A major new study published this week indicates that a major event described in the Bible was completely wrong. The Bible says that the ancient Canaanites were totally destroyed by the Israelites, but the study determined that not only did they not die out, that they currently live today as the modern-day Lebanese.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK published the study in the American Journal of Human Genetics, which is based on an analysis of DNA extracted from the remains of five people found in Sidon, a former Canaanite city state in present-day Lebanon. Scientists believe the remains are 3,700 years old.

These are the same Canaanites from the famous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which God destroyed in the Book of Genesis. And in Deuteronomy, God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites once and for all, which they reportedly did.

“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.”