Who were the Hittites?

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.

This distinction seems clear in the first half of the second millennium. But the situation changes in the final third of the second millennium. This period coincides with the time of the biblical judges as well as the beginning of Israel’s monarchy. When the books of Joshua to Kings mention ‘Hittites’, they do not seem to refer to a Semitic-speaking Canaanite tribe. Instead, they seem to indicate a people politically, if not ethnically, related to the central Anatolians.

For example, Joshua 1:4 refers to the land between the River Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea as the ‘land of the Hittites’.  This region was indeed controlled by the central Anatolians during this later period.

Around 1350 BC, a new king, Suppiluliuma I, ascended the throne. During his reign of around thirty years, he dramatically turned his mid-sized kingdom into one of the largest empires of the ancient Near East. It ranged from western Anatolia to northern Mesopotamia, beyond the Euphrates river (compare fig. 1, which indicates the extent of the Hittite kingdom prior to Suppiluliuma I, to fig. 2).

More significant for considering the relationship of the people of Hatti to the biblical Hittites is Suppiluliuma’s influence and presence in the northern Levant (modern day Syria and Lebanon). By the end of his reign, he had control over the very significant city of Ugarit as well as several other surrounding cites.

Suppiluliuma installed two of his sons as rulers in centres of power in Aleppo and Carchemish. Sharri-Kusuh, his eldest son, became the ruler of Carchemish. He and his successors became Suppiluliuma’s primary representatives for controlling the region until the end of the empire, in the early twelfth century BC. Records from Carchemish and Assyria allow for the possibility that the line of rulers descending from Sharri-Kusuh could be unbroken from the late fourteenth century until 717 BC. However, gaps in the meagre evidence that has survived make this possibility uncertain.

The empire that Suppiluliuma I built in the fourteenth century BC lasted only around 150 to 175 years. It ended when his descendant, Suppiluliuma II, abandoned the city of Hattusa to relocate to a currently unknown destination, sometime around 1200 BC. It is uncertain whether the king of Hatti continued to rule from a new location.

What is clear is that the Luwian language (which was closely related to Hittite and was used in Hattusa during the empire period) continued in use in south-eastern Anatolia and the northern Levant. Many Luwian inscriptions from this post-Empire period (twelfth to eighth centuries BC) have been found throughout this relatively small region. This suggests that the centre of ‘Hittite’ power shifted from Hattusa in central Anatolia to the cities in the northern Levant around, or shortly after, 1200 BC (see fig. 3 on p. 9).

An additional piece of evidence for the presence of Hittites in the Levant comes from within Israel itself. Archaeologists excavating the important site of Megiddo (south-west of the Sea of Galilee) in 1937 discovered a collection of ivory artefacts dating back to the thirteenth century BC. One of these was a plaque with an intricate carving of animals, people, and deities (see fig. 4). The style and iconography is distinctly Hittite. It has features that are found only in Hattusa or the Hittite outposts in the northern Levant. These include:

• a winged solar disc appearing twice along the top
• two prominent figures holding a curved stick, which is identical to a relief of the Hittite king Tudḫaliya IV from the thirteenth century BC
• bulls with lowered heads

Many other finds from Megiddo show the international character of this city: there are items from Egypt as well as Mycenaean Greece, all from the Late Bronze Age (1600–1200 BC). How the Hittite ivory arrived in Megiddo is uncertain. What is clear is that it suggests a historical connection between central Anatolian people and the inhabitants of the central Levant.

Within this cultural-political context in the centuries before the Israelite monarchy, the references to the Hittites take on a new character. This includes especially the references in Joshua 1:4, Judges 1:26, 1 Kings 10:29, and 2 Kings 7:6. These passages refer to Hittites or the land of the Hittites to the north of Israel. Given the shift in influence and presence of the central Anatolian Hittites in this region, the references in Judges, Samuel, and Kings are very likely referring to these same people.

There is another connection with the Hittites of the northern Levant in 2 Samuel 8:9-10. This text refers to Toi, king of Hamath in the northern Levant in the eleventh century BC. Toi probably represents (in Hebrew characters) the Luwian spelling of the name Taitas. A person with this name appears in Luwian inscriptions from the time, such as the Aleppo 6 relief (see fig. 5). He ruled the kingdom of ‘Palas(a)tin’ (or ‘Walas(a)tin’, depending on how you read the Luwian signs), apparently based in Aleppo. Hamath (modern Hama) was a part of this kingdom (see fig. 3 on p. 9). So, while 2 Samuel 8:9-10 does not use the term ‘Hittite’, it does mention the region associated with the Hittites that was also using the Luwian language (or at least its script).

So, back to the question we started with: ‘Who were the Hittites?’ The answer is not straightforward because, as we have seen, we need to narrow down the when and where of the ‘Hittites’ in the various passages. The Bible refers to more than one people group using the term ‘Hittite’. It can refer to descendants of Canaan in the southern Levant who seemed to speak a Semitic language. And it can refer to peoples of the region north of Israel who were familiar with languages coming from central Anatolia such as Hittite and Luwian. When we read about Hittites in the Bible, then, we should keep in mind that there seems to have been two separate people groups with different histories and different kinds of interactions with the people of Israel.