The Philistines, while an integral part of the Canaanite milieu, do not seem to have been ethnically homogenous with the Canaanites ; the Hurrians ( who spoke a language isolate ), Hittites ( Indo-European speakers ), as well as the Semitic Aramaeans, Moabites, and Ammonites, are also considered " distinct " from generic Canaanites / Amorites, in scholarship or in tradition ( although in the Biblical Book of Nations, " Heth ", Hittites are a son of Canaan, despite the fact that it has been proven beyond doubt that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language ).

The Canaanite states of Aleppo, Nuzi, and Arrapha seem to have been incorporated into Mitanni under Shaushtatar as well.

The terms Amorite and Canaanite seem to be used more or less interchangeably, Canaan being more general and Amorite a specific component among the Canaanites who inhabited the land.

The ideas of pairs of mountains seem to be quite common in Canaanite mythology ( similar to Horeb and Sinai in the Bible ).

In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently " alphabetic " system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in the Sinai peninsula during the 19th century BC, by Canaanite workers in the Egyptian turquoise mines.

* 1457 BC – Likely date of the Battle of Megiddo between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh, the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.

A cadastral survey seems also to have been instituted, and one of the documents relating to it states that a certain Uru-Malik, whose name appears to indicate his Canaanite origin, was governor of the land of the Amorites, or Amurru as the semi-nomadic people of Syria and Canaan were called in Akkadian.

Some scholars have identified the biblical creature Leviathan as a monster from Canaanite mythology.

It is a matter of considerable scholarly debate whether the biblical " Hittites " signified any or all of: 1 ) the original Hattians ; 2 ) their Indo-European conquerors ( Nesili ), who retained the name " Hatti " for Central Anatolia, and are today referred to as the " Hittites " ( the subject of this article ); or 3 ) a Canaanite group who may or may not have been related to either or both of the Anatolian groups, and who also may or may not be identical with the later Neo-Hittite ( Luwian ) polities.

Almost nothing is known of Bronze Age ( pre-1200 BC ) Canaanite views of heaven, and the archeological findings at Ugarit ( destroyed c. 1200 BC ) have not provided information.

Dating of remains to the biblical history is made difficult by the Bible's lack of datable events and its unreliable internal chronology ; the interpretation of remains has been influenced by religious and nationalistic arguments, as evidenced by arguments over burials from the highland settlement phase ; and no material remains have been found which can reliably separate Israelite from non-Israelite ( Canaanite ) sites in the earliest period.

Archaeologists and historians attempting to trace the origins of these villagers have found it impossible to identify any distinctive features that could define them as specifically Israelite – collared-rim jars and four-room houses have been identified outside the highlands and thus cannot be used to distinguish Israelite sites, and while the pottery of the highland villages is far more limited than that of lowland Canaanite sites, it develops typologically out of Canaanite pottery that came before.

Archaeologists and historians see more continuity than discontinuity between these highland settlements and the preceding Late Bronze Canaanite culture ; certain features such as ceramic repertoire and agrarian settlement plans have been said to be distinctives of highland sites, and collar-rimmed jars and four-roomed houses have been said to be intrinsically " Israelite ," but have also been said to belong to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Canaan.

The original myth may have been about a lesser god Helel trying to dethrone the Canaanite high god El who lived on a mountain to the north.

The archaeological remains that are considered to date from the time of Solomon are notable for the fact that Canaanite material culture appears to have continued unabated ; there is a distinct lack of magnificent empire, or cultural development-indeed comparing pottery from areas traditionally assigned to Israel with that of the Philistines points to the Philistines having been significantly more sophisticated.

According to a widely accepted theory ( the " Kenite hypothesis "), the Edomite god YHW could have been brought north to the Canaanite hill country and the early Israelites by migratory Edomite desert tribes, of whom the Kenites were one.

While traditionally these words have been understood to be either Jewish words whose meaning has been derived from characteristics of these Canaanite deities or references to demons, some interpret these as evidence of Israelite recognition of these gods as part of the military retinue of Yahweh.

* Ea ; was also Babylonian in origin, and may have influenced Canaanite El, and also ים Yam, God of the Sea and River.

Snake cults were well established in Canaanite religion in the Bronze Age, for archaeologists have uncovered serpent cult objects in Bronze Age strata at several pre-Israelite cities in Canaan: two at Megiddo, one at Gezer, one in the sanctum sanctorum of the Area H temple at Hazor, and two at Shechem.

Israel Finkelstein et al., however, have claimed that lack of evidence for a systematic conquest or the abrupt appearance of a new culture indicates that the Israelites simply arose as a subculture within Canaanite society.

From the form of the name, it is suspected that Shamgar may actually have been a Hittite, a similar name occurring with Sangara, a Hittite king of Carchemish ; it is also the case that Anath is the name of a Canaanite deity, and son of Anath is thus merely a royal title.

Early Canaanite I ( 3100-2900 BCE ) period tombs are the earliest rock-cut tombs yet discovered in Israel ; several have been found beneath the Ophel in Jerusalem.

Northern Canaanites are commonly thought to develop into Phoenicians by the 8th century BC-a claim which has recently been verified by genetic comparison analysis of ancient Canaanite and Phoenician burial sites in modern Lebanon.

The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible points out that no evidence has been found of any Canaanite myth of a god being thrown from heaven, as in Isaiah 14: 12.

Though the Philistines adopted local Canaanite culture and language before leaving any written texts ( and later adopted the Aramaic language ), an Indo-European origin has been suggested for a handful of known Philistine words that survived as loanwords in Hebrew.

The Muslim commentators explain that Balaam was a Canaanite who had been given knowledge of some of the books of God.

In the Canaanite pantheon as attested in Ugaritic sources, Hadad was the son of El, who had once been the primary god of the Canaanite pantheon.

At the end of this period a new landscape emerges: the northern Canaanite cities still existed, more or less intact, and became the Phoenicians ; the highlands behind the coastal plains, previously largely uninhabited, were rapidly filling with villages, largely Canaanite in their basic culture but without the Bronze Age city-state structure ; and along the southern coastal plain there are clear signs that a non-Canaanite people had taken over the former Canaanite cities while adopting almost all aspects of Canaanite culture.

The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains in the local Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite, and almost the sole marker distinguishing the " Israelite " villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether even this is an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute.

Sutailja was a Canaanite rather than a native Egyptian name which means that she was almost certainly a king's concubine from Canaan.

As a result, the accounts contained within the Bible were almost the only sources of information on ancient Canaanite religion.

The word is identical to the usual plural of el meaning gods or magistrates, and is cognate to the l-h-m found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite Gods, the children of El and conventionally vocalized as " Elohim " even though this is a speculation as Ugaritic as a consonantal written language only recorded consonants.

According to Howard Schwartz, " the myth of the fall of Lucifer " existed in fragmentary form in Isaiah 14: 12 and other ancient Jewish literature ; Schwartz claims that the myth originated from " the ancient Canaanite myth of Athtar, who attempted to rule the throne of Ba ' al, but was forced to descend and rule the underworld instead ".

Linguistically, the Canaanite languages form a group within the Northwest Semitic languages ; its best-known member today is the Hebrew language, being mostly known from Iron Age epigraphy.

The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a plural in-în rather than-îm ( e. g. mlkn " kings " for Biblical Hebrew məlākîm ), like Aramaic and Arabic ; retention of the feminine ending-at which Biblical Hebrew reduces to-āh ( e. g. qryt " town ", Biblical Hebrew qiryāh ) but retains in the construct state nominal form ( e. g. qiryát yisrael " town of Israel "); and retention of a verb form with infixed-t -, also found in Arabic and Akkadian ( w -’ ltḥm " I began to fight ", from the root lḥm.

" He presents evidence that the name (" Pummay ") in the last line is a shortened form ( hypocoristicon ) of the name of Shubna's king, containing only the divine name, a method of shortening “ not rare in Phoenician and related Canaanite dialects .”.

The Arabic name of the village, Az-Zeeb is a shortened form of the site's original ancient Canaanite / Phoenician name, Achzib.

The Canaanite languages, together with the Aramaic languages and Ugaritic, form the Northwest Semitic subgroup.

Biblical Hebrew (), also called Classical Hebrew (), is the archaic form of the Hebrew language, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken in the area known as Canaan between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

These words evolved from older Canaanite and Semitic words that ended with two consonants ; indeed, when a suffix ( other than an absolute plural ) is added to a segolate, the original form ( or something similar ) reappears ( cf.

The evidence which led to the abandonment of Albright's theory include: the collar-rimmed jars have been recognised as an indigenous form originating in lowland Canaanite cities centuries earlier ; while some " Joshua " cities, including Hazor, Lachish, Megiddo and others, have destruction and transition layers around 1250-1145 BCE, others, including Jericho, have no destruction layers or were uninhabited during this period ; and the Merneptah Stele indicates that a people called " Israel " were already known in Canaan by the reign of Merneptah ( 1213-1203 BCE ).

The term was applied originally in the Book of Joshua ( where it is found in its verbal form ) to the Gibeonites who converted during the time of Joshua, later in the Book of Ezra they include the Avdei Shlomo (" Servants of Solomon ") the descendants of the remnant of the Canaanite people in the land.