Peoples & nations
Hittites
The Hittites are the nation Israel was told to destroy and never quite did — and the one that produced David’s most loyal soldier. They come off better in Scripture than almost any other people on the conquest list.
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At a glance
Ancestry and origins
The sons of Heth appear in the Table of Nations as the second son of Canaan (Genesis 10:15), and it is these Canaanite “sons of Heth” that Abraham meets around Hebron. Scripture also knows a far larger Hittite power to the north — the empire centered at Hattusa in Anatolia that fought Egypt at Kadesh and whose “kings of the Hittites” could still frighten an Aramean army in Elisha’s day (2 Kings 7:6; 1 Kings 10:29). Whether the Hebron clans were a southern offshoot of that empire or a separate people sharing a name, the Bible treats both under one word.
For centuries sceptics counted the Hittites as evidence the Bible invented nations. Then the archives of Hattusa were excavated and read, and a forgotten superpower stepped back into history exactly where Scripture had left it.
Where they lived
The biblical Hittites of Genesis lived around Hebron and Kiriath-arba in the southern hill country of Judah. Others were scattered through the land — the spies report “the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country” (Numbers 13:29) — and Hittite towns survived in the north near Bethel (Judges 1:26). The imperial Hittites held Anatolia and pressed south into Syria as far as Kadesh on the Orontes, making them Egypt’s chief rival during Israel’s years in Egypt.
Timeline with Israel
c. 2027 BC — The cave of Machpelah
Abraham, “a sojourner and foreigner among you,” buys a burial cave from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels, refusing to take it as a gift (Genesis 23:3-20).
c. 1978 BC — Esau’s Hittite wives
Esau marries Judith and Basemath, “and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah” (Genesis 26:34-35).
c. 1955 BC — Rebekah’s despair
“If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women... what good will my life be to me?” (Genesis 27:46), the reason Jacob is sent to Haran for a wife.
c. 1445 BC — On the list
The Hittites are named among the peoples whose land God will give Israel (Exodus 3:8; 23:23).
c. 1406 BC — Not driven out
Hittites remain in the land through the conquest and the judges (Joshua 1:4; Judges 3:5).
c. 1010 BC — Ahimelech the Hittite
One of the two men David asks to go down into Saul’s camp by night (1 Samuel 26:6).
c. 995 BC — Uriah the Hittite
One of David’s thirty mighty men, betrayed and killed by his own king (2 Samuel 11; 23:39).
c. 950 BC — Solomon’s Hittite wives
Among the foreign women who turned his heart (1 Kings 11:1).
c. 850 BC — Still a name to fear
The Arameans flee Samaria thinking Israel has hired “the kings of the Hittites” against them (2 Kings 7:6).
c. 458 BC — After the exile
Ezra finds returned exiles have again married into Hittite and other families (Ezra 9:1).
Working with Israel
Ephron the Hittite gives Abraham the first honest land transaction in the Bible. He offers the field of Machpelah as a gift; Abraham insists on paying full price in weighed silver before witnesses at the city gate, and the deed holds — Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob are all buried there (Genesis 23; 49:29-32). The first square foot of the promised land that Israel ever legally owned was bought from a Hittite.
Uriah the Hittite is the more piercing case. A foreigner by blood, he is listed among David’s mighty men and behaves with more covenant loyalty than the king: called home from the front and offered a night with his wife, he sleeps at the palace door because “the ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths... shall I then go to my house?” (2 Samuel 11:11). David has him killed. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus will not let it be forgotten, naming Solomon’s mother not by her name but as “the wife of Uriah” (Matthew 1:6).
Ahimelech the Hittite stood with David in the wilderness years (1 Samuel 26:6), one more sign that Hittites served in Israel’s ranks throughout.
Standing against Israel
The Hittites never mustered an army against Israel in Scripture. Their damage was domestic. Esau’s Hittite marriages poison Isaac’s household and drive the whole Jacob-to-Haran narrative; Solomon’s Hittite wives are named among the women who “turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:1-4). Ezekiel’s charge against Jerusalem — “your mother was a Hittite” (Ezekiel 16:3, 45) — is an accusation about character, not census: the city had learned its parents’ religion.
How their story ends
The Anatolian empire fell around 1180 BC in the same collapse that pushed the Philistines onto the coast of Canaan. Neo-Hittite city-states lingered in northern Syria until Assyria swallowed them in the eighth century. Inside Israel the Hittite clans simply dissolved into the population — conscripted by Solomon (1 Kings 9:20-21), still marriageable in Ezra’s day, and then gone.
Christ connection
The Hittites are proof that Scripture’s judgments fall on nations while its mercy reaches persons. On paper they were a people marked for destruction; in the text they sell Abraham a grave with courtesy, guard David at night, and die faithful at the wall of Rabbah. And through Bathsheba, “the wife of Uriah,” a Hittite’s household is written into the line of the Messiah — a reminder that the King who came was descended, by God’s deliberate arrangement, from the wronged as well as the righteous.
Key passages
- Genesis 10:15 — Heth, second son of Canaan.
- Genesis 23:3-20 — Abraham buys Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite.
- Genesis 26:34-35; 27:46 — Esau’s Hittite wives and Rebekah’s grief.
- 2 Samuel 11:6-17 — Uriah’s loyalty and David’s betrayal.
- 2 Samuel 23:39 — Uriah listed among the thirty mighty men.
- Matthew 1:6 — “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”
- Ezekiel 16:3 — “Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”