kena'ani

This is the ordinary word for a Canaanite, one of the peoples living in the land of Canaan (כְּנַעַן) before Israel arrived. It runs through the accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus, and the conquest, where the Canaanites are named again and again as the population Israel was told to drive out.

The word stretches between a wide use and a narrow one. Widely, it can stand for the whole population of the land, as when Genesis observes that "the Canaanite was then in the land." Narrowly, it names one people among a fixed list, set beside the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, and others, and it often points to those who lived in the valleys and along the coast rather than up in the hills.

Beneath both uses lies a heavy moral charge. Because the Canaanites were remembered as idolaters whose land Israel was to take, their name became shorthand for everything Israel was warned not to become. That buried judgment is what later lets the prophets turn the name into an insult, and it is the seed of the word's second life as a term for a trader (see the merchant meaning below).

In a few texts the same word means "merchant" or "trader" rather than "Canaanite." The link is history: the Canaanites, and above all the Phoenicians of the coast, were the famous traders of the ancient world, so their name drifted into a common word for a dealer, much as the name of a place known for a craft can come to stand for the craft itself.

In its plain commercial uses the sense is simply a trader. The capable wife of Proverbs sells her sashes "to the merchant," and Job pictures traders bargaining over a catch they could never really bring to market. Hebrew also has flatter words for a trader, such as סֹחֵר, that carry none of this history.

Even so, the word rarely sheds its edge. Because the name "Canaanite" still sounds inside it, calling a man a "merchant" with this word can brand him a cheat, an idolater, a foreigner at heart. That double edge comes to a head in the last verse of Zechariah, where readers have long divided over whether the promise clears God's house of traders or of Canaanites (see the note there).