Did the Israelites conquer Canaan

Answer 1

The World of Ancient Israel, edited by R. E. Clements, is a book dedicated to exploring issues concerned with the emergence of Israel as a nation. It contains a number of papers from different authors who explain the consensus on how the nations of Israel and Judah really developed.

J. W. Rogerson (The World of Ancient Israel, Anthropology and the Old Testament) says that until the 1970s, Old Testament scholars were broadly in agreement that the Israelites were semi-nomads who had either forcefully, as portrayed in The Bible, or peacefully entered Canaan and had become sedentary. By the late 1970s a different consensus was emerging, particularly in America, according to which the Israelites had been peasant farmers in Canaan who withdrew or revolted from the influence of the city states and formed a new society with a tribal structure and an egalitarian ideology. F. S. Frick (Israel as a tribal society) says that the hypothesis that the Israelites came from outside Canaan has since largely been abandoned. He says that modern studies show that Israel emerged peacefully through internal migration, although there are still some adherents to an intermediate view that the Israelites were lower-class peasants who rebelled against rule by the Canaanite kings. H. G. M. Williamson (The concept of Israel in transition) says that various recent writers agree that 'lsrael' emerged peacefully within the land as an inevitable consequence of the economic and social decline of late bronze age Canaan coinciding with the development of new agricultural techniques which enabled increasing numbers to withdraw from the city states, located principally in the valleys, and to start settling in the hitherto sparsely populated hill country of Judah and Israel. There was no biblical conquest.