ABSTRACT
The Hebrew Bible by and large preserves a late Iron Age Judean cultural memory of Canaan’s inhabitants before Israel’s appearance in the 13th century BCE. For this reason, questions persist concerning the cultural or historical accuracy of biblical portrayals of groups like the Amorites and Canaanites, and how these relate to wider ancient Near Eastern traditions. Various lines of evidence point to the use of the frequently used term Canaanite in the Hebrew Bible as a demonym, referencing Canaan’s population as a whole and its limited utility as a term for a specific group and their customs. Alternatively, the term Amorite, like Hittite, was employed more specifically to reference one group among several that inhabited Canaan before Israel. The persistence of a number of cultural traditions associated with Amorites in Mesopotamia during the first millennium suggests a wider prevalence of traditions in the Near East associated with Amorites that offer a significant way by which biblical traditions involving them were shaped. Alongside this is increasing evidence of the cultural influence of second-millennium Amorite traditions upon the formation of first-millennium Levantine traditions, as evidenced among Israel, Judah, and their neighbors.
