First of the seven nations named at Deuteronomy 7:1, and the one with the longest reach outside the Bible. Genesis traces them to HETH, a son of Canaan (Genesis 10:15, already on these pages), and it is ‘the sons of Heth’ who sell Abraham the cave of Machpelah at Genesis 23. ⚠ Two different things share the name and are worth keeping apart: the great Hittite empire of Anatolia, a Bronze Age power that fought Egypt at Kadesh and left a large archive in its own Indo-European language, and the local Canaanite group the Hebrew Bible usually means — hill-country neighbours with Semitic names (Ephron, Uriah). The Bible never describes the Anatolian empire; whether the two are related at all is genuinely unsettled.