Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Are Palestinians Canaanites?

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                        

Remember Noah and his Ark landing on Mt. Ararat?  He saved his family in the gigantic flood and landed on a new piece of land.  One of Noah's sons was Ham..  He also had Shem and Japheth.  All three were born after the flood..  Ham treated his father terribly.  Because of this, Ham's descendants, the Canaanites, were cursed and condemned to servitude.  (Gen. 9:20)  From these three sons came the first seventy from which humanity was derived after the flood had wiped out everyone but Noah's group. The story was also found in the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic.  It is in the Torah in Genesis.

What happened was that Noah debased himself and planted a vineyard after they left the ark.  He drank the wine and became drunk.  In this drunken state he took off his clothes inside his tent in order to sleep but must not have covered himself.  Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside, "Dad's naked!  Come see! Ha, Ha!"  Brothers Shem and Japheth reacted differently to this news.  They took a garment and laid it on both their shoulders, as they were little and it was heavy and large, walked into the tent backwards so they couldn't look at their father, and covered Noah but didn't look at him.

Noah woke up, most likely with a hangover and realized what his small son had done to him.  It must have been Canaan who was always in trouble for him to immediately realize that it took two children to cover him with this big cloak because one had caused them to do so.  He said, Cursed is Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers. Blessed is HaShem (G-d, which here means the Name); and let Canaan be a slave to them.  May G-d extend Japheth, but he will dwell in the tents of Shem;  may Canaan be a slave to them."

Ham was in turn the father of Cush, from which Nubia and Ethiopia came from; Put, from which Libya and Morocco came from; Mizraim, from which Egypt came from; and Canaan,who was the youngest,  from which Syria and Eretz Israel (later called Palestine after 135 CE) came from.  Canaan was cursed before he was even born when it was his father who had done wrong.  Was that prophesying what would happen with the DNA?   He could have been thinking, This son Ham of mine is a little devil.  I imagine that at least one of his children is going to grow up to be a trouble-maker just like  he is."

"Canaan's sons were Zidon and Heth.  and they propagated into the Jebusite, the Amorite, the Gingashite, the Hivite, the Arkite, the Sinite, the Arvadite, the Zemarite, and the Hamathite.  Afterwards, the families of the Canaanites branched out.  The Canaanite boundary went from Zidon going toward Gerar, as far as Gaza; going toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha.  These are the descendants of Ham, by their families, by their languages, in their lands, in their nations. "

It was the land of Canaan that G-d told Moses to take the children of Israel for their home.  The Israelites had to fight their way in as they were not greeted with a welcome.  The 12 spies that Moses sent out thought they were too big to fight against, but Joshua thought they could handle the situation.  Scientists of today think they were a mixture of Horites, Hittites and Hebrews, dating back to the Hyksos period of the 17th Century BCE.  The Canaanites were almost entirely obliterated or assimilated by the Israelites who had arrived in the 13th Century.  There were Philistines along the coast in the 12th Century, and the Arameans in the north in the 11th Century.  The remnants of people were absorbed into the community and  ruled under King David and Solomon.  Much later we see the name, Canaanites preserved only among the Sidonians and Phoenicians.

The land had been cultured for the past 500 years before the Israelites had arrived.  They were growing huge grapes and other agricultural products.  They believed in many gods called Baalim (lords) and Baalot (ladies).  One was a Baal.  This was something Moses was getting away from as that's what was going on in Ur when Abraham entered Canaan.long ago and of course Egypt was also a land of multiple gods of all descriptions. "The Canaanites were "disobedient" (Heb. 11:31) which is from the Christian New Testament, a term indicating a moral awareness of wrongdoing but a refusal to turn from it."

The land of Canaan was the name for Syria in the 15th to 13th centuries BCE, usually applied to the coast of Eretz Israel.  Before the Israelite conquest, the land was divided into small city-states like Greece.  The Israelites named the land "Eretz Israel" and the northern part which today is Syria,  "Aram."  Arabs traversing the land on camels when Jews made aliyah from Russia in the late 1800's CE called themselves Syrians.

Eretz Israel was attacked many times.  In 722 BCE the Assyrians attacked and carted off people from 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, who then were lost to Judah and Levi tribes.  Later the Babylonians did the same thing.  Sometimes people were brought into the land and replaced by the attackers which is what happened with the Samaritans.  Originally they were of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh but also included a mixture of non-Israelite colonists.   Only the Jews remained as a people who were the remnants of the 12 tribes of Israel.  On the 40 year march, Moses had told his people that they should not reject an Edomite, because he is your brother, and you should not reject an Egyptian, for you were a traveler in their land.  Children who are born to them in the 3rd generation may enter the congregation of HaShem (G-d).  Deuteronomy 33: 7-24:4.
Are the Palestinians today the actual Canaanite people?  Hardly!  However, some of those who were assimilated have planted themselves in the genes of Jews and non-Jews who lived there and are with us today in our chromosomes, no doubt.   We all carry 23 pairs of chromosomes; one of a pair from our mother (mt dna) and one from our father (Ydna).

A few years ago I had a DNA test through a company called "23&Me."  I matched genes with another lady tested there and we found we shared 67cM  found on 6 of our chromosomes which were # 1,6,8,9, and 2 spots on #10, and 12. A cM (centi Morgan) is a measurement of dna on a chromosome and is a very short segment.   This means we are related but that relation goes back quite far, farther than the knowledge I have on  my family tree.  We did share a heritage of being Eastern European Jewish women.  The least I share with someone so far is 6cM on #7 chromosome.  I had about 1,000 hits of sharing these wee amounts with others that must connect us so far back in history.

Bryan Sykes wrote the book "the Seven Daughters of Eve," which are Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine.  He showed that 98% of all people of Western Europe descended from 7 women who lived in Europe within the last 50,000 years. A few have been added to this list, such as the newer discovered "W"  for Wilma, which my paternal grandmother happens to be.  Women's DNA (MTdna) can go back very far.  That's why they can only check for this in DNA testing on Egyptian mummies.  Ydna of men can't go back as far, unfortunately at this time.  The women 50,000 years ago or clan mothers descended from a common ancestor  the scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Jasmine was found to have originated in Syria, with the home about a mile from the Euphrates River when the Great Ice Age was at an end.  Jasmine's descendants are not evenly distributed evenly throughout Europe which contains about 17%..  One branch follows the Mediterranean coast to Spain and Portugal and goes into Cornwall, Wales and west of Scotland.  People did get scattered around..

As for Ydna originating in Canaan, the E and E3a, E3b haplogroup,  very common with Jews originating in Africa 50,000 years ago, contains a number of groups in Africa and the Middle East. J, J2,   J1 arose 10,00-15,000 years ago in the fertile crescent and includes Jews, Arabs, Armenians and Kurds with the highest in Iran and Iraq.  The Cohen gene is from J1.  The majority of Jewish men tested fall into J.

So far I find through another company where my brother was tested for both Ydna and MTdna, that his male line Y is finding matches with Arabians and Afghanis  That's a pretty big surprise for a Jewish man today.  They are not close matches like first cousins, but again, way back in history, we may have had a common ancestor because we're sharing the same line of Ydna, showing mutations of the distance of time.

Recently, scientists said that all Jewish women descended from 4 original Jewish women.  We don't know the dates of those women or who they were, but it's interesting because we have the history  of 4 very important Jewish women or mothers; our matriarchs Sarah, wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac, Rebekah, wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob, Rachel and Leah., sisters, both married to Jacob and mothers of the 12 tribes of Israel.   However, I don't think the scientists meant these women.    Leach and Rachel were sisters and would have had the same MTdna.  In fact, Sarah was related to Abraham.

What was the Ydna of Canaanites?  Nobody can know.  The same people of yesterday are not alive in order to test.  There are no mummies of Canaanites.  All that can be done is test people who think they may have some Canaanite heritage and see what it produces of what we do know today.

 Only the Jewish people have survived the 3,000 years of being part of the 12 Tribes of Israel, created by religion.  Other people were only given names such as "Amorite" because that was the name of their leader or king.  That's all that held them together, whereas Jews were followers of a monotheistic religion, in fact the only one in existence till Jesus came along.  Their leader was secondary, their religion being first.  It took 600 years after his appearance before Islam was created by Mohammed from which Palestinians find identification. For the 400 years prior to WWI the Ottoman Empire held title to Palestine, and they were Muslims.

Therefore, when a Palestinian exclaims that this land of Israel belongs to them and they were there first, it's not quite true.  We may all have the same segment of chromosome, whether we be Jew or Muslim from the Canaanites, or we may not have any part of it. In fact, it's more possible that Jews have more cM's being it was the Jewish people who entered the land of the Canaanites.  The admixture would be of these two, not humans farther away.  There weren't that many Canaanites left alive in the first place.

Resource: Tanach (the Torah/Prophets/Writings) Stone Edition Genesis 9:18-10:26
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
DNA & Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick & Andrew Yeiser
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/jewish-genes-what-haplogroup-could-they.html What Haplogroup We Be?
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf-docs/Interpreting-Genetic-Genealogy-Results_web_optimized.pdf
http://www.torah.org/features/wperspective/binah.html
http://history-world.org/canaanite_culture_and_religion.htm
http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=63
The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
Abraham's Children, race, identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People by Jon Entine

15 comments:

  1. I am an atheist now so I really don't understand how claims about purported land titles several millennia old apply. It seems that dislodging the modern Palestinians was typical bad human behavior in response to other bad behavior (Hitler's horrors).

    While an interesting possible history point...Canaan was cursed by Noah...not Hashem according to my reading, but according to other Torah readings the sins of the fathers are only visited unto the 3rd-4th generations. So I'd hope the Canaanites were off the hook by the time the Jews marched to destroy them supposedly for their adherence to other gods (also a sin of every other society on the planet at the time, but the Jews didn't want their land I guess).

    Also, I realize that Jews may not recognize the New Testament as historical fact, but Jesus spoke to a Canaanite woman who asked for his help and made an analogy of her and her people being dogs while the Jews were the masters in the exchange. I assume people recognized as Canaanites still existed around the time of Christ and subsequently there are likely real Canaanite descendents in the area.

    Regardless, I liked your article and it was very informative and made me think and study a bit. Thank you!

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    1. Moses died in about 1271 BCE. After he died, Joshua was the appointed leader and went into Canaan, so you can figure that by the time Jesus appeared on the scene, more than 1,271 years had passed. No, by that time, there were no Canaanites existed and no real Canaanite descendents. Like I said in the article, there may be those of us who carry a few of their genes, however, as some assimilated with the Israelites.

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  2. It wasn't Jews who told Palestinians to leave the land. It was their own leaders, as they were about to attack Israel. They told them to leave and when they won, they could come back. They didn't win and these people were then put into refugee camps where they have remained to this day, though some have been returned. So it was their own greed. They were planning on returning and taking over the Jewish homes.

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    1. That's quite a contorted narrative . Requires a lot of mental gymnastics to swallow that one. People leaving their homes because of a dastardly plot to get them back?
      That is quite a leap of logic.

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    2. Aluminium Fish, I'm afraid you missed the whole narrative. They left their homes because of the promise of getting more by their leaders if they did. Their leaders wanted them out of the way so they could kill the Jews. They were not successful and the Jews won, instead. Now they had left their homes and their leaders told them to go live in the refugee camps. That's not hard to figure out, not a leap of logic. It's an example of pure greed that didn't pan out.

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  3. I don't know why are you relaying on Biblical Historicity since the whole Canaanites' history there is written of theological anti-paganism and was put on paper somewhere between the 9th-7th Centuries BC at the maximalist view or 6th-5th Centuries BC according to the minimalistic view, while Canaanites who lived in Israel ceased to exist in their Canaanite pagan context around the 11th Century BC. The most of the Canaanites who lived in Southern Canaan (modern day Israel & Transjordan) turned into the Hebraic Nations: Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites between the 14th-13th Centuries BC, due to social-political and economical reasons, so their only descendants to live nowadays in the Holy Lands are the Hebrews, or in other words: are the Jews and the Samaritans.
    Canaan included what today are Lebanon, Israel and the "Palestinian" (was NEVER such a nation or land before 1964/7, even the arabs know that..) territories, northwestern Jordan, and some western areas of Syria. According to archaeologist Jonathan N. Tubb, "Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites and Phoenicians undoubtedly achieved their own cultural identities, and yet ethnically they were all Canaanites", "the same people who settled in farming villages in the region in the 8th millennium BC."
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL-F_MkDy...

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  4. I'm showing that the Palestinians are not Canaanites. What are you trying to say? I know that there never has been a state called Palestine. That's the term picked up by the world for these Arabs. Palestine was the name given to the land after 135 by the Romans who had to fight a 3 year war with Bar Kokhba, the Jewish General who held out against the Romans for 3 years before he was killed. Before 1948, both Jews and Arabs living there were called Palestinians. These same Palestinian Arabs have been trying to say that they are of the original people, the Canaanites. It's not true. The Canaanites did not turn into the Hebraic Nations. There's only one Hebrew nation and that is Israel. Some of the others may have been Semites. Read my newest blog article. http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2014/09/names-middle-east-has-gone-by-and-their.html

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  5. Most of the information good. But I grow little impatience because my people had our identity stolen by so called Jewish. There is NO such thing as the Cohen Modal Haplogroup! Recent DNA evidence has already shown the fake Jew have NO connection to IsraeEL. My father is Hebrew and he is a black man from West Africa(Liberia) so there no way these fakes in Israel can be jews by blood! Thank God I was able to find out my real last name which is Hebrew "Manubah-El" the meaning of the name broken down is
    (Man=Man) (unbah=one who is wealthy;lord of the house) (El=of God) ! The true Y haplogroup of the Hebrews are E1B1A and all of its subclades! My black people(negroes/Heebos/ /Israelite/Hebrews) came into Africa to escape persecution for hundreds of years from the Gentiles. Please stop the lies!

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  6. You are not accepting history that has been scientifically proven with DNA. Everything I've said about our Jewish history is true. It's interesting that your father's name is from Hebrew and that he thinks he is the only kind of Jew in the world, but this is not true. We have many Jews who are also E haplogroup. My cousin is E-L117. Not all of us are J1 of the Cohen gene from Aaron, brother of Moses. We also have found black tribes who are Jewish and still practice Jewish customs, and are proven Jewish by actually having the Cohen gene. this is the Lemba tribe. They live in Central Africa, 40,000 in the tribe, speak Bantu languages such as Venda or shona, live in south Africa and Zimbabwe, look like everyone around them and appear to be completely African. Their customs were from Judaism. Tudor Parfitt wrote about them. If your black people came into Africa again to escape persecution from Gentiles, was that when other Jews were also doing the same thing? I mean, after 70 CE when Jerusalem fell to the Romans? Liberia is not a state I have heard of Jews coming from. This is a first. Here is my article on Jewish haplogroups. http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/jewish-genes-what-haplogroup-could-they.html

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  7. The Palestinian people are the descendants of the ancient Canaanites as genetic research by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, Nagah Elaiwa, Carlos Silvera, Ahmed Rostom, Juan Moscoso,
    Eduardo Gómez-Casado, Luis Allende, Pilar Varela and Jorge Martínez-Laso has showed. Canaanites continued to exist and were even mentioned in the New Testament. The Jewish people originate from Ur and then became Egyptian slaves and came to Canaan as foreign conquerors as the Torah itself affirms.

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  8. Unknown, did you read the article or only the title. I wrote, "What was the Ydna of Canaanites? Nobody can know. The same people of yesterday are not alive in order to test. There are no mummies of Canaanites. All that can be done is test people who think they may have some Canaanite heritage and see what it produces of what we do know today."
    The Y dna is the line of the males. Mt dna is the line of the females. We do not have evidence of Canaanites' dna. Most all Canaanites were killed in battle against the Israelites OR..those that lived were absorbed into the Israelite tribes, so their DNA could be sprinkled through the Israelites to reach the Jews of today. I have not read any papers by the men you cite above, but can't understand how they can make such assumptions. Yes, Israelites, led by Moses, then Joshua, took Canaan. The Canaanites were cited as being people who sacrificed humans-which many were used to doing-even Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. They worshipped trees and rocks, etc; kind of behind the times with from the thinking of the Israelites. Their development about social matters, life, etc was behind the new era that came with Moses. They were not a state, but the land was made up of little towns with leaders. It was behind much of Mesopotamia in their social development.
    Now, the Palestinian people have been defined as to where they have come by the deep research of Joan Peters who wrote the facts in her book, FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL, which is about the Origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine. She went to original papers as to where exactly these Arabs came from, and a lot came from Syria, and then all the other surrounding lands, near AND far. They were nomadic people before that, few and far between. By the time the 19th century CE came along, they were still nomadic except for a few landowners who treated the others working for them as peons. Read Mark Twain's accounting of Arabs in Palestine in his book, The Innocents Abroad, about his visit to the land in 1867. You will get a good picture of what they were like.
    Another thought: The Palestinians are not a people. They are a mixture from many countries-but a people stemming from ancient roots; NO. It was the name given to the land by the Romans. Jews were also THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE after 135 CE. They were also called "Palestinians up to May 14, 1948 when the UN voted that they had created Israel and the state was accepted by them.

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  9. I read all of your article but you seem not to have either read recent genetic research like the one cited in my last comment or even my comment itself. The Canaanites were not killed in battle as that's biblical mythology, and they were never absorbed into the Israelites because the Israelites were strictly forbidden from marrying or interacting with non-Israelites. The Canaanites were also mentioned in the New Testament, long after the mythological kingdoms of Israel. Since the genetic research above has shown that the Palestinian people are distinct from Arabs, Jews and Egyptians, the only possible explanation is that they must be the descendants of the indigenous people of the land, the ancient Canaanites. The Palestinians were shown to be so close to the Jewish people and the only people that could be so close to the Jewish are the Canaanites. Whether the Canaanites were less developed than other is irrelevant. In any case, they weren't. Canaanites worshiped many gods, and all ancient civilizations sacrificed humans to their gods, including the Israelites for a period of time. Joan Peters book has been refuted by Yehoshua Porath and Norman Finklestein, who showed how she misused, omitted and miscalculated her papers. In fact Palestinians were migrating to Jordan and that's why today 29% of Jordan's population is of Palestinian origin. Mark Twain's account is unreliable and contradicts what we know about Palestine at the time. And it's also contradicted by the accounts of other chroniclers. The Palestinian people were farmers, and as early as the 18th century they were exporting high quality agricultural products to Europe. In 1948 Palestinians were producing three times as much as Jews in agricultural produce. Furthermore, all censuses, Ottoman and even pre-Ottoman, show a Muslim-Christian majority in Palestine throughout the centuries.
    Herodotus, the father of history, mentions the Syro-Palestinians in 450 BCE, but never mentions the Jews as they didn't exist in the land or were insignificant squatters.

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  10. Bibical mythology? That's your assumption, as most of your comments seem to be. We've got an awful lot of facts that have been proven found in our Bible. If you want me to read any papers of the authors you cite, you should post their website so I can read them. I've never heard of them. Oh, I know Joan Peters material has been refuted and by none other than Noam Chomsky himself, but she was decorated by USA presidents. She is a Christian news reporter, not a PhD, who did a greater job of investigating and digging out facts from actual sources than any Phd has done who attack Israel constantly like Finkelstein and Chomsky, and their PhDs are not in history. Chomsky is a linguist. Mark Twain was an American who happened to be a tourist and a great writer and just wrote what he saw. The rest I find hard to believe, especially about the farming. I need proof. I might remind you that Egypt didn't write much about the Jews, either, but we're finding a lot in their murals on the walls. They had the habit of erasing anything not complimentary to their country. I would say that the Middle East was highly biased, at least what you are speaking of. Oh, that business about Jews not marrying or interacting with non-Israelites; it happened. This was really at the end of the Israeli conquest. Moses had not been able to enter, and they were just settling in. The Exodus was said to have happened 480 years before Solomons's building the Temple. Solomon's reign was from 961 to 920 BCE.
    Here's my work on our Jewish DNA: http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-haplogroup-we-be.html.

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  11. Ahmad, what's this "The Canaanites were also mentioned in the New Testament, long after the mythological kingdoms of Israel". Israel is in history, maybe only mythologically to you. What do you think of "The Old Testament and Israel that is written about? That's documentation right there, written by Moses, who is also regarded highly by the Islam religion as a prophet. That's not the only source one can find Israel mentioned, or Judah, which was the southern part of Israel. I suggest you read FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL before you knock Joan Peter's work. You should see her reference list. She could have had 2 PhD.s for it. Do you know that when she started her investigation, she was not on Israel's side? She was sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs. What her investigation showed proved her wrong and she was big enough to realize it and share it with the world. She's to be commended. People like Chomsky are just plain jealous of her findings, because she proves him wrong.

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  12. So apparently they found the mummies and everything you wrote is bull

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/canaanite-bible-ancient-dna-lebanon-genetics-archaeology/

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