Unfamiliar to most students of the Old Testament, the Hurrians played an intriguing role in the ancient world. Documented as early as the third millennium BCE, the Hurrians come most strongly onto the stage of history in the Late Bronze Age (LBA). Having expanded westward as far as Anatolia and eastward to the Tigris, the Hurrians formed the unified state of Mitanni. In the peculiar peer-polity mode of LBA international relations, Mitanni functioned as a top-tier great power. The king of Mitanni interacted as a "brother" with the kings of Hatti and Egypt. Unfortunately, Mitanni remained ever under pressure from the Hittites in the west and the ambitious second-tier power, Assyria, in the east. After the collapse of Mitanni (ca. 1350 BCE), the erstwhile Mitannian territories came under the nearest dominant power, either the Hittites or the Assyrians. After the general collapse of the LBA (ca. 1200 BCE), many of the Neo-Hittite city-states in Syria lay within formerly Mitannian territory. Ethnic Hurrians appeared throughout the Levant, especially in Syria and Ugarit, where personal names, lexical texts, and literary and ritual texts testify to their influence.
For Canaan, the Amarna texts (from Egypt) suggest that the king of Jerusalem, ‘Abdi-Heba, was Hurrian. Other stray Hurrian names appear in the Amarna letters. By the late 1400s BCE the Egyptians regularly referred to Canaan as "Kharu/ Khuru-land" and sometimes identified prisoners from Canaan as "Hurrians." This Hurrian label reflects not the ethnicity of the captives, but rather Egyptian administrative terminology. In the important Israel Stela of Merneptah, the line "Canaan is plundered" is seen by many to be in parallel with the line "Hurru is become a widow." This exemplifies the tendency in Egypt to identify the two. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word horJ renders the term "Hurrian."
The Hurrians had a significant impact on the culture of the ancient Near East. Their technology in glassmaking, metallurgy, and weaponry possibly brought the distinctive LBA chariot into widespread use. Most famous is the Hurrian mastery of horse training. The manual of Kikkuli, a Hurrian horse trainer, served as a standard text for training warhorses. It describes practices still in use today.
The most detailed information about Hurrian culture derives from the personal and family archives unearthed in the north Mesopotamian city of Nuzi. The texts document adoptions, land transfers, lawsuits, and a host of other details of the culture. Some personal names in the Bible, such as "Sheshai," "Talmai," and "Piram," may best be analyzed as Hurrian. In the region of the southern Levant, evidence of Hurrian culture disappears after the tenth century BCE.
Conflicts with Canaanites, raiders from Transjordan, and the Philistines, who had arrived in 1175 BCE and ultimately would provoke a crisis leading to the foundation of the Israelite state.
World History
