The ancient Canaanites survived a divine call for their elimination and went on to become modern-day Lebanese, a study has found.

According to the Bible, God had ordered the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites, a people who lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago in the Middle East.

“You shall not leave alive anything that breathes," the passage in Deuteronomy reads. "But you shall utterly destroy them ... so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods.”

The Bible claims elsewhere that the purge was not successful, an account backed up now by a scientific study.

Examining the DNA of the region's ancient and modern inhabitants, the scientists found more than 90 per cent of the ancestry of modern-day Lebanese derived from the Canaanites.