HABIRU. — Numerous documents of the ancient Near East, differing in date and provenance, mention groups and individuals called H.
HAMMURABI (HAMMURAPI) (v.), they are found at Larsa as mercenary soldiers, at Babylon likewise as mercenaries, in the texts of Mari as bands of nomadic robbers, and at Alīšar as prisoners. Later, in the Hittite inscriptions, they are still seen hired as mercenaries; in the tablets from Nuzi they appear as a class of individuals who do not possess all civil rights and who offer their services as servants. In the texts of el-'Amārnah the H. appear as bands operating both as hired men in the service of princes and on their own account. They are also found in some Assyrian and Babylonian texts of the 13th and 11th centuries B.C.
Moreover, Egyptian documents from the time of the Ramses (Nineteenth Dynasty) speak of 'pr (cf. E. A. Speiser [V. BIBLICA.], p. 38, note 93), and recently discovered Ugaritic texts likewise bear the name 'pr.
It follows that the H. are encountered from Asia Minor to Egypt and the Persian Gulf, over a period extending from the 18th to the 11th century B.C. Their common characteristics are as follows: everywhere they appear as foreigners who readily form bands of mercenaries in the service of the State, or offer their services to private individuals, as at Nuzi. Where authority is less strongly felt, they act as raiders or as independent warriors. For the most part, the H. come from the borders of the country where sedentary and nomadic populations meet and intermingle; if they do not belong to the type of the great nomads, they belong at least to the semi-nomads, capable of serving as auxiliary troops or of acting to their own advantage as laborers, also skilled in organizing plunder. Their ranks include adventurers from every quarter, fugitives undesirable in their lands of origin.
The designation H. acquired different meanings. At first it was a simple appellation which, on the one hand, signified the semi-nomads and, on the other, the troop units,
or bands of either the Gum or the Rezzu type, of which these semi-nomads were the principal element. The name thus came to denote the social status of these peoples, until the Ḥ. more or less settled in the great States; but they were not assimilated to the citizens, living a life more or less like that of the Cossacks, or in the manner of the colonial laborers grouped together in the metropolises of the present day, offering their services, and even their freedom, in order to live. Finally, as a result of the principal recruitment of these bands and of this social class, the name acquired a quasi-ethnic character, and the Ḥ., especially in the Hittite region, had sacrifices offered in their own name, possessed their own gods, and even their eponymous god: Ḥabiri.
The ideogram designating the Ḥ. is SA-GAZ, which is sometimes found simplified as GAZ, or corrupted into SAC-GAZ, and means “raider.”
The name Ḥ., the corresponding phonetic form, has been interpreted in different ways. The form 'pr, provided by the Egyptian and Ugaritic texts, seems to exclude any etymology that presupposes a primitive ḥ. as the first radical (the ḥ. is a cuneiform transcription of ', the reverse being impossible). The root is therefore 'pr, which may also appear in the form 'br (cf. W.-F. Albright [V. BIBLICA.], p. 32; E. A. Speiser, p. 40 ff.). It seems that the vocalization imposes upon this form the stative meaning of “someone who is passing, going from one place to another” (= nomad), rather than the active meaning, “one who crosses” (cf. E. A. Speiser, p. 40, note 26).
Can the Ḥ. and the Hebrews be identified? Here is the cautious response of R. de Vaux: “... regarding the problem of the Ḥ., for which Ras Shamra has provided a new element..., agreement with the Hebrews becomes more difficult to establish.”
It seems that the Hebrews, because of their way of life and their customs, preserved even after they had become definitively settled in one place, originally belonged to the Ḥ., but that not all the Ḥ. were Hebrews.