Canaan is a region historically centered around Palestine, originally inhabited by the Canaanites. References to Canaan and Canaanites appear in cuneiform, Egyptian, and Phoenician texts dating back to the 15th century BCE, as well as in the Old Testament.
"Canaan" can refer to all of Palestine and Syria, just the land west of the Jordan River, or a narrow coastal strip from Acre (ʿAkko) northward. The Israelites began occupying Canaan in the late 2nd millennium BCE,
