The Kenites came from the desert, and were apparently of Midianitish descent.  Balaam had looked down upon their rocky strongholds from the heights of Moab; and they had accompanied their Hebrew comrades of Judah from their first camping-ground near Jericho to the wilderness south of Arad.  Here they lived among the Amalekite Bedawin down to the days of Saul.  To the last they maintained their nomadic habits, and the Kenite family of Rechab still dwelt in tents and avoided wine in that later age when the kingdom of Judah was about to fall.[3]

The Edomite element in Judah was stronger than the Kenite.  It consisted of the two clans of Jerahmeel and Kenaz, or the house of Caleb as it was called in the time of David.[4] Kenaz was a grandson of Esau, and the fact that the Kenizzites shared with the Israelitish tribes in the conquest of Canaan throws light on the law of Deuteronomy[5] which gave the Edomite of “the third generation” all the rights and privileges of a Jew.  Caleb, the conqueror of Hebron, was a Kenizzite; so also was Othniel, the first of the Judges of Israel.  Edomites, rather than Hebrews, were the founders of the future Judah.

This accounts for the comparatively late appearance of Judah as a separate tribe in the history of Israel, as well as for the antagonism which existed between it and the more pure-blooded tribes of the north.  In the Song of Deborah and Barak, Judah is not mentioned; Ephraim and Benjamin, and not Judah, are still regarded as forming the bulwark of Israel against the Amalekite marauders of the southern wilderness.  It was the Philistine wars which first created the Judah of later days.  They forced Hebrews, Edomites, and Kenites to unite against the common enemy, and welded them into a single whole.  Though the three peoples still continued to be spoken of separately, this was but a survival of ancient modes of speech, and after the accession of David all distinction between them disappears.  From this time forward the kingdom of Judah is one undivided community.

But the Amalekites were ever on its borders.  The Amalekite of the Old Testament is the Bedawi of to-day.  Now, as ever, he is the scourge of his more settled neighbours, whose fields he harries and whose families he murders.  He lives by robbery and theft; too idle to work himself, he plunders those who do.  A strong government forces him to hide himself in the depth of the wilderness; when the countries that skirt the desert fall into decay he emerges from his retreat like a swarm of flies.  The ancient Oriental world saw in Amalek “the firstborn of nations;” he was for them the representative of the primitive savage who had survived in the wilds of the desert.  Untamed and untamable, his hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against him.