dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic words.  Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from Syria.  Thus a “chariot” was called a merkabut, a “waggon” being agolta; hurpu, “a sword,” was the Canaanitish khereb, just as aspata, “a quiver,” was ashpah.  The Canaanitish kinnor, “a lyre,” was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties of “Syrian bread.”  The Egyptian words for “incense” (qadaruta), “oxen” (abiri), and “sea” (yum) were taken from the same source, though it is possible that the last-mentioned word, like qamhu, “wheat,” had been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history.  As might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought with them their native names from the Phoenician coast.  Already in the time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed Kabanitu, or “Gebalite”; we read also of “boats” called Za, the Canaanite Zi, while a transport was entitled qauil, the Phoenician gol.  The same name was imported into Greek under the form of gaulos, and we are told that it signified “a Phoenician vessel of rounded shape.”

The language of Canaan was practically that which we call Hebrew.  Indeed Isaiah (xix. 18) speaks of the two dialects as identical, and the so-called Phoenician inscriptions that have been preserved to us show that the differences between them were hardly appreciable.  There were differences, however; the Hebrew definite article, for instance, is not found in the Phoenician texts.  But the differences are dialectal only, like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel.

How the Israelites came to adopt “the language of Canaan” is a question into which we cannot here enter.  There have been other examples of conquerors who have abandoned the language of their forefathers and adopted that of the conquered people.  And it must be remembered, on the one hand, that the ancestors of Israel had lived in Canaan, where they would have learnt the language of the country, and, on the other hand, that their original tongue was itself a Semitic form of speech, as closely related to Hebrew as French or Spanish is to Italian.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the land.  Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them.  Like the Babylonian words, they are written in cuneiform characters, and since these denote syllables and not mere letters we know exactly how the words were pronounced.  It is an advantage which is denied us by the Phoenician alphabet, whether in the inscriptions of Phoenicia or in the pages of the Old Testament, and we can thus obtain a better idea of the pronunciation of the Canaanitish language in the century before the Exodus than we can of the Hebrew language in the age of Hezekiah.