“And now the king your lord has heard that you wrote to the king saying, ‘Let the king my lord permit Khanni the messenger of the king to come to me for the second time, and I will deliver the enemies of the king into his hand.’ Now he will go to you as you have asked; do you therefore deliver them (to him) and do not let a single one of them escape. Now the king your lord sends you the names of the king’s enemies in this letter by the hand of Khanni the king’s messenger; so deliver them to the king your lord and let not a single one of them escape, but put fetters of bronze upon their feet. Behold, the men you are to send to the king your lord are Sarru with all his sons, Tuia, Liya with all his sons, Yisyari with all his sons, (and) the son-in-law of Manya with his sons and wives. The treasurer of Khanni is the official who will read the dispatch. Dâsirtî, Pâlûwa and Nimmakhî have gone [to collect taxes?] into the country of the Amorites. “And know that the king, the Sun-god in heaven, is well; his soldiers and chariots are many; from the upper country to the lower country, from the rising of the sun [to] the setting of the sun all is peace.” We hear again of one of the rebels mentioned in this letter in the tablet discovered at Lachish in Palestine by Mr. Bliss. Yisyari is there described as inciting the governor of Lachish to revolt and promising assistance if he would call out the militia of his city against the king. That an Amorite of the north should thus have been able to interfere in the politics of a city in the south of Palestine is an interesting illustration of what I may call the solidarity of Syria and Canaan in the pre-Mosaic period. They had not yet been broken up into a series of isolated States; like the Hittites, the Amorites still claimed to be a power in the future territory of Judah as well as in the neighbourhood of Sidon or Hamath. It is possible that a well-known but somewhat mysterious personage of the Old Testament was one of the Hittite leaders who succeeded in carving out a principality for himself: I mean Balaam the son of Beor. He is said to have come from the Hittite town of Pethor near Carchemish, and besides being a seer and a prophet he was also a soldier who fell in the ranks of the Midianites in a war against Israel. But Balaam the son of Beor was not only a native of Pethor; we hear of him again in the Book of Genesis, and here he appears as the first king of Edom, his name heading the list of Edomite kings extracted from the state annals of Edom and probably brought to Jerusalem when David conquered the country. In the light of what we have learnt from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna it is perhaps not going too far to suppose that in Balaam we have one of those Hittite chieftains who, after playing the part of prophet, made himself leader of a band of Hittite free-lances and established a kingdom for himself in Edom, finally falling in battle by the side of his Midianite allies.