CANAAN, the fourth son of Ham, whose irreverence towards his father Noah is recorded in the ninth chapter of Genesis. Upon the occasion of his disrespectful conduct, the patriarch cursed him in a branch of his posterity, declaring that “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” This curse however being pronounced, not against Ham the immediate transgressor, but against his son, who does not appear, from the words of ĂIoses, to have been anywise concerned in the crime, has occasioned several conjectures; some believing that Noah cursed Canaan because he could not well have cursed Ham himself, whom God had not long before blessed; whilst others think that the chief intent of Moses in recording this prediction was to raise the spirits of the Israelites, then entering on a terrible war with the children of Canaan, by the assurance that that people were destined by God to be subdued by them. The opinion of those who imagine that all Ham’s race were here accursed, seems repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, which confines the malediction to Canaan and his posterity, and it is also contrary to fact. Indeed the prophecy of Noah, that Canaan should be a servant of servants to his brethren, seems to have been wholly completed in him. It was completed with regard to Shem, not only in a considerable part of the seven nations of the Canaanites being made slaves to the Israelites, when they took possession of their land, as part of the remainder of them were afterwards enslaved by Solomon, but also by the subsequent expeditions of the Assyrians and Persians, who were both descended from Shem, and under whom the Canaanites suffered subjection as well as the Israelites; not to mention the conquest of part of Canaan by the Elamites or Persians under Chedorlaomer, which preceded them. With regard to Japhet, we find a completion of the prophecy, in the successive conquests of the Greeks and Romans in Palestine and Phoenicia, where the Canaanites were settled, and especially in the total subversion of the Carthaginian power by the Romans; besides some invasions of the northern nations, in which many of them probably were carried away captive. The posterity of Canaan were very numerous. His eldest son was Sidon, who founded and peopled the city of Sidon, and was the father of the Sidonians and Phoenicians; and he had, besides, ten sons, who were the fathers of as many tribes, dwelling in Palestine and in part of Syria, namely, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgasites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and Hamathites.

Land of Cαnααn, the country so named from Canaan, the son of Ham. It lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of Arabia, extending from Egypt to Phoenicia, and is bounded to the east by the mountains of Arabia; to the south by the wilderness of Paran, Idumea, and Egypt; to the west by the Mediterranean, called in Hebrew the Great Sea; and to the north by the mountains of Libanus. Its length, from the city of Dan, afterwards called Caesarea Philippi, or Paneadis, to Beersheba, is about seventy leagues; and its breadth, from the Mediterranean Sea to the eastern borders, is in some places thirty. This country, which was first called Canaan, from Canaan the son of Ham, whose posterity possessed it, was afterwards called Palestine, from the people whom the Hebrews call Philistines, and the Greeks and Romans corruptly Palestines, who inhabited the sea coasts, and were thus first known to them. It likewise had the name of the Land of Promise, from the promise which God made to Abraham of giving it to him; that of the Land of Israel, from the Israelites having made themselves masters of it; that of Judah, from the tribe of Judah, which was the most considerable of the twelve; and lastly, the ever memorable fact of its having been sanctified by the presence, actions, miracles, and death of Jesus Christ, has given it the name of the Holy Land, which it still retains. The first inhabitants of this land therefore were the Canaanites, who were descended from Canaan, and the eleven sons of that patriarch. Here they multiplied extremely. Trade and war were their first occupations, and gave rise to their riches, as well as to the several colonies scattered by them over almost all the islands and maritime provinces of the Mediterranean. The measure of their idolatry and abominations was completed when God delivered their country into the hands of the Israelites. In St Athanasius’s time the Africans still pretended they were descended from the Canaanites; and it is said that the Punic tongue was almost entirely the same with the Canaanitish and Hebrew language. The colonies which Cadmus carried into Thebes in Boeotia, and his brother Cilix into Cilicia, appear to have sprung from the stock of Canaan; and the isles of Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, Cyprus, Corfu, Majorca and Minorca, Gades and Ebusus, are also supposed to have been peopled by the Canaanites. Bochart, in his large work entitled Canaan, has treated of these migrations and settlements with great learning, though not without an evident bias towards his favourite hypothesis.
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Many of the old inhabitants of the north-west of the land of Canaan, however, particularly on the coast of Tyre and Sidon, were not driven out by the children of Israel; and hence this tract seems to have retained the name of Canaan long after those other parts of the country which were better inhabited by the Israelites had lost this denomination. The Greeks called the tract along the Mediterranean, inhabited by the old Canaanites, Phoenicia; and the more inland parts, inhabited partly by Canaanites and partly by Syrians, Syrophoenicia; and hence the woman said by St Matthew to be a woman of Canaan, whose daughter Jesus cured, is said by St Mark to be a Syrophoenician by nation as she was a Greek by religion and language.