vermontsavant wrote:
The middle east was to conquered by a diverse group of conquerors over the years that it would be impossible to know for any real certainty who were the original inhabitants of Palestine.
The original Canaanites could have dispersed anywhere in the middle east or central Asia after the Israeli conquest,the bible says many were killed and a few converted to the newly then formed monotheistic religion we now call Judaism.But that's assuming the bible is 100% accurate.
Baal worship was a problem in ancient Israel according to the bible and Baal meaning "master" was an old Canaanite god from pre Israeli times,if some aspects of Canaanite culture stuck,we could assume some Canaanites stuck around.But this again is relying on the bible to be 100% right.
I may be wrong but I personally don't know of any non biblical writtings on the Canaanites and so for all we know they skipped town for Kazakhstan after the fall of Jericho.Or they slowly dispersed after centuries of conquest of Palestine by,Assyrians,Babylonians,Persians,Greeks and Romans just as the Jewish tribes were lost after centuries of conquest and the tribes of Benjamin and Judah were left in the Roman province of Judea.
It's not very likely this question will be answered,there may be college professors with theory's but likely just theory's.
Well... we DO know enough about it to know that the whole question is kinda silly- and only gets asked because modern folks of today have modern political and religious agendas, and need to project modern ethnic identities back onto Bronze Age peoples of the past.
Canaan was just the name for the Levant. The various groups that lived there were probably not a distinct ethnic group. The ancient Hebrews themselves were probably originally Canaanites themselves. The Hebrews were semitic nomads who probably were camp followers of the Hyksos (the shepherd kings) who invaded from Arabia into Egypt and ruled part of Egypt. Century later the native Egyptians reasserted rule and kicked the Hyksos and their allies out-including Moses' tribe of Hebrews. The Hebrews then needed a new home, and so conquered, or reconquered Canaan. The two kingdoms of Judea and Israel then thrived in the area once part of Canaan for centuries.
Dial ahead a 1000 years. Ancient Judea in the time of Jesus is a Roman Province. They rebel against Roman rule. The Romans beat the crap out of them, and destroy the temple - and the Jews get driven out of the land and disperse. Settlers from the surrounding countries move into the now empty Judea. Then five hundred years later the Arabs invade out of Arabia led by Mohammed in the seventh century AD and absorb the whole fertile crescent (including Palestine)Egypt and North Africa into the Arab indentity and into the Muslim faith.
So... now the Jews are dispersed all over the old world, and now their former homeland is inhabited by people absorbed into the Arabs. The land is called "Palestine". Palestine was named after the Philistines in the Bible. But the Philistines were invaders who fought the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament- and were "sea peoples" (proto Greeks) who came from the Aegean islands centuries before the Arab invasions and before the Diaspora of the Jews.
Fast forward to now: two groups (Jews and Palestinians) are fighting over a piece of land the size of Maryland named after a proto Greek people who vanished from history almost 3000 years ago. But one group wears their name as a proud badge anyway. The other group is a recent group of migrants from Europe who claim descent from a people who lived on that land 2000 years ago. Modern DNA science shows that that may actually be largely true, but it also shows that both of the modern adversarial groups are genetic siblings(modern Jews and modern Palestinian Arabs) who share huge amounts of the same Semitic DNA. And logic dictates that folks in both groups MUST have a lot of Canaanite ancestors.
AND
the whole thing pivots upon the Book of Exodus in the Bible -that describes how the Hebrews fled Egypt and seized the Promised land. Real, or imagined, the events in Exodus would have happened around 1300 BC. Or more than 130 generations ago!
Even a White Gentile WASP American guy like me - if I could trace my ancestry back 130 generations, could probably find a Canaanite ancestor or two just because of genetic drift.
11 Nov 2019, 2:35 pm
