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Remember that the psalmist said in Psalm 105 that the land promise was based on God’s oath, not on Israel’s performance. As Paul stated, “The law, introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise.” (Galatians 3:17) In other words, the conditions of the Sinai covenant do not undo God’s unconditional promises to the patriarchs.

Two ancient clay tablets discovered in Iraq and covered from top to bottom in cuneiform writing contain details of a "lost" Canaanite language that has remarkable similarities with ancient Hebrew. The tablets, thought to be nearly 4,000 years old, record phrases in the almost unknown language of the Amorite people, who were originally from Canaan — the area that's roughly now Syria, Israel and Jordan — but who later founded a kingdom in Mesopotamia. These phrases are placed alongside translations in the Akkadian language, which can be read by modern scholars. In effect, the tablets are similar to the famous...

A rare archeological find from Mount Ebal: A small, folded 3,200-year-old lead plate sheds new light on biblical study - and was unveiled today (Thursday). Inside it - an ancient curse in ancient Hebrew script ("Proto-Canaanite"), with the God's explicit name [of the Divine]. Prof. Gershon Galil, from the University of Haifa, calls the discovery an "earthquake in biblical studies." He said, "The new find unearthed today is the earliest Hebrew inscription found so far." An inscription was found in Hebrew from the 13th century BC Prof. Galil: "The new finding is a death blow to all biblical deniers" An...

After examining the DNA of 93 bodies recovered from archaeological sites around the southern Levant, the land of Canaan in the Bible, researchers have concluded that modern populations of the region are descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Most modern Jewish groups and the Arabic-speaking groups from the region show at least half of their ancestry as Canaanite. In the study, published in Cell, the researchers explain that they used existing DNA analysis of 20 individuals, from sites in Israel and Lebanon, and then added 73 more, taking DNA from the bones of individuals found at Tel Megiddo, Tel Abel Beth...

A 3,400-year-old Canaanite fort discovered in the heart of the modern Israeli city of Nahariya will be incorporated into a residential high-rise to be built at the spot. The Bronze Age citadel apparently served as an administrative center serving Mediterranean mariners... It had been destroyed at least four times by fire and was rebuilt each time... Among the artifacts discovered in the ruined citadel's rooms are ceramic figurines with human and animal forms, bronze weapons, and pottery vessels that hadn't been made locally -- they had been imported. That is further testimony to the extensive trading relations among the peoples...

The new samples come from Sidon, a coastal city in Lebanon. Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., extracted enough DNA from the ancient skeletons to sequence the whole genomes of five Canaanite individuals, all around 3700 years old. Haber’s first mission was to figure out who the Canaanites were, genetically speaking. Ancient Greek sources suggested they had migrated to the Levant from the East. To test that, Haber and colleagues compared the Canaanite genomes to those of other ancient populations in Eurasia. It turned out the Greeks were half right: About 50% of...

In 1844, when the Ottoman Empire still controlled the Holy Land, a census was conducted, which revealed that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. Where were the "Palestinians"? Where were the Canaanites? The census count reported the presence of three groups in the city: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Canaanites were apparently not present. But suddenly, inexplicably, all Palestinians were spontaneously transformed into Canaanites in 2019, just as quickly as all Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs in Israel were spontaneously transformed into Palestinians in 1967. It took nothing more than the word of Yasser Arafat to create Palestinians out...

Last week, the American Journal of Human Genetics published a study connecting the DNA of ancient Canaanites to modern-day people in Lebanon. Various news outlets immediately reported that this study proved the Bible wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution News' David Klinghoffer compiled a helpful series of headlines: “Study disproves the Bible’s suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out” (The Telegraph) “Bible says Canaanites were wiped out by Israelites but scientists just found their descendants living in Lebanon” (The Independent) “Bronze Age DNA disproves the Bible’s claim that the Canaanites were wiped out: Study says...

DNA research is shining new light on the Biblical Canaanite civilization, which existed thousands of years ago in the Middle East. The ancient civilization, which created the first alphabet and is mentioned frequently in the Bible, has long fascinated historians. LiveScience reports that, because the Canaanites kept their records on papyrus, rather than clay, relatively little is known about them. Now, however, scientists have found a genetic ‘trail’ back to the Canaanites’ ancient world. By sequencing the genomes of five Canaanites that lived 4,000 years ago with genomes from 99 people living in modern day Lebanon, researchers identified a strong...

More than 3,000 years have passed since this dramatized event, but for the archaeologists of the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition, it looks as if it had happened only yester-day. Slowly and carefully -- it took four full seasons -- we uncovered a building filled with more than 200 complete ceramic vessels, 45 stone tools, exceptional metal objects, 108 beads, five scarabs, eight034 amulets, and the remains of four people. This collapsed building is located on the top of Tel Azekah. The name of Azekah (or 'Azeqah) is known to most readers as the location of the famous battle between David and...

Gezer is mentioned in a well-known passage in the Hebrew Bible that states that Solomon used forced labor "to build the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, [and] Gezer" (1 Kings 9:15)... at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer... most of the structures clearly belong to the Iron Age. In contrast, the water system at Tel Gezer has now been dated by project archaeologists to a much earlier period -- the MBA -- with a date as early as 2000 B.C... Gezer is also the site of massive fortifications and other structures dating to the MBA -- in addition to the Iron Age...

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations Security Council that PA residents are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, claiming that ‘Palestine’ made significant contributions to humanity prior to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. During his address at the UN Security Council in which he called on the international community to hold a Middle East peace conference, with the goal of launching multilateral negotiations, Abbas claimed that the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were in fact descended from the ancient Canaanites. "We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years...

Some 3,500 years ago, there was already a brisk trade in fish on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea. This conclusion follows from the analysis of 100 fish teeth that were found at various archeological sites in what is now Israel. The saltwater fish from which these teeth originated is the gilthead sea bream, which is also known as the dorade. It was caught in the Bardawil lagoon on the northern Sinai coast and then transported from Egypt to sites in the southern Levant. This fish transport persisted for about 2,000 years, beginning in the Late Bronze Age and...

The faces of disaster through the ages are legion, and the dusty places of archaeological digs in Israel have been no exception, as archaeologists at the Tel Gezer excavation site in central Israel will tell you after they encountered 3,200-year-old skeletal remains of three individuals. As they were conducting excavations during the summer of 2017, traces of human bones emerged as they dug within a stratum that evidenced a fiery destruction. They were articulated skeletons. The archaeologists could see that one of them, an adult, whose remains were badly decomposed and burned, was lying with hands over the head. The...

Are the conquest narratives in the Old Testament any different from what we are currently viewing with ISIS throughout the Middle East and Europe? Questions like this often come up in discussing the existence of objective moral values and duties and their proper grounding. When God is posited as the grounding of morality, the objector usually brings up some obscure OT text that he or she thinks will demonstrate that God has a warped sense of morality and it is usually in this context that the conquest narratives are brought up. False DistinctionOne reason this problem has persisted is that...

A massive gate unearthed in Israel may have marked the entrance to a biblical city that, at its heyday, was the biggest metropolis in the region. The town, called Gath, was occupied until the ninth century B.C. In biblical accounts, the Philistines — the mortal enemies of the Israelites — ruled the city. The Old Testament also describes Gath as the home of Goliath, the giant warrior whom the Israelite King David felled with a slingshot. The new findings reveal just how impressive the ancient Philistine city once was, said lead archaeologist of the current excavation, Aren Maeir, of Bar-Ilan...

The gate of Gath, believed to be the home of the giant Goliath, has been discovered by archaeologists. I love this kind of story because I love it when the Bible is shown to have historical accuracies. You might recall: The Philistines occupied the high ground on one side and the Israelites occupied the high ground on the other side, with the valley between them. A champion stepped out from the Philistine ranks; his name was Goliath, from Gath; he was six cubits and one span tall. On his head was a bronze helmet and he wore a breastplate of...

A massive gate unearthed in Israel may have marked the entrance to a biblical city that, at its heyday, was the biggest metropolis in the region. The town, called Gath, was occupied until the ninth century B.C. In biblical accounts, the Philistines — the mortal enemies of the Israelites — ruled the city. The Old Testament also describes Gath as the home of Goliath, the giant warrior whom the Israelite King David felled with a slingshot. The new findings reveal just how impressive the ancient Philistine city once was, said lead archaeologist of the current excavation, Aren Maeir, of Bar-Ilan...

New finds presented Tuesday from an intriguing site in the Judean Hills are part of a scholarly argument about the accuracy of the Bible The excavation at Hirbet Qeiyafa is currently one of the most important in the world of Biblical archaeology (Courtesy of Hebrew University of Jerusalem)Two rare 3,000-year-old models of ancient shrines were among artifacts presented by an Israeli archaeologist on Tuesday as finds he said offered new support for the historical veracity of the Bible. The archaeologist, Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University, is excavating a site known as Hirbet Qeiyafa, located in the Judean hills not far...

Science continues to prove the Bible on a regular basis. This time, archaeologists from Bar-Ilan University in Israel have uncovered what appears to be the hometown of the giant Goliath. The town, called Gath, was occupied until the ninth century B.C. In biblical accounts, the Philistines — the mortal enemies of the Israelites — ruled the city. The Old Testament also describes Gath as the home of Goliath, the giant warrior whom the Israelite King David felled with a slingshot.The new findings reveal just how impressive the ancient Philistine city once was, said lead archaeologist of the current excavation,...