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.
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Archibald Henry Sayce (25 September 1845 – 4 February 1933) was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919.
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