coast in the early twelfth century BCE, part of a larger migration of 'Sea Peoples' from the Mycenaean Aegean world. Philistine pottery is a variant of Mycenaean; their urban design, craftsmanship, dress and habits (they ate pork and drank wine mixed with water) point to the Aegean, and even the word seren, 'ruler', is probably related to Greek tyrannos.
The Philistines can be shown to be outsiders because their distinct culture appears in the archaeological and linguistic record and traces back to another part of the world. Not so with the Israelites: their language, religion and material culture tie them to earlier Canaanite culture, as if they were an outgrowth of it.
At Beth Shemesh and other sites, archaeologists found practices that set the population, presumably proto-Israelite, apart from nearby Philistines: pig bones are almost absent there, whereas frequent at Philistine sites. Archaeologists theorize that the taboo on pork may have arisen in this period as a marker of difference and allegiance, and a similar explanation has been proposed for circumcision, which the Bible itself stresses as a mark of difference between Israelites and Philistines.