Perhaps it is because America is such a large country where major cities are separated by great distances, but it's been my experience that many Americans rarely appreciate just how close major cities can be elsewhere in the world. Culture does not stop at national borders and the ancient cultures of the Near East do not line up along borders created by politicians in the 20th century.
This map of the Eastern Mediterranean coast doesn't have any national boundaries marked on it, but it does show the locations of the major cities and thus reveals how close they all really are. Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Baalbek, Damascus, Acre, Haifa, Jericho, Jerusalem, and Amman are all within relatively short distances of each other. These cities were important even in the ancient world and their closeness reveal how there could be so much religious and cultural continuity in the region, even when travel was costly, difficult, and time-consuming.
It may also illustrate how there would be religious and cultural continuity between Phoenicians in the north and Canaanites in the south. Scholars believe that the name 'Phoenician' probably comes from the Greek phoinix, a red-purple color which probably refers to the famous red-purple dye produced and exported by Phoenicians for centuries. The name 'Canaan' may come from a Hurrian word, kinahhu, for the same color. Thus Phoenicia and Canaan are the same word for the same people, but in different languages.
It is likely that the Phoenicians of the Iron Age (1200-333 BCE) are descendants of the Canaanites of the Bronze Age (3000-1200 BCE) who were themselves probably the southern branch of a larger Semitic group known as the Amorites. The lands occupied by the Canaanites would have included modern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. It is argued by some scholars that later Hebrew people descended from the Aramaeans, another Semitic group that settled between Syria and Mesopotamia in the 12th and 13th centuries BCE.
Other cultures in the region experienced severe disruptions at the transition to the Iron Age, but not the Phoenicians. Major Phoenician cities like Tyre and Sidon may have been founded by Canaanites. Such continuity would be important because almost nothing of the original Canaanites remains. Thus, while the archaeological records for the Phoenicians is far less then scholars would like, they may provide evidence about what the Canaanites believed without having to rely solely on biased reports in the Bible.