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The Canaanites and the Old Testament
From: The British Museum
| By:
Jonathan Tubb |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Canaanites were the ancient population of Western Levant, comprised of modern-day Israel, Transjordan, Lebanon and coastal Syria. Though they are recognised by anyone familiar with the Old Testament, it has been difficult to reconstruct the Canaanites, as, unlike the Babylonians or Assyrians, they did not leave textual records. Here, Jonathan N. Tubb, curator and author of The Canaanites (British Museum Press, 1998), explains the difficulty of relying on the Old Testament for an accurate conception of Canaan and the Canaanites. |
 n the most basic terms, the Canaanites were the people who occupied the land of Canaan from time immemorial, and the land of Canaan can be defined only as the geographical area occupied by the Canaanites. This not terribly helpful circle can be broken only by first defining the land of Canaan by reference to modern political states and their boundaries. This is not a satisfactory process, since it assumes that the people contained and included within the defined area were, by reasons of their own self-perception, Canaanites. In reality, however, the identity is 'received', having been imposed by modern scholarship on the basis of socio-cultural analogies and artefactual differentiation. |
With the acceptance of this reservation, it is broadly possible to equate ancient Canaan with the modern states of Israel, Transjordan, coastal Syria (including Lebanon) and southern inland Syria. In these terms it is the ancient equivalent of the 'Levant'. Having established a geographical foundation, it is clearly possible to define the Canaanites as the inhabitants of the ancient Levant. It is here, however, that another assumption has to be made, and that is that they represent the indigenous population of the Levant, the people who had always dwelt in that region since the time of the very earliest settled communities in remote prehistory. The Canaanites known to the writers of the biblical texts can be seen to be the same people who settled in farming villages in the eighth millennium BCE. This is not, in any way, to deny the reality, nor indeed the importance, of external influences on the culture, whether through trade, small-scale infiltration or aggressive invasion. Neither is it to ignore the socio-political constructs that have, at times, subsumed Canaanite identity under other names. Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites and Phoenicians undoubtedly achieved their own cultural identities, and yet ethnically they were all Canaanites. |
Canaanites and the Bible
Biblical references to 'Canaan' and 'Canaanites' are numerous, but on closer inspection they can be seen to be mostly confined to the Pentateuch and to the books of Joshua and Judges, where they relate mostly to genealogical definitions and to the narratives of the covenant, exodus and conquest. In these stories the land of Canaan is seen as the 'promised land' in which the Israelites were to settle, and against whose population (the Canaanites) the Israelites would have to prevail. As the story unfolds, it will become apparent that the Israelites were themselves Canaanites, and 'historical', as opposed to 'literary' Israel was, in reality, a sub-set of Canaanite culture. This statement, in a sense, highlights the difficulty in utilizing what, on the face of it, ought to be one of the most valuable textual resources for the reconstruction of Canaanite/Israelite history, namely the Old Testament. Indeed, ever since the first modern pioneering explorations of the Levant in the nineteenth century, there has been a desire on the part of many scholars to integrate the results of archaeological research into those of biblical text analysis. For these scholars the land of Canaan, the Levant, Syria-Palestine, was, fundamentally, the 'Holy Land', and a whole discipline grew up, more prominently and persistently in the United States than in Europe, which has become known as 'biblical archaeology'. |
At its most simplistic level this term could be taken to mean 'the archaeology of the land in which the biblical narratives were set, during the time period to which the narratives relate'--in broad terms, the archaeology of the Levant between about 3000 BCE and the first century AD. In other words, biblical archaeology would be seen as merely a more exclusive sub-discipline of Levantine archaeology. In point of fact, however, the term 'biblical archaeology' conveys something rather different, for inherent within the coupling of the two words is an assumption that they can be, or should be, in some way, related. It assumes that the Bible has a fundamental role in the reconstruction of the history of civilization of the Levant, which would otherwise be based on purely archaeological data. Unlike Mesopotamia or Egypt, where the rich resources of contemporary textual documents have allowed a very full and detailed historical framework to be developed, the Levant has only exceptionally yielded significant text archives, and these only from Syria--Ebia, Mari, Ugarit and Alalakh, for example. Now, clearly the Bible cannot be ignored: it contains a wealth of material directly relevant to the subject area. On the other hand, it has to be understood from the outset that it cannot be used as primary historical source material. None of the books of the Old Testament can be seen as contemporary documents: they were compiled from compositions written, in most cases, hundreds of years after the events described. |
It is clear that the time of writing, editing or compiling of, say, the Patriarchal stories is of critical importance, for it obviously has a bearing on the credibility of the source material. In this respect, a number of points can be made. First, the narratives represent a compilation of very many individual sources. Second, the process of editing these sources into the coherent whole we recognize as the book of Genesis could not have taken place before the seventh or possibly sixth century BCE. Third, the writers or editors had access to a variety of material, most of which it can be assumed was contemporary or near-contemporary with the time of writing--religious and literary texts, geographical and topographic information, traditional folk legends, propaganda and undoubtedly some historical writings, but of unknown reliability. It seems generally unlikely that the writers had access to ancient historical texts, contemporary in other words with events of the distant past. |
It was, in any event, surely never the intention of the writers of the Patriarchal stories to create an accurate, objective history of Israel, but instead to present a moving and roughly sequential rationalization for the emergence of the Israelites, the main concerns of which were theological and genealogical. This is not to say that some of the source material drawn upon might not have contained elements of historical reality; but Genesis was not composed as a manual for future archaeologists, and the exact time of, say, Abraham's stay in Harran or the destruction of Sodom was neither known by the writers nor seen as significant. The importance of these events was that they occurred 'a very long time ago'--no more, no less. The validity of the texts as the crystallization of a literary heritage is not even challenged by the frequent anachronisms--Ur of the Chaldees, Philistia and so forth. The concern of the writers was surely to make the stories relevant to the contemporary reader of the seventh or sixth century BCE, for whom these geographical terms would have some meaning. |
One of the major obstacles to an acceptance of the Patriarchal narratives as literary constructs, however, has been the misguided enthusiasm with which so-called biblical archaeologists have seized upon apparent synchronisms in an attempt to validate the texts. |
Giorgio Buccellati's study of the Amorites of the Ur III period, for example, was heralded as a breakthrough in interdisciplinary correlation. The documentation of the migrations into southern Mesopotamia in the last quarter of the third millennium of a people identified as the Amorites provided for many a rationale for, if not an absolute proof of, Abraham's journey from Ur, via Harran, to Palestine. After all, if Amorites moved into southern Mesopotamia towards the end of the third millennium, then there was surely nothing to have stopped them from moving into Palestine also. It has to be said, in this case, that this already hypothetical westward migration suited very conveniently the then current archaeological thinking of certain scholars who saw the Early Bronze IV period as a semi-nomadic culture introduced by newcomers who destroyed the urban culture of the Early Bronze Age, and put in its place a semi-sedentary occupation, the economic basis of which relied upon dry-farming and pastoralism. For these scholars, the coincidence of the arrival of this semi-nomadic culture and the textually documented migration of Amorites, in whatever direction, was too appealing to pass up, and the Early Bronze IV 'invaders' were unreservedly identified as the Amorites, providing for many the ideal entrée for Abraham and his family. In point of fact, the Amorites were most probably native Syrians. Although many scholars have stated that they moved into Mesopotamia and Syria from some unspecified region of the Eastern Desert, there is no reason at all to assume that they had not always lived in Syria and, in these terms, they can be thought of as the indigenous population of inland, central and north Syria, equivalent to the Canaaanites of the Levant. |
To give another example: the American expedition to the Dead Sea plain, directed initially by Paul Lapp and subsequently by Walter Rast and R. Thomas Schaub, produced evidence for extensive urban settlements dating to the early third millennium BCE, at sites such as Safi, Numeirah and in particular Bab edh-Dhra'. This information was seized upon with great enthusiasm, for here surely were the 'cities of the plain', and suddenly Lot and his wife were brought from the realms of fiction and thrust into the limelight of virtual reality. Few stopped to consider the historical value of the somewhat nonsensical statement, which prefaces the story of Lot, that the area of the Dead Sea plain was, at the time, under the control of the king of Elam. (Indeed, the inclusion of such a statement serves only to indicate that the story was edited or compiled during the period of the exile when Elam, together with Media, fought against Babylon and took over its empire.) |
Now it may well be that the 'cities of the plain' have been rediscovered, but it rather assumes that they had ever been lost. It is perfectly possible that Sodom could be identified as Bab edh-Dhra. It might well have still have been known as such in the sixth century BCE, and any traveller to that region of southern Jordan would not have failed to be impressed by the dramatic spectacle of the ruins, and could well have composed a story around them. |
Now, quite obviously, the mention in the Patriarchal stories of a place-name which can be identified as a real location in no way validates the story that surrounds it. Bab edh-Dhra is as real today as it was in the third millennium BCE, or as it was in the sixth century BCE. It has inherent in its ancient existence a history the absolute reality of which is completely independent of its supposed role in the story of Lot. The formative history of ancient Israel, and indeed its prehistory, is present to some degree or other in every mound or single-period settlement archaeologists choose to examine in the Holy Land, and the accumulated data from now thousands of excavations and surveys yields a surprisingly detailed documentation. True, this archaeological reality may not make as compelling reading as the pages of the Old Testament. It certainly lacks the dramatic events and the heroes and villains, and addresses itself to the less tangible aspects of political and social structure, economic development, material culture, interregional relations and international trade and so forth. Just occasionally, this somewhat skeletal history is fleshed out by the discovery of contemporary text documents, giving at least a few names or generally inconsequential events to add a hint of humanity to the otherwise almost clinically objective presentation. But it must be stressed that it is not necessary to eliminate the Old Testament stories from this more objectively derived reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel, but merely to reclassify them as part of the nation's literary heritage, which may or may not have anything to do with historical reality. |
After the archaeological record has been surveyed, the most striking feature of all that emerges is the essential cultural continuity of Canaanite civilization from at least the fourth millennium to the time of composing or compiling the biblical texts. In these terms Israel itself has to be seen as a political construct, its culture derived as a sub-culture of the indigenous Canaanite population. The literary traditions of the Old Testament can be expected, therefore, to contain, and do contain, writings relevant to the sub-set of Israel, but also to the greater cultural heritage of ancient Canaan (as evidenced by the many close parallels with the Ugaritic texts). |
In the end the most pertinent point that emerges is that, if we wish to examine the literary and theological heritage of Israel, then we have the rich resource of the Old Testament. If, however, we wish to reconstruct the history of civilization of the Canaanites, then we have first to look at the equally rich resource of archaeological data. |
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