Robert Marineau untangles the knotty problems of identifying the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament.
I am a Hittitologist. Whenever people ask me if I study the Hittites of the Bible, my answer is always some variation of ‘sort of’, ‘not really’, ‘sometimes’, or ‘it’s complicated’. The Hittites are one of the many people groups mentioned in the Old Testament that are hard to identify.
Our English word ‘Hittite’ comes from the Hebrew ethnic designation khitti. This term occurs 48 times in the Bible, from all periods of Old Testament history. It is not clear that each refers to the same people group. The identification of the people or persons with this label is a question of both when (chronology) and where (geography).
The first time the designation occurs in the Bible is in Genesis 15:20. It seems connected to the personal name Heth, which first occurs in Genesis 10:15. Heth was a son of Canaan and grandson of Ham. Later, in Genesis 23, 27:46, and 49:32, this name appears as a patriarch of a growing clan or people group. The ESV translates many of these instances as ‘Hittite(s)’, but the Hebrew text frequently has either ‘sons of Heth’ or ‘daughters of Heth’. The Pentateuch (first five books in the Bible), then, presents the Hittites as peoples descended from Canaan through Heth.
There is evidence for ‘Hittites’ outside the Bible too, but their relationship to the biblical references is complex. The first evidence for Hittites outside of the Bible did not come from the land of Canaan. In the nineteenth century, archaeologists in central Turkey rediscovered a people group that became known as ‘Hittite’.
Excavations of the ruins of ancient Hattusa in the early twentieth century uncovered thousands of tablet fragments. While the cuneiform writing on them was familiar from Mesopotamia, the language of the texts was unfamiliar. Scholars could recognise the signs, but not translate them. Eventually, they realised that it was an Indo-European language, related to German or Greek. These texts referred to the people of the area as ‘people of Hatti’. Due to the similarity to the biblical term ‘Hittite’, the language and its speakers became known as ‘Hittite’. This is also the origin of the name for the modern academic discipline of Hittitology.
Over time, scholars realised that the biblical Hittites and the people of Hatti may not be the same group. There were two main factors behind this.
First, the biblical Hittites lived in the southern and central Levant, over 1,000 km away from Hattusa in central Anatolia.
Second, the Pentateuch refers to the ‘sons of Het(h)’, which is different from ‘people of (the land of) Hatti’. The latter people group also referred to their language as Nesite. ‘Nesite’ derives from Nesa (also known as Kanes, modern Kültepe), a city located some 200km south-east of Hattusa (see Fig. 2). The leaders of the ‘people of Hatti’ had lived in Nesa prior to establishing Hattusa as their capital in the second millennium BC.
So these people are unlikely to be the same as the Hittites referred to in Genesis to Deuteronomy. Yet the label ‘Hittite’ stuck, both for the people of central Anatolia and their language.es and different kinds of interactions with the people of Israel.
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