Ḫabiru (also Hapiru, Apiru)

The Ḫabiru (also Hapiru or ʿApiru) were a social group, not a nation: ancient texts use the term for brigands, outlaws and displaced people who lived outside the established order of society. The word resembles ʿibri, the Hebrew word for a Hebrew, and whether the Ḫabiru were connected with the Bible's Hebrews remains debated.

---

The Ḫabiru in ancient texts

In many texts the term alternates with the cuneiform signs SA.GAZ, and in Egyptian and Ugaritic texts the form is ʿapiru (ʿapiruma in Ugaritic). Moshe Greenberg, in his article on them for the Encyclopaedia Judaica, describes them as part of the society of the Fertile Crescent for the greater part of the second millennium BC, named in more than 250 texts. Their personal names, Akkadian and West Semitic in an early Babylonian list and principally non-Semitic at Alalakh, show in Greenberg's judgment that they were not one ethnic group.

In what Greenberg dates as the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries BC, they served in the kingdoms of Larsa, Babylon and Mari as bands of warriors kept by local rulers, and they also appear as robber bands that plundered settlements. In the Nuzi tablets, Ḫabiru men and women bind themselves to wealthy citizens by contracts that are part slavery, part adoption.

In the Amarna letters, the rulers of Canaan describe the Ḫabiru as outlaws, mercenaries, or day laborers and servants, and as troublemakers from outside. On their own or as mercenaries for either side, Greenberg writes, the Ḫabiru added greatly to the confusion of the Amarna period. Letters from Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem complain that the Ḫabiru threatened the existing order in Canaan, and name the ʿApiru among his enemies. Shechem's rulers were criticized by their neighbors for cooperating with the Ḫabiru: Abdi-Heba blamed the sons of Labayu for giving the king's land to the ʿApiru, and Labayu protests in a letter, “I did not know that my son was consorting with the 'Apiru.”

---

The Ḫabiru and the Hebrews

In the Bible the word Hebrew usually appears where Israelites speak to foreigners or are spoken of by them. Abraham is “Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13); in Egypt Joseph is “this Hebrew” to the woman who accuses him and was “kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews” (Genesis 39:14; 40:15). A baby in Egypt is “one of the Hebrew children” (Exodus 2:6), and the message for the king of Egypt is “The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us” (Exodus 3:18). The law speaks of a “Hebrew servant” who goes free in the seventh year (Exodus 21:2).

In 1 Samuel the Philistines speak of “the camp of the Hebrews” (1 Samuel 4:6), Saul proclaims, “Let the Hebrews hear!” and “some Hebrews even crossed the Jordan” (1 Samuel 13:3, 7), and Hebrews who had joined the Philistines “now went over to the Israelites who were with Saul and Jonathan” (1 Samuel 14:21). Albert D. Friedberg, in a 2017 essay for TheTorah.com, reads this verse as the strongest evidence that the ivrim and the Israelites were not the same group; in his view they were “two socially distinct but ethnically related groups of people.”

Many scholars have noted the likeness of the Ḫabiru forms to ʿibri and argued that the words are cognate. Genesis calls Shem “the forefather of all the sons of Eber” (Genesis 10:21), and the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible (1975) derives both Eber and the word Hebrew from a root that conveys the idea of “crossing over.” James K. Hoffmeier, in a 2007 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society answering Bryant Wood, reports Wood's view that the marauding Ḫabiru of the letters could be the Hebrews. Hoffmeier holds that “All of these Habiru in all these locations cannot be the biblical Hebrews,” since they are found “centuries before the earliest date for the Israelite appearance in Israel.” The Encyclopaedia Judaica's entry likewise warns that one cannot simply equate the two, since the Ḫabiru “are always a social element,” while the word Hebrew is at least sometimes another name for Israel.