Canaanite or Isrealite, Is There A Difference?

A mounted Joshua conquering Jericho

In the opening of her second chapter in Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Karen Armstrong quickly recounts the history of the Israelites from a Biblical perspective. She talks of how they migrated and were enslaved in Egypt before escaping under Moses, and the eventual conquering of Canaan. She follows up this personally familiar timeline with something I had never heard before, “[I]n recent years, scholars have become skeptical about the biblical account”(Armstrong 22). Archaeologists, while having found some evidence of the conquering of Canaan, cannot definitively link it with Israel. This begs the question that Armstong addresses: did “Israel emerged peacefully and gradually from within Canaanite society?”(Armstrong 23), and if so then why does the Bible tell so many contradicting stories about the Israelites’ origin?

While scholars are certain that the Israelites were in Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century, as other documents corroborate this fact, the idea of them as conquerers is harder to believe when looking at the evidence available. The prevailing thought is that the birth of Israel came from a new wave of settlement in the “central highlands of Canaan”(Armstrong 23). The city-states of Canaan were undergoing a time of unrest, war, and economic hardships plagued many. It would not be unreasonable to believe that some people would migrate to the hills so they could escape these issues. Archaeological evidence supports this, as they discovered the remains of around one hundred “unfortified new villages in the hill country north of Jerusalem”(Armstrong 23). Could these villages composed of an amalgamation of fleeing Canaanites be the Israelite people? There is certainly evidence to support this, but if this is the case, then why does the Bible tell so many contradicting stories?

The Israelites did not start tracking their own history until they had become a major power, and it is believed that their history was kept by four distinct sources written at different times. The sources, J, E, D, and P are the ones who wrote the Pentateuch, and their goal was not to tell completely objective and clean-cut historical facts, rather it was to “show how the people of their own period saw the past”(Armstrong 25). The writers were not alive at the same time and did now truly know early Israelite history so they made history that their people believed. For example, at the time when J and E were writing, Israelites believed that they all descended from Jacob, all one united people, even though evidence today tells a different story.

So, while there is no definitive answer, the evidence does point to Israel emerging from Canaan due to migration. The Bible contradicts this because the writers were not trying to tell objective history, but rather how the Israelites of the time saw their own history.

Citations:

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Harper Perennial, 2005.

Photo Source: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/joshua-in-canaan/