Canaanites
The Canaanites or Canaanites are the oldest known inhabitants of today's Israel , the biblical land of Canaan , predominantly before the appearance of the Israelites in the 13th century BC. Chr.
history
Early to Middle Bronze Age
The Canaanites were organized in city-states , whose city kings mostly acted independently of one another. They are identical to the Phoenicians in that Phoenicians is the Greek and Canaanite or Canaanite is the Hebrew name for the Semitic tribes living on the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean and in the neighboring inland. Since the semi-nomadic Hebrews living in the mountains were the Canaanites, whose name in Hebrew ( כְּנַעֲנִי Knaʿani ) is not "ק", but "כ", as traders and merchants perceived, they identified them by the Hebrew קנע, qana "to do business", so that Canaanites can also be translated as " trader ". Since the Greeks had more encounters with the seafaring "Phoenician" trading cities on the coast in historical times, the terms "Phoenicians" and "Canaanites" are not used synonymously, although they are one and the same ethnic group .
Early Iron Age
After the colonization of the land of Canaan by the Israelites , Canaanites and Israelites lived in the same land and existed side by side for several hundred years, only separated by religion ( YHWH cult and Baal cult). Through the " conquest " of the Hebrews and the cities, at least partially conquered by military power, the territorial possession of the Canaanites passed to the Hebrews over time, including Jerusalem , but the demarcation of the peoples continued for a long time through the distinction in faith.
In the times of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah , especially after the unification efforts of David and Solomon , the mixing of both cultures - the Canaanite and the Israelite - could no longer be stopped. In northern Palestine, with the Phoenicians, the Bronze Age, matriarchal culture of the Canaanites was retained until the Iron Age . In the land of Canaan the Canaanites were divided into seven ethnic groups: the Amorites , Girgashites , Hittites , Hivites , Jebusites , the actual Canaanites and the Perizzites .
According to recent archaeological research (including by the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein ), the difference between Israelites and Canaanites is not due to belonging to different peoples, but to different ways of life (urban central in the plain with intensive agriculture as opposed to semi-nomadic village life in the hill country) conditionally. This is in line with the close linguistic relationship of the earliest Canaanite and Hebrew inscriptions that has already been observed. For this strict separation into two different peoples, which is not postulated as in the later writings of the Bible (whereby the Canaanites are banished to YHWH and must be destroyed), but a single people in originally two clearly different ways of life also speak
- the material archaeological legacy from the early Iron Age , especially in the Judeo- Galilean hills (which no sign of conquest, but shows a significant increase in population density at the beginning of the Iron Age, parallel to the main result of the loss of the former protector of Egypt -related economic and political collapse of the once powerful city-states in the plain),
- comparable main deities in Israel and Ugarit (whereby YHWH as tribal god of semi-nomadic tribes seems to come from Seir , i.e. the areas of Edom and Midian and with regard to the ban on how the god Chemosh speaks the Moabite Mescha stele ) with attributes and symbols that are comparable in different places in the Bible by YHWH, as they were previously attributed to the gods El and Baal in Ugarit,
- various narratives of the Bible itself (e.g. appearance of YHWH as El Schaddai to Abraham , Psalm 82 with the god ʾĒl ʿElyōn presiding over the assembly of gods and the worship of the fertility god Baal and the wife of El, which was common well into the reign of Israel and Judah , Asherah ).
Especially under King Joschiah and the later prophets, there seems to have been a strict centralization of the cult in Jerusalem. All other gods that were previously worshiped or at least tolerated in the sense of a monolatry were ousted by the now all-powerful YHWH.
Due to the sovereignty of interpretation over the history of all of Canaan that remained in the Kingdom of Judah after the Northern Empire was destroyed by the Assyrians , the chronologically earlier stories were also rewritten, modified and reinterpreted. “Canaanites” thus became a general term for all groups of people who were not foreign to Canaan (such as the Philistines ) and rejected YHWH.
literature
- Shmuel Ahituv: Canaanites. In: Kathryn A. Bard (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Archeology of Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London 1999, ISBN 0-415-18589-0 , pp. 186-189.
- Manfred Clauss : Ancient Israel: History, Society, Culture. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3406445736 .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Marc Haber, et al .: Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences . In: The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 101, Issue 2, P 274-282 . July 27, 2017. doi : 10.1016 / j.ajhg.2017.06.013 .
- ^ Israel Finkelstein , Neil Asher Silberman : No Trumpets Before Jericho. The Archaeological Truth About the Bible. CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3406493218 .
- ↑ http://www.bibletopics.com/BIBLESTUDY/154.htm