“Ancient DNA counters biblical account of the mysterious Canaanites”?

I’m grateful to Cody Quirk for bringing both of these articles to my attention:

“Ancient DNA reveals fate of the mysterious Canaanites”

“Living Descendants of Biblical Canaanites Identified via DNA”

It’s taken me a while to get to these links, and I regret that:

When this story first appeared, some hailed it as casting doubt upon the historical accuracy of the Bible.  (The original title of the first story read something like “Ancient DNA counters biblical account of the mysterious Canaanites”; the fossilized remains of that original title still persist, unable to be fully hidden, in the article’s URL.)

The new research results summarized in the articles identify living relatives of the Canaanites, which supposedly contradicts the Bible’s claim that all of the Canaanites were exterminated.  But the Bible claims no such thing.  And, as passages such as Hosea 4:12-14 and 1 Kings 14:22-24 point out, Canaanite religious practices survived for a long time after the Conquest and served as a powerful snare to the Israelites.  They survived for the simple reason that many of the Canaanites themselves had survived.

So, now, somewhat sheepishly I should think, the publishers of the first article have been obliged to rewrite portions of it and to change it’s too-sensationalistic title.

Moreover, says the first article, “the Canaanites left no surviving written records.”

But this, too, is not quite true.  There are some surviving Canaanite inscriptions, for example.  And it seems to me that the Ugaritic tablets found in Ras Shamra certainly ought to count as Canaanite.

Moreover, when the article asserts that “Archaeological data suggests that Canaanite cities were never destroyed or abandoned,” that’s a bit of an overstatement, and readers shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the new DNA evidence recovered from Sidon proves any such thing:  The Old Testament never suggests that the Israelites under Joshua sought to conquer Sidon, which sits on the modern Lebanese coast to the north of anything that can historically be called Israel.

As for genetic survivals of the ancient Canaanites in the modern population of Lebanon, I’m scarcely surprised.  I would have been greatly astonished, to the contrary, if such genetic traces had not been found.

I like the second article’s depiction of the Canaanites as “a collection of tribes of varying ethnicities.”  I strongly suspect that the same was true of the Book of Mormon’s ancient Lamanites, as well.

The pre-Islamic Arabs, too, used fictive genealogies to integrate newcomers and outsiders into tribes.  It’s the doctrine of “adoption,” in a sense.