kena'an

The name works on three levels at once. In Genesis, Canaan is a man, a grandson of Noah. The country is called after him, and the peoples living in it are traced back to him. So one word can point to a person, a place on the map, or a whole culture, and a reader has to notice which is meant.

Most often it is the plain geographical label, and almost always in the fixed phrase "the land of Canaan": the country promised to Abraham's family, the land the spies walk through and report on, the land Israel finally divides up. It marks a boundary as much as a place. The Jordan is the line, and Canaan is everything west of it, which is why the tribes who settle on the east bank are so anxious about which side of the river their altar stands on.

The same name can also stand in for the people and everything about them:

• "the daughters of Canaan" are Canaanite women a family refuses to marry into
• "the language of Canaan" is the local speech, which Egyptian cities are one day promised to speak
• "the idols of Canaan" are the gods to whom Israel sacrificed its own children

Used that way the name carries a moral charge, because Canaan is the culture Israel is warned not to copy, and that charge is what later turns the name into an insult.

On the coast the name narrows to the harbor country. In the oracle against Tyre it points at the Phoenician seaboard, and in Zephaniah at the Philistine coast. Those were the shipping and trading towns, which is how a country's name ended up as a word for a dealer (the second meaning below). The matching word for a person from there (כְּנַעֲנִי) traveled the same road.

For centuries the port cities of the Canaanite coast ran the shipping and dealing of the whole region, so their name became a word for what they did, much as "Chaldean" came to mean an astrologer. The trade made the name into a job title, not the other way round.

In the Bible this sense is almost never neutral. Ezekiel twice calls Babylon "a land of Canaan," which cannot be geography, since Babylon never was Canaan; he means a land of dealers, and he says so in the next breath by calling it "a city of traders." Hosea and Zephaniah aim the word at Israel itself: a dealer holding crooked scales, the silver-heavy men of the Jerusalem market. The sting works because both senses are heard at once. Call an Israelite a trader with this word and you have called him a Canaanite too.

English cannot hold both halves, so translations split. Some print "merchant" and lose the name; others keep "Canaan" and lose the trade. Hebrew had plain words for the same business, trading (סָחַר) and peddling (רָכַל); reaching for this one instead was the whole point.