Hittite or Hittites occurs 47 times in the Bible. Its first occurrence is in Genesis 15:20 when God promised Abraham that He would give his descendants part of their land. Abraham bought his burial cave from a Hittite. (Genesis 23:10) Esau married two Hittite women. (Genesis 26:34) David had Uriah the Hittite murdered so he could have Bathsheba. (2 Samuel 12:9-10) The Bible speaks of many contacts that Abraham's descendant’s had with a group of people known as the Hittites.

Nevertheless, Biblical critics for many years doubted their actual existence even though Numbers 13:29 indicates very specifically that they occupied the “hill country” (the north central part of the Promised Land). Joshua 1:4 adds that they also occupied the land between the Euphrates and “the Great Sea” (the Mediterranean). The Bible even recognizes them as a regionally significant economic powerhouse trading with other powerful kingdoms of the area. (1 Kings 10:29) They also had enough significant military strength to bring fear into the hearts of the Arameans, who feared both the Hittites and the Egyptians.     

2 Kings 7:6 says “For the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots and a sound of horses, even the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, ‘Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians’.” In this passage, the Hittites are not only named with the most powerful nation of the ancient world (Egypt), they are even mentioned before them as if they had prominence over them! C. W. Ceram, in his book, THE SECRET OF THE HITTITES: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire, speaks about those who have doubted the reliability of the Bible. He says this of 2 Kings 7:6, “There is one passage, however, which would have given historians pause…if nineteenth-century science had not been so wary of the Bible as a source book for history.”

Regardless of the unbelief of some, the amazing thing about the Bible is that even seemingly unimportant comments are reliable, like Jesus himself confirmed! (Matthew 5:18) God’s words (or “judgments”) are “true” and “righteous altogether.” (Psalm 19:9) That means that all of the Bible can be trusted, even comments about peoples that have not yet been historically verified in other ways!

                   Ronaldo Ricardo Guzmán