a word used in two senses:

1. A tribe which inhabited a particular locality of the land west of the Jordan before the conquest. In Genesis 10:18-20 the seats of the Canaanite tribe are given as on the seashore and in the Jordan valley (comp. Joshua 11:3).
2. The people who inhabited generally the whole of the aforementioned country. Applied as a general name to the non-Israelite inhabitants of the land, as we have already seen was the case with “Canaan.” Instances of this are in Genesis 12:6 and Numbers 21:3. The Canaanites were descendants of Canaan. Their language was very similar to the Hebrew. The Canaanites were probably given to commerce, and thus the name became probably in later times an occasional synonym for a merchant.