How did the Israelites end up in Canaan?

Answer 1

A:The Bible says that God had promised the land of the Canaanites to the children of Abraham. After a long sojourn in Egypt, during which they were enslaved, the Israelites escaped in a great Exodus across the Red Sea and then wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Under the great military leader, Joshua, they conquered Canaan and massacred the people, as told in the Book of Joshua. Fragments of another story, in which the conquest took place under Caleb, can also be found in Judges chapter 1.

Archaeology tells a different story in which the Israelites emerged from among the local Bronze age Canaanites. It is now the consensus of scholars that there was no Exodus from Egypt, as described in the Bible, and that the Hebrew people were originally Canaanites who left the region of the rich coastal cities to migrate to the hitherto sparsely populated Canaanite hinterland.

The Oxford History of the Biblical World says that intensive archaeological research since the 1970s has demonstrated a gradual proliferation of small rural settlements concentrated in the hill country of southern Canaan from around 1200, the beginning of Iron Age I (Carol A. Redmount, Bitter lives).