CANAAN Son of Ham, grandson of Noah, who laid a curse upon him ( Ge 9:18,22-27). In Ge 10:15-19 eleven groups who historically inhabited Phoenicia in particular and Syria-Palestine in general are listed as his descendants. See also the following article. K.A.K. CANAAN, CANAANITES A Semitic-speaking people and their territory, principally in Phoenicia. Their racial affinities are at present uncertain. I. The name The name Canaan (Heb. e ) of people and land derives from that of their forebear Canaan or Kna‘ (see previous article) according to both Ge 10:15-18 and native Canaanite- Phoenician tradition as transmitted by Sanchuniathon and preserved by Philo of Byblos. Kna‘(an) is the native name of the Canaanites-Phoenicians applied to them both in Greek sources and by the Phoenicians themselves ( e.g. on coins; see W. F. Albright, p. 1, n. 1, in his paper, ‘The Rôle of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization’, in The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Essays for W. F. Albright , 1961, pp. 328-362; cited hereafter as BANE Vol.). The meaning of Kn‘(n) is unknown. Outside the Bible, the name occurs both with and without the final n This n could be either a final n of a common Semitic type, or else a Hurrian suffix (Albright, op.cit. , p. 25, n. 50). Formerly, some linked kn‘(n) with words for ‘purple dye’, esp. in Hurrian (with Speiser, Language 12, 1936, p. 124), but this was disproved by Landsberger ( JCS 21, 1967, p. 106f.). II. Extent of Canaan ‘Canaan’ in both Scripture and external sources has threefold reference. 1. Fundamentally it indicates the land and inhabitants of the Syro-Palestinian coastland, especially Phoenicia proper. This is indicated within Ge 10:15-19 by its detailed enumeration of Sidon ‘the first-born’, the ARKITE , the Sinite, the Zemarite and Hamath in the Orontes Valley. More specifically Nu 13:29; Jos 5:1; 11:3; Jdg 1:27ff. put the Canaanites on the coastlands, in the valleys and plains, and the Jordan valley, with Amorites and others in the hills. Notably the inscription of Idrimi, king of in the 15th century BC, mentions his flight to Ammia in coastal Canaan (S. Smith, The Statue of Idrimi , 1949, pp. 72-73; ANET 3, pp. 557-558). 2. ‘Canaan(ite)’ can also cover, by extension, the hinterland and so Syria-Palestine in general. Thus, Ge 10:15-19 includes also the Hittite, Jebusite, Amorite, Hivite and Girgashite, explaining that ‘the families of the Canaanite spread abroad’ (v. 18); this wider area is defined as extending coastally from Sidon to Gaza, inland to the Dead Sea cities Sodom and Gomorrah and apparently back up N to LASHA (location uncertain). See also Ge 12:5; 13:12; or Nu 13:17-21; 34:1-2, with the following delimitation of W Palestinian boundaries; Jdg 4:2,23-24 calls Jabin (II) of Hazor titular ‘king of Canaan’. This wider use is also encountered in early external sources. In their Amarna letters (14th century BC) kings of Babylon and elsewhere sometimes use ‘Canaan’ for Egypt's Syro-Palestinian territories generally. And the Egyptian Papyrus Anastasi IIIA (lines 5- 6) and IV (16:line 4) of 13th century BC mention ‘Canaanite slaves from Huru’ (= Syria- Palestine generally) (R. A. Caminos, 8, 1954, pp. 117, 200). 3. The term ‘Canaanite’ can bear the more restricted meaning of ‘merchant, trafficker’, trading being a most characteristic Canaanite occupation. In Scripture this meaning may be found in Job 41:6; Isa 23:8; Eze 17:4; Zep 1:11; the word kn‘t in Je 10:17 is even used for ‘wares, merchandise’. A stele of the pharaoh Amenophis II ( c. 1440 BC) lists among his Syrian captives ‘550 maryannu (= noble chariot-warriors), 240 of their wives, 640 Kn‘nw , 232 sons of princes, 323 daughters of princes’, among others ( ANET , p. 246). From this, Maisler ( BASOR 102, 1946, p. 9) infers that the 640 Kn‘nw (Canaaneans) found in such exalted company are of the merchant ‘plutocracy of the coastal and the trading centres of Syria and Palestine’; but this is uncertain. III. Canaanites and Amorites Alongside the specific, wider and restricted uses of ‘Canaan(ite)’ noted above, ‘ AMORITES ’ also has both a specific and a wider reference. Specifically, the Amorites in Scripture are part of the hill-country population of Palestine ( Nu 13:29; Jos 5:1; 11:3). But in its wider use ‘Amorite’ tends to overlap directly the term ‘Canaanite’. ‘Amorite’ comes in under ‘Canaan’ in Ge 10:15- 16 for a start. Then, Israel is to conquer Canaan (= Palestine) in Nu 13:17-21, etc. , and duly comes to dwell in the land of the Amorites, overcoming ‘all the people’ there, namely Amorites ( Jos 24:15,18). Abraham reaches, and is promised, Canaan ( Ge 12:5,7; 15:7,18), but occupation is delayed as ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete’ ( Ge 15:16). Shechem is a Canaanite principality under a Hivite ruler ( Ge 12:5-6; 34:2,30), but can be called ‘Amorite’ ( Ge 48:22). The documentary theory of literary criticism has frequently assayed to use these overlapping or double designations, Canaanites and Amorites (and other ‘pairs’), as marks of different authorship (see, e.g. , S. R. Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament 9, 1913, p. 119, or O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, an Introduction , 1965, p. 183). But any such use of these terms does not accord with the external records which have no underlying ‘hands’, and it must therefore be questioned. In the 18th century BC Amurru is part of Syria in the tablets, while Amorite princes are mentioned in a Mari document in relation to Hazor in Palestine itself ( cf. J.-R. Kupper, Les Nomades en Mésopotamie au temps des Rois de Mari , 1957, pp. 179-180). As Hazor is the Canaanite city par excellence of N Palestine, the mingling of people and terms is already attested in Abraham's day. In the 14th/13th centuries BC the specific kingdom of Amurru of - , Aziru, and their successors in the Lebanon mountain region secured a firm hold on a section of the Phoenician coast and its Canaanite seaports by conquest and alliance ‘from Byblos to Ugarit’ (Amarna Letter No. 98). This AMORITE control in coastal Canaan is further attested by the Battle of Qadesh inscriptions of Rameses II (13th century BC) mentioning the timely arrival inland of a battle force from a ‘port in the land of Amurru’ (see Gardiner, Ancient Egyptian Onomastica I, 1947, pp. 188*-189*, and Gardiner, The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II , 1960, on this incident). This is independent evidence for a contiguous use of Amor(ites) and Canaan(ites) in Moses' time. The use of these terms as the distinguishing marks of different literary hands is thus erroneous. In any case the situation reflected in the Pentateuch and Joshua by this usage was radically changed by the impact of the sea peoples at the end of the 13th century BC, after which date the emergence of that usage would be inexplicable. IV. The language The definition of what is or is not ‘Canaanite’ is much controverted. Within the general group of the NW Semitic languages and dialects, biblical Hebrew ( cf. Isa 19:18) and the W Semitic glosses and terms in the Amarna tablets can correctly be termed ‘S Canaanite’ along with Moabite and Phoenician. Separate but related are Aramaic and Ya'udic. Between these two groups comes Ugaritic. Some hold this latter to be a separate NW Semitic language, others that it is Canaanite to be classed with Hebrew, etc. Ugaritic itself betrays historical development linguistically, and thus the Ugaritic of the 14th/13th centuries BC is closer to Hebrew than is the archaic language of the great epics (Albright, BASOR 150, 1958, pp. 36-38). Hence it is provisionally possible to view NW Semitic as including S Canaanite (Hebrew, etc. ), N Canaanite (Ugaritic) and Aramaic. Cf. S. Moscati ( The Semites in Ancient History , 1959, pp. 97-100), who (rather radically) would abolish ‘Canaanite’; and J. Friedrich ( Scientia 84, 1949, pp. 220-223), on this question. The distinction between ‘Canaanite’ and ‘Amorite’ is almost illusory, and little more than dialectal. On NW Semitic versus Canaanite , cf. Gelb, JCS 15, 1961, pp. 42f. They differ in little more than the sibilants. Texts from the N Syrian city of EBLA are written in a dialect that appears to be W Semitic and to show affinities with S Canaanite, according to the decipherer, G. Pettinato, who calls it ‘Palaeo-Canaanite’ ( Orientalia n.s. 44, 1975, pp. 361-374, esp. 376ff.). ( LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT .). V. Canaanite history The presence of Semitic-speaking people in Palestine in the 3rd millennium BC is so far explicitly attested only by two Semitic place-names in a text of that age: Ndi’ which contains the element ’il(u) , ‘god’, and n.k. which begins with ain , ‘spring, well’, both these names occurring in an Egyptian tomb-scene of 5th/6th Dynasty, c. 2400 BC. However, the question as to whether these indicate the presence of Canaanites, and just when Canaanites appeared in Palestine, is a matter of dispute. It is certain that Canaanites and Amorites were well established in Syria-Palestine by 2000 BC, and a NW-Semitic-speaking element at Ebla in N Syria by c. 2300 BC. Throughout the 2nd millennium BC, Syria-Palestine was divided among a varying number of Canaanite/Amorite city-states. For the 19th/18th century BC, many names of places and rulers are recorded in the Egyptian Execration Texts.