HABIRU. — In numerous documents from the ancient Near East, varying in date and provenance, mention is made of groups and individuals called H.
HAMMURABI (HAMMURAPI) (v.), they are found at Larsa as mercenary soldiers, at Babylon also as mercenaries, in the texts from Mari as bands of nomadic robbers, and at Aliaḫar as prisoners. Later, in Hittite inscriptions, they appear again as mercenaries; in the Nuzi tablets they are shown as a class of people who do not possess full civil rights and work as servants. In the el-ʿAmārnah texts, the H. appear as bands operating both as mercenaries for princes and on their own account. They are also found in some Assyrian and Babylonian texts from the 13th and 11th centuries B.C.
Moreover, Egyptian documents from the time of the Ramses (19th Dynasty) speak of ‘pr (cf. E. A. Speiser [V. BIBLICA.], p. 38, note 93), and recently discovered Ugaritic texts likewise contain the name ‘pr.
From this it emerges 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: wherever they appear, they are foreigners who readily form bands of mercenaries in the service of the state or of private individuals, as at Nuzi. Where authority is weaker, they act as plunderers or as independent warriors. For the most part, the H. come from the borders of the settled land where semi-nomads and nomads meet and mingle; if they are not of the type of the great nomads, they are at least semi-nomadic, capable of serving as auxiliary troops or, for their own profit, as workers skilled in organizing plunder. Among their ranks are adventurers from every quarter, fugitives unwelcome in their lands of origin.
The designation H. has taken on various meanings. At first it was a simple epithet, signifying on the one hand semi-nomads, on the other military units or bands of the type of the Gum or Rezzu, of which these semi-nomads formed the principal element. The name thus came to denote the social status of these people, until the H. in some measure became settled in the great states; yet they were not assimilated to citizens, living a life more or less like that of the Cossacks or in the manner of colonial laborers grouped together in modern metropolises, offering their services—and even their freedom—in order to survive. Finally, in consequence of the principal recruitment of these bands and this social class, the name acquired a semiotic character, and the H., especially in the Hittite region, had sacrifices offered in their own name, possessed their own gods, and even a tutelary deity: the Habiri.
The ideogram denoting the H. is SA-GAZ, sometimes simplified to GAZ or corrupted to SAG-GAZ, and means “plunderer.”
The name H., the phonetic equivalent, has been interpreted in various ways. The form ‘pr, supplied by the Egyptian and Ugaritic texts, seems to exclude any etymology positing an original h as the first radical (the h is a cuneiform transcription of ‘e’, the reverse being impossible). The root is therefore ‘pr, which may also appear as ‘br (cf. W.-F. Albright [V. BIBLICA.], p. 32; E. A. Speiser, pp. 40 ff.). It seems that the vocalization imposes on this form the stative sense of “one who is passing through, going from one place to another” (= nomad), rather than the active sense of “one who crosses” (cf. E. A. Speiser, p. 40, note 26).
Can the H. be identified with the Hebrews? Here is the cautious reply of R. de Vaux: “... regarding the problem of the H., for which Ras Sharma has brought a new element... the correspondence with the Hebrews becomes more difficult to establish.”
It seems that the Hebrews, by their way of life and customs preserved even after they had definitively settled in a place, originally belonged to the H., but not all H. were Hebrews.