Given the casual tone in which the Hittites are mentioned in most Old Testament references, Biblical scholars before the age of archaeology traditionally regarded them as a smaller tribe, living in the hills of Canaan during the era of the Patriarchs, including Abraham ... the Anatolian Hittites were a powerful political entity in the region before the collapse of their empire in the 14th-12th centuries BC ... A stone lion relief found at Beth Shan, near the Sea of Galilee (now at the Israel Museum), dated to about 1700 BC, has been interpreted by professor Bill Humble as confirming this identification, since lions are often pictured in Hittite art ... Modern academics propose, based on much onomastic and archaeological evidence, that Anatolian populations moved south into Canaan as part of the waves of Sea Peoples ... Many kings of local city-states are shown to have had Hittite and Luwian names in the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age transition period. Indeed, even the name of Mount Zion may be Hittite in origin. Some people have conjectured[citation needed] that the Biblical Hittites could actually be Hurrian tribes living in Canaan, and that the Hebrew word for the Hurrians (ḤRY in consonant-only script) became the name of the Hittites (ḤTY) due to a scribal error.

Trevor Bryce suggests that biblical references to Hittites may be separated into two distinct groups. The first, the majority, are to a Canaanite tribe as encountered by Abraham and his family. The names of these Hittites are for the most part of a Semitic type; for example Ephron at Genesis 23:8-17 etc, Judith at Genesis 26:34 and Zohar at Genesis 23:8. These were presumably the Hittites who were subject to Solomon (1 Kings 11:1-2, 1 Kings 9:20-21, 2 Chronicles 8:7) and who were elsewhere in conflict with the Israelites (Deuteronomy 20:17, Judges 3:5). They were a small group living in the hills, and clearly to be distinguished from the Hittites of the Anatolian Kingdom. But there are other biblical references which are not compatible with the notion of a small Canaanite hill tribe. Most notable among these is 2 Kings 7:6: "For the Lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us." This conveys the impression that the Hittite kings were commensurate in importance and power with the Egyptian pharaohs. A similar impression is conveyed by 2 Chronicles 1:17: "And they fetched up, and brought forth out of Egypt a chariot for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty: and so brought they out horses for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, by their means." In these cases there can be little doubt that the references are to the neo-Hittite kingdoms of Syria. If the references to the Canaanite tribe are distinct from those to the neo-Hittite kingdom, the similarity between the names (only two significant consonants) could easily be due to chance.