![]() ![]() (I’ll come back to this.) When it came time to report these findings to the general public, this notion became the most prominent, not only in the headlines (produced by the editors, I suppose), but also in the stories’ texts themselves.įor example, the online journal Cosmos (Australian, popular science reporting) for July 28 ran a report under the headline, “ DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites.” The reporter, Andrew Masterson, added details, such as, “The Bible is full of references to the need for the Canaanites to be driven out of Canaan, Fascinatingly, so many different reporters and editors spun the scientific report the same way, namely that science has contradicted and disproved the Bible.the land promised to the Israelites, because they ‘served Baal and the Ashtoreths’ (Judges 2:13) and were also generally in the way.” Bryan Nelson, writing for the Mother Nature Network on July 27, wrote, “In the Hebrew Bible, the Canaanites are a group of people who once inhabited the Southern Levant and are credited with constructing the first alphabet before eventually being systematically annihilated by the Israelites.” The title of that articles was, “ New DNA study casts doubt on Bible claim: Modern-day Lebanese are descendants of the Canaanites, proving that they weren’t wiped out after all.” The science paper had said, “the Bible reports the destruction of the Canaanite cities and the annihilation of its people if true, the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations” (p. I’m interested in what the playing out of the controversy tells us about how we think and talk about science and faith issues in our culture. A controversy arose but that is not my subject. But trouble seems to follow the cool stuff, as the sparks fly upward. ![]() I’ve been to the Middle East, have noticed differences between the various groups that we call “Arabs,” and have wondered about just such things as their lines of descent. The only debate is whether the people at Ugarit, a bit farther north, are properly called Canaanites.) Based on these comparisons, the study concluded that (at least some of) the modern Lebanese appear to have Canaanite ancestry. (Everyone who studies ancient Near Easter languages and cultures knows this we’ve read the inscriptions. Sidon was a I’m interested in what the playing out of the controversy tells us about how we think and talk about science and faith issues in our culture.major Phoenician city of the ancient world, and its inhabitants can be properly called Canaanite. The study, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, compared genetic material from 99 modern-day Lebanese with what they could recover from 3,700-year-old burial remains from Sidon. The cynic in me suspects that the whole thing was predictable from the very get-go. A study in genomic sciences that was on most counts not newsworthy has made big headlines in recent days, both in the media’s initial declarations and in the ensuing reaction.
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