Who are the Habiru?

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Who are the Habiru?
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Who are the Habiru?The Sequel

• Nomadic sheep herders
• Settled in Palestine c. 1500 BCE
• Appear in cuneiform records as laborers,
  mercenary soldiers and slaves
• Mentioned in texts from Babylonia, Assyria,
  Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Canaan, and Egypt
• Part of a migration of nomads, tracing a common
  ancestry, who travelled the entire area,
  eventually settling in what would become Israel
• An ethnic conglomerate constructs a common
  ancestry with these narratives

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Israelites in Egypt
(wall painting on an Egyptian tomb wall)
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Religious Beliefs

• Polytheistic in time of Abraham Moses (c.1300
  BCE) probable starting point of monotheistic and
  nationalistic beliefs
• Monotheistic
• God is completely free, not subject to any
  outside forces, either natural or magical
• God has a moral purpose, not understandable by
  human beings fate does not exist
• Human being are responsible for their own choices
  and the consequences can affect the generations
  that follow
• Emphasis on sin and punishment
• Patriarchal belief system reflected in culture

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Inlaid Calf and Shrine
(found in recent dig at Ashkelon)
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The Covenant

• Gods chosen people (sons of Jacob)
• The promised homeland in Canaan
• First stated directly in Exodus, but foreshadowed
  repeatedly in Genesis
• God will keep his promise only if the people
  remain faithful and completely obedient to him

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TaNaKh

• Torah
• Neviim
• Ketuvim

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Text of the Bible/Tanakh

• Believed to have divine origin
• Torah understood to have been communicated by God
  to Moses at Sinai
• Logic problems notwithstanding, this belief gives
  authorship of Torah to Moses
• Traditionally, scholars have seen four different
  hands in finished product, but current theory
  favors the concept of a redactor (editor)

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Literary Style in the Tanakh

• Understatement
• Details omitted
• Characters thoughts concealed
• Anticipatory information
• Consequences of choices often concealed for
  several chapters
• Complex chronology
• Flashbacks, allusions, dreams/visions, flash
  forwards, fade ins and outs
• Motifs and events often repeated
• Patterns of oral tale telling
• Use of repetition for emphasis

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