The historian of the Hebrews is met at the very outset by a strange difficulty. Who were the Hebrews whose history he proposes to write? We speak of a Hebrew people, of a Hebrew literature, and of a Hebrew language; and by the one we mean the people who called themselves Israelites or Jews, by the other the literary records of this Israelitish nation, and by the third a language which the Israelites shared with the older population of Canaan. It is from the Old Testament that we derive the term ‘Hebrew,’ and the use of the term is by no means clear. Abram is called ‘the Hebrew’ before he became Abraham the father of Isaac and the Israelites. The confederate of the Amorite chieftains of Mamre, the conqueror of the Babylonian invaders of Canaan, is a ‘Hebrew’; when he comes before us as a simple Bedâwi shêkh he is a Hebrew no longer. When Joseph is sold into Egypt it is as a ‘Hebrew’ slave; and he tells the Pharaoh that he had been ‘stolen’ out of ‘the land of the Hebrews.’ The oppressed people in the age of the Exodus are known as ‘Hebrews’ to their Egyptian taskmasters. Moses was one of ‘the Hebrews’ children’; and he declares to the Egyptian monarch that Yahveh of Israel was ‘the God of the Hebrews.’ It would seem, therefore, as if it were the name by which the people of Canaan, and more especially the Israelites, were known to the Egyptians. And yet there is no certain trace of it on the Egyptian monuments. In the Egyptian texts the south of Palestine is called Khar, perhaps the land of the ‘Horites’; the coast-land is termed Zahi, ‘the dry’; and the whole country is indifferently known as that of the Upper Lotan or Syrians, and of the Fenkhu or Phœnicians. When we come down to the age of the nineteenth dynasty we find the name of Canaan already established in Egyptian literature. Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Bedâwin from the frontiers of Egypt to ‘the land of Canaan’; and in a papyrus of the same age we hear of Kan’amu or ‘Canaanite slaves’ from the land of Khar. Of any name that resembles that of the Hebrews there is not a trace. It is equally impossible to discover it in the cuneiform records of Babylonia and Assyria. The Babylonians, from time immemorial, called Palestine ‘the land of the Amorites,’ doubtless because the Amorites were the dominant people there in those early ages when Babylonian armies first made their way to the distant West. The Assyrians called it ‘the land of the Hittites’ for the same reason, while in the letters from the Asiatic correspondents of the Pharaoh found at Tel el-Amarna, and dating from the century before the Exodus, it is termed Kinakhna or Canaan. How then comes Joseph to describe it as ‘the land of the Hebrews,’ and himself as a ‘Hebrew’ slave?