A stunning new report from scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK suggests that an event that was described in the Bible appears to be totally false. The Bible claims that the Israelites totally destroyed the Canaanites, but the study found that the Canaanites weren’t wiped out, but are even around today as the modern-day Lebanese.

The scientists published the study in the American Journal of Human Genetics. They based their findings on DNA that was pulled from five people dated about 3,700 years old and found in Sideon, which is a former Canaanite city that is in present day Lebanon.

It’s the same Canaanites from the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which God infamously destroyed in the Book of Genesis for their wickedness. In Deuteronomy, God commands the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites for good.

“Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them otherwise they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshipping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God,” he said to the Israelites.

“In the most recent whole-genome study of ancient remains from the Near East, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute scientists and their collaborators sequenced the entire genomes of 4,000-year-old Canaanite individuals who inhabited the region during the Bronze Age, and compared these to other ancient and present-day populations,” the Institute said in a statement. “The results, published today (27 July) in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggest that present-day Lebanese are direct descendants of the ancient Canaanites.

“The Near East is often described as the cradle of civilisation. The Bronze Age Canaanites, later known as the Phoenicians, introduced many aspects of society that we know today – they created the first alphabet, established colonies throughout the Mediterranean and were mentioned several times in the Bible.”