Abdi-Heba

Overview

Abdi-Heba was the ruler of Jerusalem, then called Urusalim, in the Amarna period, and the author of six of the Amarna Letters, EA 285 to 290, written to the pharaoh, probably Akhenaten. They are the earliest surviving documents written from Jerusalem, and they show a city ruler who held his post by Egyptian appointment and was struggling to keep it.

The Letters

Abdi-Heba insists repeatedly that he owes his position to Egypt rather than to his family: "neither my father nor my mother put me in this place, but the strong arm of the king brought me into my father's house" (EA 286). He protests his loyalty against accusers at court, and asks again and again for Egyptian archers, warning that without them "lost are the lands of the king, my lord". His chief complaint is the Habiru: "Why do you love the 'Apiru, but the mayors you hate? ... The 'Apiru have plundered all the lands of the king" (EA 286). He blames neighbouring rulers for siding with them, naming Milkilu and "the sons of Lab'ayu", the family of Labayu of Shechem (EA 287).

His neighbours told a different story. Shuwardata, the ruler of Gath, wrote that "another Lab'ayu is 'Abdi-Heba, and he seizes our towns" (EA 280). The letters are therefore a quarrel between rival city rulers, each accusing the others before a distant king, and they should be read as advocacy rather than as neutral reports.

Name

The name means "servant of Hebat", a goddess of the Hurrian pantheon. It is a non-Semitic name for a ruler of a Canaanite hill-country city, and it is sometimes taken as a sign of Hurrian influence in the region, though the name alone does not establish his origin.

Biblical Significance

Abdi-Heba is not named in Scripture. His letters show Jerusalem as a walled city with its own ruler before Israel's arrival, which is the picture of Joshua 10, where the king of Jerusalem leads a coalition of hill-country kings against Israel, and of Judges 1, where the city is attacked but its Jebusite inhabitants remain (Judges 1:8, 21). His repeated alarm at the Habiru has been read by some scholars working within the biblical framework as a reflection of Israel's entry into the land, on the early date for the conquest. Others take "Habiru" as a social term for displaced or outlaw groups rather than the name of a people, in which case Israelites could be among them without the word meaning Israel. The letters themselves name neither Israel nor Joshua.