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September 10, 2006

The Canaanites Were in Canaan

The other day I left the following comment on Chris Heard's great Higgaion post on The Exodus Decoded. Well, I tried to leave this comment but some of the formatting didn't work.

Chris,

As usual, this is a great post. I have one tiny bone to pick.

“Canaanite” (our term, not theirs)

It is the case that while the Amarna letters do not consistently use the word ^mâtukinahhi to mean Canaan or the gentilic, kinahaau (EA 9:19) to mean Canaanite, the place name does seem to be a general geographical area bounded on the north by the land of Ammuru and to the south by Egypt. The western border appears to be the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern border is anyone’s guess. One might want also to consider the Ugarit gentilic kn‛ny. The Akkadian version is also known from Ugarit. I cite as my authority on this Astour (and Smith), RSP, II, 293 and 355 and if you don’t trust those guys checkout the index of geological names in Moran, The Amarna Letters, 389. To be sure the name wasn’t pronounce exactly the way we pronoun it (or the way it was pronounced in Hebrew, but the Ugaritic is close) and it was exclusively used as a geological term rather than with the ethnic meaning that we sometimes give it. So you were not completely wrong.

Thanks for a great post and your usual clear presentation of the facts and implications in this matter.

[I have corrected a couple of grammatical weirdnesses in this quote, so this version now says what I wanted to say rather than what it did say.]

After reading a couple of things, I thought it might be interesting to elaborate on my point. The idea that ^mâtukinahhi or perhaps a better example, ^mâtukinahna, in the Amarna letters means the actual geographical "land of Canaan" goes back to at least 1915 when Knudtzon, 1027 noted it. The idea likely preceded Knudtzon but I'm too lazy to track down its origins. And while there was some debate about the geographical boundaries of this land of Canaan there was a nearly unanimous scholarly consensus that the word reflected some fairly precise geographical area until 1991. But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

The uninitiated may ask, "What does the word ^mâtukinahna have to do with the word Canaan." In texts like the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic that are normally written using an alphabet the word was written kn‛n. The geographical name doesn't occur in any Ugaritic text. But the gentilic, kn‛ny, does, so we can be very sure that it would be written that way. The Hebrew gentilic has the same consonants. A gentilic is a word that is built by modifying a place name so that it is indicative of where someone comes from. We say "New Yorker" to mean someone from New York. I am a native "Californian." Anyway, the superscripted "mâtu", sometimes written KUR, is what is called a determinative. It means that the word it precedes is a geographical name for some territory. Often it is translated "land" but just as often, it is not translated at all. There are other determinatives that indicate the names of cities or personal names for example. I hope you can see the "k" equaling the hard English "C" and the "n" equaling the English "n." But you may wonder about the "h" equaling "‛" which I use here to represent the Semitic ‛ayin. We don't have this exact sound in English nor does our alphabet have a direct way of representing it. The Amarna letters and some of the other texts I will be mentioning are written in the Akkadian syllablary. The Akkadian syllabary was derived from the Sumerian syllabary and the Sumerain syllabary didn't have (or need?) a way to represent an ‛ayin. So scribes, writing in Akkadian used various ways to get around this deficiency in the writing system. One way was to use syllables that contained what was normally associated with the "h" sound to do double duty. We use the letter "c" in much the same way in English. So when they needed to represent the sound of the ‛ayin they might use the "h." (By the way, it is normal practice to underscore the "h" with a curved line rather than a straight line but if I were to try to do that you would need a special font. So now you see why there is a "h" in the ^mâtukinahna, rather than an "‛"). Sometimes, like at Mitanni and Babylon, the scribes used other ways of designating the ‛ayan. In ^mâtukinahna one can see the final "n." There are linguistic explanations for the missing final "n" when the name is written ^mâtukinahhi. There are also linguistic explanations for the differences in vowel sounds and placement but they would take more effort to explain than I think reasonable at this time. The fact is no one who understands the linguistic issues questions the equation between the geographic names ^mâtukinahna and "Canaan" at a purely linguistic level.

Now, back to the main story: In 1991, Lemche did question the idea that ^mâtukinahna was a specific geological area either in the Amarna letters or in other contemporary and later references. He, 39, says,

. . . evidently the inhabitants of the supposed Canaanite territory in Western Asia had no clear idea of the actual size of this Canaan, not did they know exactly where Canaan was situated.

And a little later, 52, he claims,

To a scribe of ancient Western Asia "Canaanite" always designated a person who did not belong to the scribe's own society or state, while Canaan was considered to be a county different from his own.

And so a rather abrasive debate began. I think the first rejoinder was from Na'aman in 1994. But the real fun came with Rainey in 1996. Rainey is not known to dodge controversy. After dismissing Lemche's "anthropological" arguments (p.1) as "irrelevant to the interpretation of the ancient documents," Rainey turns to those ancient documents. He cites and explains the evidence, from Alalakh, Ugarit, Egypt, Mitanni, Babylon, Alashia. Much, but far from all, of this evidence is found in the Amarna letters from those places. Then he moves to the Amarna letters from Byblos and then to later sources: particularly the Hebrew Bible but also some very late numismatic evidence. Finally, Rainey, 12, concludes,

All the texts discussed above reflect a realistic concept of geography. Canaan as a geographic and social entity was a reality to the various authors. There is nothing "diffuse and vague" (Lemche, 1991, 39) about these passages. That a specific Late Bronze Age border description is missing along with detailed bureaucratic references to the province is not proof that such did not exist. The geopolitical and cultural evidence of the Late Bronze epigraphic witnesses strongly support the assumption that the biblically described border was a reality in the Late Bronze Age . . .

Furthermore, there is no attempt here to read modern ideas of ethnicity into the texts. The ancient scribes have been allowed to speak within the context of their own times and their own understanding. On the contrary, Lemche's appeal to modern anthropological studies of peoples in Africa or Asia is no valid substitute for a truly professional analysis of the original documents under discussion.

Rainey sure has a strong finish. A little too strong for my taste but I do believe he made his case and made it well. But why the need to impugn Lemche's professionalism?

So you think that was the end of it? Well the discussion goes on in a series of papers. Perhaps Na'aman best sums up what I think on this subject in the conclusion to his 1999 paper,

In sum, Canaan was the political-territorial name for the Egyptian province in Asia in the Late Bronze Age. Some of the texts mention Canaan without specifying an exact location because their authors did not consider it necessary to specify something that was so well known. But there are enough texts that give accurate details on the size of the land and the identity of its inhabitants, while there is not a single text that defines the size of Canaan differently. The phantom of the "Greater Canaan" should disappear from the scholarly literature, along with the erroneous arguments that were brought to support it.

See, it is possible to have a strong finish without being nasty.

While the eastern boarder of this territory is not known and may not have been well defined in the Late Bronze Age, the Northern boarder is, as I said in my comment to Chris' post, Amurru, the southern border is Egypt itself and the western boarder is the Mediterranean Sea. While I am not so sure that this territory represents a unified ethnicity in the modern sense, there is sufficient common material evidence from throughout the region to support the notion of some level of cultural identity. I do strongly suspect that whatever this culture might have been in the Late Bronze Age, the Biblical authors had a somewhat different view of it.

References:

Posted by DuaneSmith at September 10, 2006 10:32 AM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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