The insistence in the Book of Joshua that the Israelites had come as conquerors to Canaan hinted at a nagging and persistent anxiety: that the worship of their god might originally have owed more to Canaanite practice than Jewish scholars cared to acknowledge. Customs they condemned as monstrous innovations – the worship of other gods, the feeding of the dead, the sacrifice of children – were perhaps the very opposite: venerable traditions, compared to which their own evolving cult constituted the novelty.
