To the established city-states, these refugees were the desper-ate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets.1 And khabiru softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.

• language
• thought