Canaan #27

Canaan is the biblical name for the land west of the Jordan River, stretching along the Mediterranean coast and into the hill country, which God promises to Abraham and his descendants. The name comes from Canaan, a son of Ham, and Genesis lists the peoples descended from him, including the Sidonians, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, and others (Genesis 10:6, 15-19). Its borders are sketched in Genesis 10:19 and given in more detail in Numbers 34:1-12.

Biblical Significance

Canaan is the destination of Abram’s journey from Haran. He passes through the land as far as Shechem, and there the Lord tells him, “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:5-7). The promise is renewed and formalized in the covenant of circumcision, when God declares that he will give Abraham and his descendants “all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8). Famine later drives Jacob’s family to Egypt, but the hope of return endures.

When God calls Moses at the burning bush, he says he has come to bring Israel out of Egypt into “a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey,” the territory of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, and other peoples (Exodus 3:8). Moses sends twelve men to explore Canaan, and their report of its fruit and its fortified cities sets up the crisis at Kadesh (Numbers 13:1-2, 17-33). Israel is warned not to imitate the practices of the land of Canaan, whose religion involved the worship of gods such as Baal and Asherah (Leviticus 18:3). After the conquest under Joshua, the book of Joshua records that the Lord gave Israel all the land he had sworn to give their fathers, and that not one promise failed (Joshua 21:43-45).

Canaan is still remembered in the New Testament. A “woman of Canaan” in the region of Tyre and Sidon asks Jesus to heal her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28).

Today

The name “Canaan” appears outside the Bible as well. Egyptian records refer to a province called Canaan in the second millennium BC, and the Merneptah Stele, from about 1208 BC, lists Canaan among the peoples and places it claims to have conquered, alongside the earliest known mention of Israel. Letters from the Amarna archive of the fourteenth century BC show Canaan as a patchwork of small city-states under Egyptian influence, and the texts from Ugarit, in modern Syria, preserve myths about Baal that help scholars understand the religious background of the Old Testament.

The exact extent of Canaan varies in the Bible, and the origins of Israel within it are debated among historians. In modern usage it describes a geographic region covering Israel, the Palestinian territories, and adjacent parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.