Hybridity,Hapiru, and Ethnicity in 2nd MillenniumBCEWestern Asia 147Based on the textual evidence surveyed in the preceding text, it becomes clear that the
hapiruwere not an ethnic group. Rather, the term is used as a pejorative social marker,
often denoting parasocial individuals such as refugees, fugitives, and individuals who have
cut ties to settled communities and often took on a variety of roles such as mercenaries,
slaves, servants, or brigands.Hapirunames are not from the same linguistic group, they
did not share a common ancestry, and they did not speak a common language.
Due to perceived linguistic similarities between the West Semitic termhapiru/habiru/
‘apiruand the biblical gentilic
̨
ibri(Hebrew, e.g., Abraham is described as an ‘ibri[Gen-
esis 14:13]), it has been tempting to link thehapiruwith the Hebrews of the Bible
(Na’aman 1986contraRainey 1987). G. Mendenhall was the first to develop this link-
age and propose the theory that early Israel emerged from Canaan as a result of internal
revolts of disaffected peasants. In his view, there was no exodus and conquest of Canaan-
ite cities as described in the Books of Exodus and Joshua. Rather, it was a sociopolitical
upheaval against the Canaanite city-states by rebelling peasants, who were empowered
and united by an ideology and the belief in the Hebrew deity, Yahweh. Mendenhall
equated these unruly Yahweh believers, who formed the nucleus of early Israel, with
thehapiruof the Amarna texts (for an overview, see Mendenhall 1992). N. Gottwald
(1979) further developed Mendenhall’s revolt model. Drawing from the theories of
Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, he proposed that early or proto-Israel was
an expansion of thehapirumovement. However, according to Gottwald, these under-
class Canaanites (akahapiru) were not motivated by ideological beliefs, but rather by a
notion of sociopolitical egalitarianism. For both Mendenhall and Gottwald, proto-Israel
and thehapiruwere not ethnic groups; rather, the term referred to a social designation
(see also Rowton 1976b and Doak 2011). In their view, one was not born a Hebrew
orhapiru, but became one through choice. Due to lack of archaeological or textual evi-
dence, the revolt model as the defining feature for the emergence of early Israel has been
rejected by the majority of archaeologists and biblical scholars (see the following text
and, e.g., Rainey 2008: 46–47).
A Northwest Semitic people, the Aramaeans emerge in late second millenniumBCEtex-
tual evidence as tribal groups occupying the Jebel Bishri region in upper Mesopotamia of
modern central Syria. The development from Late Bronze Age pastoral and village con-
texts to small, independent Iron Age kingdoms mainly situated in the northern Levant
is documented in Mesopotamian sources and parallels the transformation and eventual
sedentarization of other semi-nomadic western Asian tribal groups, such as the Amorites.
However, suggestions that the Aramaeans are directly related to the Amorites are largely
discredited.
Attempts to link the Aramaeans with appearances of the place namearamuor the
termahlamu(=“wanderers,” i.e., nomadic pastoralists) in third- and second-millennia
Mesopotamian texts are tentative at best (see, e.g., Lipinski 2000: 26–35). The ́
possible exceptions are two New Kingdom Egyptian documents dating to the reigns
of Amenophis III and Merneptah that refer to ’rm, apparently a region in cen-
tral Syria (Younger 2007: 134). The first undisputed reference to the Aramaeans
(ahlamu-Aramaeans) is dated to the reign of Tiglath-pileser I (late twelfth/early
eleventh centuriesBCE). As becomes clear from these inscriptions, the Aramaeans are
closely associated with theahlamu; however, not everyahlamuwas an Aramaean.
Following the crisis of the Late Bronze Age, the Iron Age Aramaeans emerged as a