[…] The discovery of the Amarna Letters introduced the world to a group of people that the Egyptians called apiru or, in Akkadian, habiru, described as a wandering group of asiatics in Palestine and Syria with whom the Egyptians were familiar. They are portrayed sometimes as brigands, sometimes as fighting against Egyptian troops, sometimes as ethnic units serving within the Egyptian army itself, as tenders of cattle, and as being skilled vintners and stonecutters. The obvious similarity of the words ‘habiru’ and ‘Hebrew’ led some scholars to suggest that the habiru might be the Israelites of the Bible appearing for the first time in an historical source outside the Old Testament. Although the habiru were indeed an important factor in Egyptian and Israelite history, further research has not completely resolved that they were not the Hebrews.

Habiru was not a designation for an ethnic or racial group, but described a class of wandering peoples in Palestine and Syria who came into frequent contact with the Egyptians after the establishment of the New Kingdom. The ethnic mingling so characteristic of the habiru seems evident among the Israelites as well. Exodus 12:38 says, ‘And also many foreigners went up with them, and flock and herd … very heavy cattle’. The term used for ‘foreigners’ is erev rav or ‘mixed multitude’ or ‘mixture’ and is a rare construction. It seems to imply concubines, half-breeds, and other persons who joined the group. It may simply refer to the Egyptian wives, husbands, relatives, and children acquired by the Israelites during their stay in Egypt. Later, in Numbers 11:4 when the people agitated against Moses for lack of food, the term used to describe the non-Israelites among them is asasphsuph, or ‘riff-raff’. The ethnically mixed character of the Israelites is reflected even more clearly in the foreign names of the group’s leadership. Moses himself, of course, has an Egyptian name. But so do Hophni, Phinehas, Hur, and Merari, the son of Levi. Hur is Moses’ sacral assistant, and Phinehas an important priest chosen to guide the army in its war against the Midianites. The Merari clan is one of the Levite subclans who keep the Tabernacle. The fact that such important personages possessed Egyptian names seems to testify to the multiethnic character of the Israelites, which also suggests that it was the welding of this diverse group to the belief in Yahweh, more than ethnic ties, that forged the national identity of the Israelites during the desert trek […] (pp. 62-63).

The Military History of Ancient Israel, Richard A. Gabriel

[…] It is important to remember that one of the anomalies of the chapter [ie. Genesis 14] is that Abraham is called a Hebrew, a term usually employed by foreigners concerning the Israelites (Genesis 39:14), or for Israelite self-designation to outsiders (Genesis 40:15, 43:32).

Because of the unequivocal military-heroic nature of the patriarchs, and especially of Abraham, the epithet ‘ibri and the Habiru problem cannot be as lightly disassociated as some modern scholars would have it. [Thomas L.] Thompson’s rejection of a link between the Habiru and the ‘ibri, although in most cases convincing, collides head-on with the unequivocal overlap between the military activities of Abraham and the Habirus of history. Albright’s imaginative connection between Abraham and the Habiru is, however, doubtful. While I greatly admire Thompson’s sober critique of the pan-Babylonianism of Speiser, Albright, and others, this remarkable overlap between the activities of Abraham and of the earlier Habiru cannot be ignored as easily as I myself often wished.

As Speiser noted, the evidence of Genesis 14 accords more closely than any other with cuneiform data on the Western Habiru, calling to the Alalakh date formula in AT 58 (eighteenth/seventeenth centuries, BC), which mentions a treaty with Habiru warriors, and to the Statue of Idrimi (fifteenth century, BC, Alalakh), which tells how the royal fugitives found asylum among Habiru warriors […] (pp. 105).

Abraham the Noble Warrior: Patriarchal Politics and Laws of War in Ancient Israel, Yochanan Muffs (1982. Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 33, nos. 1-2: 81-107)

[…] Those wishing to identify the Hebrews with the troublesome habiru would find the military exploits of Joshua and those of the habiru occurring in the same general area in the middle of the fourteenth century. At an earlier date, identifying the habiru with the Hebrews was common, but in recent decades, the association has been discouraged, largely because habiru is now understood to be a sociological term, not indicative of any one particular ethnic group. More recent studies consider the habiru to be more specifically groups of refugees who lived out of reach of urban, settled areas, who nevertheless preyed upon such states. This generally accepted meaning need not preclude the term habiru from being applied to the Hebrews who were dislocated in Egypt and then again when they returned to Canaan. A few scholars have lately reconsidered the association of the Hebrews and the habiru. Lemche, as noted above, believes the Israelites were habiru, displaced Canaanites moving from one area of the Levant to another. Ahlström [1986] also allowed for a possible connection between the Israelites who occupied the hill country and the habiru. The appearance of 3600 captured ‘prw (Egyptian for habiru), a rather large figure, in the Memphis stela of Amenhotep II, suggests that the habiru were more than just small marauding bands. Listing the ‘prw/habiru alongside other ethnic groups from Hurru, Retenu, and the Shasu suggests that the Egyptians may have viewed the habiru as a distinguishable ethnic group (pp. 124).

Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition, James K. Hoffmeier (1996. New York: Oxford University Press)

Reputedly fugitives from Egypt, and in rootless transit through Transjordan into Canaan, the tribal group ‘Israel’ was not the only such population group troubling their neighbors (and sometimes, higher authorities) there in the late second millennium. The Amarna letters of the mid-fourteenth century are full of reports about restless groups such as the Apiru, or displaced people. This much-discussed term cannot be readily equated linguistically with biblical ‘Hebrew’ (‘ibri), as is often done. But there are clear behavioral analogies between these Apiru and the displaced Hebrews who had fled Egypt and (now rootless) sought to establish themselves in Canaan. The biblical Hebrews in Joshua-Judges sought to raid towns, and hopefully to seize control of them, occasionally burning them down (Jericho, Ai, Hazor). Of the Apiru we can read similar activities from the point of view of local city rulers in the Amarna letters. Time and again they are accused of trying to overcome cities and expel their petty kings (’mayors/governors’ in Egyptian usage), and get control, as did the Hebrews. Seeing trouble, the people of Gibeon (Josh.9) sought to make treaty-alliance with the Hebrew intruders. And in the Amarna letters, city rulers continually fear towns joining up with the Apiru. Or they go over to the Apiru and make agreement or treaty with them, as the Gibeonites later did with Joshua and his people. Local rulers might band together against a third party, just as the five kings of south Canaan did against Gibeon and Israel (Josh.10) and the group in north Canaan did against Joshua and his forces.

This range of activity by Apiru and other groups is also attested in the thirteenth century, from brief Egyptian reports under Sethos I, circa 1295/1290. His first stela of his Year 1 at Beth-Shan reports on the rulers of Hammath and Pella capturing Beth-Shan and besieging Rehob, until the pharaoh’s forces recaptured Beth-Shan and relieved Rehob, securing also Yenoam. Compare the five kings led by Jerusalem that threatened Gibeon, until Joshua brought military deliverance. On his second Beth-Shan stela a little later, Sethos I reports on tribal conflict involving the ‘Apiru of the mountain of Yarmutu’ (’Jarmuth’), along with the Tayaru folk, attacking another Asiatic group, of Ruhma; which mischief he stepped in to quell. This appears to have been in Lower Galilee, if the Jarmuth concerned was that located later in Issachar (Josh.21:29). The picture is much like that of Israel or of segments such as the Calebites (Josh.14:6-14; cf. Judg.1:12-15) battling it out with other groups such as the Anakim, but without pharaonic interference, until Merenptah in 1209 briefly repulsed some part of Israel’s forces.

This last event may find other echoes in our data. In Josh.15:9 and 18:15 is found the seeming tautologous place-name ‘Spring of the waters of Nephtoah’. Surely either ’spring’ or ‘waters’ would have sufficed as definition! But for long enough the suggestions have been made that (1) we should understand this name as for ‘Spring of Menephtoah’, or in fact ‘Spring of Me(re)nptah’, named after the pharaoh, and that (2) Lifta, just northwest of Jerusalem, marks the site and preserves a remnant of the name. Whatever the military clash was, it may have stimulated the Egyptian forces into establishing a small ‘bridgehead’ upland fort near Jerusalem to watch over Canaanites and Hebrews alike. With this should be compared a mention of ‘the troop-commanders of the Wells of Merenptah that are [in] the mountain-ridges’, in Year 3 (1211), in a postal register of message-carrying officers then. It is possible that Merenptah’s strike into Canaan dates to within Years 1 to 3 […].

In the narratives Joshua is presented as a dynamic leader who can spur his people forward. This included conquest of two settlements as gateway to upland Canaan proper, then raiding through Canaan, top-slicing local city rulers and temporarily disabling local opposition. Exploits of such a kind need direct leadership; it is not the product of a wandering, unfocused mob. Other dynamic ‘Joshuas’ also flourished in the Late Bronze Levant. The city-based Labayu of Shechem made a strong impression on his contemporaries in the Amarna age, as the Amarna letters show.

But far more remarkable was Abdi-ashirta, who, aided and succeeded by his equally wily son Aziru, created from scratch a kingdom of Amurru based in the north Lebanon mountains and environs within the last ten or fifteen years of Akhenaten’s reign, the main period of the Amarna letters that evidence this feat. In this they made full use of Apiru fighting men and auxiliaries, to expand their control over neighbouring towns, not least profitable trading ports on the Mediterranean coast. Geopolitically this represented a much more ambitious achievement on the ground than the modest initial Hebrew occupation of the Canaanite upland area from Hebron to Jericho/Ai (bypassing Jerusalem) up via Shiloh to Shechem and Tirzah. Thus the territorial achievement of Joshua and the elders (in maybe ten/fifteen years?) was certainly much less than that of Abdi-ashirta and Aziru - who also faced stiff opposition from their contemporaries, and had to cope with direct threats from Egypt and the Hittite power, as the Amarna letters and contemporary archives show. Therefore there are no grounds whatsoever for denying reality or factuality to the Joshua narratives in terms of what they actually represent on the ground, when the rhetorical component is left aside” (pp. 165-166).

On the Reliability of the Old Testament, K.A. Kitchen (2003. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company)