“Behold, you write to the king your lord saying: I am your servant like all the loyal governors who are each in his city. Yet you have acted wrongly in taking a governor whom his brother had driven from the gate of his city, and being in Sidon you handed him over to the governors (there) at your own discretion, as if you did not know that they were rebellious. “If you are really a servant of the king why have you not seen that he should go up to the presence of the king your lord instead of thinking, ‘This governor wrote to me saying, “Take me to thyself and restore me to my city”’? “But if you have acted loyally and nothing that I write is correct, the king has devised a lie in saying that nothing which you declare is true. “But it happens that one has heard that you have made a treaty with the (Hittite) prince of Kadesh to deliver food and drink to one another, and it is true. Why have you acted thus? Why have you made a treaty with a governor with whom another governor is at enmity? For if you act with loyalty to him and observe your and his engagements you cannot look after (our) interests as you have undertaken to do long ago. Whatever be your conduct in the matter you are not on the side of the king your lord. “Now as for these men to whom you want to turn, they are seeking to get you into the fire and to burn (you) and all you most love. Whereas if you submit yourself to the king your lord, what is there which the king cannot do for you? If in anything you love to act wickedly and if you lay up wickedness, even thoughts of rebellion, in your heart, then you will die by the axe of the king along with all your family. Submit therefore to the king your lord, and you shall live, for you know that the king has no wish to be angry with all the land of Canaan. “And since you write: ‘Let the king excuse me this year and I will go next year to the court of the king my lord, my son not being with me,’ the king your lord accordingly will excuse you this year as you have asked. Go yourself instead of sending your son, and you shall see the king in the sight of whom all the world lives, and do not say: let me be excused this year also from going to the court of the king your lord; and do not send your son to the king your lord; he must not go in your place.