Charles River Editors

Individuals who decide to take up learning about the Old Testament of the Bible are immediately faced with the difficult proposition of identifying the various peoples that the Hebrews met and sometimes came into conflict with when they entered the territory that eventually became Israel. The Moabites and Edomites were just two of the many Canaanite groups that the Hebrews dealt with, often violently, but there were dozens of other Canaanite groups, which were all for the most part identified through the names of their respective cities. In fact, before the Hebrews established a kingdom and before the Phoenicians colonized much of the Mediterranean, the Canaanites were the most important group in the Levant for much of the Bronze Age and into the early Iron Age. Although the Canaanites never created a unified nation-state or kingdom, their importance in the ancient Near East cannot be understated. It was at least partially because of that fact that the Canaanites were unable to resist their larger and more powerful neighbors that the average person today knows so little about their history, but modern studies have revealed that they developed a unique religion that influenced non-Canaanite peoples and continued to be practiced in some form centuries after the Canaanites ceased to be an identifiable people. Furthermore, during the height of the Bronze Age the Canaanites provided important resources to the Egyptian and Hittite Empires and played a key role in the geopolitical game of chess between those two kingdoms. It also goes without saying that the Canaanites were also a factor in the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel, as the battles they lost to the Hebrews later became the foundation of the Jewish kingdom.