Some scholars, with more haste than discretion, have pronounced the Khabiri of the cuneiform tablets to be the Hebrews of the Old Testament. If that were the case, Hebrew and Israelite could no longer be considered to be synonymous terms. In the age of the Khabiri the Israelites of Scripture were still in Egypt, where the cities of Ramses and Pithom were not as yet built, and their leader to the conquest of Canaan was Joshua, and not Elimelech. When in subsequent centuries Ramses II. and Ramses III. invaded and occupied Palestine, they found no traces there of the children of Israel. They have left us lists of the places they captured; we look in vain among them for the name of Israel or of an Israelitish tribe. We look equally in vain in the Book of Judges for any allusion to Egyptian conquests. The Khabiri, then, are not the Hebrews of Scripture, nor does the word throw any light on the term ‘Hebrew’ itself. Khabiri is really a descriptive title, meaning ‘Confederates’; it was a word borrowed by Babylonian from the language of Canaan, but is met with in old Babylonian and Assyrian hymns.[3] It may be that Hebron, the city of ‘the Confederacy,’ derived its name from these ‘Confederated’ bands; at all events, the name of Hebron is nowhere mentioned by Ebed-Tob or his brother governors, and it first appears in the Egyptian records in the time of Ramses III. under the form of Khibur.[4] The Tel el-Amarna tablets, accordingly, give us no help in regard to the name of the Hebrews, nor do any other cuneiform inscriptions with which we are acquainted. Babylonian records do indeed speak of a people called the Khabirâ, but they inhabited the mountains of Elam, on the eastern side of Babylonia, and between them and the Hebrews of Scripture no connection is possible.[5] In an old Babylonian list of foreign countries we read of a country of Khubur, which was situated in northern Mesopotamia in the neighbourhood of Harran; but Khubur is more probably related to the river Khabur than to the kinsfolk of Terah and Laban.[6] Moreover, a part of the mountains of the Amanus, overlooking the Gulf of Antioch, from whence logs of pine were brought to the cities of Chaldæa, was also known as Khabur.[7]