Canaanites

Canaanite — the oldest name they could find to put a verdict on us. We called the land Kenaʿan. The coins of Berytus still said so. A people is not erased by a book.

The Hebrew scriptures, though hostile, inadvertently preserve substantial information about Phœnician religion, trade, and political power. They are a witness against their own erasure.

Hiram of Tyre sent cedar, gold, and craftsmen for the temple in Jerusalem. The pillars Jachin and Boaz are Tyrian work. The God they later set against Canaan was housed in Lebanese wood, raised by Tyrian hands.

The names for the divine — El, Elyon, Shaddai — are Canaanite words. The Paleo-Hebrew script of the Gezer Calendar, the Samaria Ostraca, the Siloam Inscription, is the Phœnician alphabet. They wrote their condemnation in our hand.

Ithobaal I of Tyre — Ethbaal in the Hebrew telling — was a priest of Astarte who took the throne and married his daughter to Ahab of Israel. The Book of Kings made her Jezebel, a byword for idolatry and painted power.

Gad Yaton: the slander is political theology. A Tyrian princess in Samaria was a diplomatic marriage between two houses of the coast and the highland. The later writers needed a witch. They found a Phœnician woman and wrote her as the enemy of their God — the same God whose house her grandfather’s city had helped to build.

The stones of Tyre remember Ithobaal as king. Menander’s chronicle, quoted by Josephus, is the city’s own memory. Where Kings contradicts the king-list, the king-list wins.

They came to Lebanon for wisdom they could not make at home. The temple is a Byblos-and-Tyre story as much as a Jerusalem one. We do not ask them to vanish. We ask that the cedar, the letters, and the names be returned to the people who first cut, wrote, and spoke them.