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The meaning of the word Canaan is something `low' and in a secondary sense a
merchant, trafficker or trader. The name `Canaan' carries with it the debasement
pronounced by Noah as the following passages which use the verb kana will show. `To
bring low' (Job 40: 12); `To subdue' (I Chron. 17: 10); `To bring into subjection'
(Psa. 106: 42).
Their name reveals their end, the Canaanites, whether physical or
spiritual, must one day be subjected beneath the feet of the Victorious Seed of the
woman.
When the time came for Isaac, the true seed, to be provided with a wife, Abraham
made his servant sware by the God of heaven and by the God of earth, that he would not
take a wife for Isaac of the daughters of the Canaanites (Gen. 24: 3, 37). The
Canaanites were to be driven out of the land of promise by Israel (Exod. 23: 28-30);
and by the Lord (Deut. 7: 1); and were to be utterly destroyed (Deut. 20: 17).
Something of the horror with which this evil seed was held can be gathered by reading
the whole of Ezra 9: and 10: This we cannot reproduce here; the extract given does not
produce upon the mind the reading of the whole passage:
"The people . . . . . have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing
according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites . . . . . the holy seed have mingled
themselves with the people of those lands" (Ezra 9: 1, 2).
The land is said to have spued out the nations that inhabited Canaan, and that the very
land was defiled by their abominable customs (Lev. 18: 24-30). Such are the
Canaanites, and one can feel the relief in the prophet's mind when he said:
"In that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of Hosts"
(Zech. 14: 21).
An illuminating chapter in reference to the Canaanites and the possession of the land,
is Deut. 2: There, not only Israel but the Moabites, the children of Esau and the
Ammonites, all blood relations of Israel, find their possession already occupied by Emim
and Anakim `a people great, and many, and tall'; `giants dwelt therein in old time'.
These the Lord destroyed before them and they succeeded them, and this is put forward
as being parallel with the case of Israel.
"As Israel did unto the land of his possession, which the Lord gave unto them"
(Deut. 2: 12).
Later in the experience of Abraham, he was to learn that there must be a waiting
period during which his seed should suffer affliction in a strange land, and this because
`the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full' (Gen. 15: 16). If we admit the sovereign
right of the Lord to destroy the corrupted people of the earth by a flood, and if we admit
His justice in destroying the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, if we admit His
patience and long suffering while He waited for the Amorite to fill up the measure of his
iniquity, we can accept the revealed fact that Israel was chosen as the destroying agent of
this foul progeny of wickedness, who in their turn typify the `spiritual wickednesses' that