was watching Columbo for first time since I was little..Genius show
Humans..like animals we wish to keep (unwild)..are word controlled creatures.
https://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/031204_CanaanCannibals.html
What do Canaanites have to do with either cannibalism or Lydians?
With respect to the former question, at least, we may point out that there was an ancient Jewish tradition that accused the Canaanites of precisely that dietary preference.
This allegation is found in the work known as the Wisdom of Solomon, which was composed around the second century B.C.E. and survived in Greek translation. It is related there (12:5) that "the ancient inhabitants of thy holy land were hateful to thee for their loathsome practices… ruthless murders of children, cannibal feasts of human flesh and blood."
It is likely that the author derived this detail from a careful reading of the report of the spies who informed Moses that the land of Canaan was "a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof" (Numbers 13:32).
It remains to be demonstrated how these Canaanites could have ended up in Asia Minor. However, some other legends that were in wide circulation in the ancient world could offer useful clues for unraveling the mystery.
The riddle is most readily solved if we posit a confusion between Lydians and Libyans. According to a persistent belief that shows up in several Byzantine authors, the ancestors of the Libyan Moors had been Canaanite refugees who fled to Africa to escape the Hebrew armies under the leadership of "that bandit Joshua." This bizarre sounding claim finds some support in the fact that Libya was heir to a strong Semitic cultural heritage, dating back to the days of its colonization by the Phoenicians.
So deeply rooted was this tradition that the church father St. Augustine, who lived in the North African town of Hippo, related that local peasants were wont to describe themselves as "Chananaei"–Canaanites.
A similar tradition is preserved in rabbinic literature, where it is the Girgashite nation who evade Joshua's onslaught by migrating to Africa.
The same assumption underlies the Talmudic tale about "Africans" who once came before Alexander the Great to accuse the Jews of stealing the Canaanites' homeland.
Although we may have become habituated to "unaligned" nations meddling in other people's affairs, especially where it involves condemnations of the Jews, this African championing of the Canaanite cause makes little sense unless we accept the premise that they regarded themselves as the heirs to the biblical Canaanites.
A variant of this legend, preserved in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, claimed that the original Canaan, Noah's accursed grandson, had disobeyed the divine command to migrate to Africa, and had chosen instead the occupy the more attractive Lebanese coast, the territory of the Phoenecians. Some historians trace this story to a Jewish-Phoenician propaganda war that raged during the era of Hasmonean expansion.
The site of present-day Beirut was once known as "Laodicea of Canaan," an epithet that was bestowed on it briefly by Antiochus IV in recognition of the link between the Phoenicians and the Canaanites. Under his reign, coins were minted with the inscription "from Laodicea, a metropolis in Canaan."
Given the vagaries of Hebrew vowels, this opens up the possibility that Rashi's reference might not have been to Lydians or Libyans, but to Laodiceans.
I confess that I am unable to map out a precise trajectory through which our story traveled and evolved on its course from biblical Canaan to medieval France.
Any scholar who wishes to trace this circuitous path will undoubtedly find it to be full of unexpected twists and detours, with some dangerous surprises lurking around every bend.
For those of you with appetizing ammounts of meat on your bones, I issue an urgent travel advisory: Avoid any unnecessary stopovers in Lydia, Libya or Laodicea.