In early days, long before the age of Abraham, the Amorites must already have been the predominant population in this part of Syria.  When the Babylonian king, Sargon of Akkad, carried his victorious arms to the shores of the Mediterranean, it was against “the land of the Amorites” that his campaigns were directed.  From that time forward this was the name under which Syria, and more particularly Canaan, was known to the Babylonians.  The geographical extension of the term was parallel to that of “Hittites” among the Assyrians, of “Canaan” among the Israelites, and of “Palestine” among ourselves.  But it bears witness to the important part which was played by the Amorites in what we must still call the prehistoric age of Syria, as well as to the extent of the area which they must have occupied.

Of course it does not follow that the whole of this area was occupied at one and the same time.  Indeed we know that the conquest of the northern portion of Moab by the Amorite king Sihon took place only a short time before the Israelitish invasion, and part of the Amorite song of triumph on the occasion has been preserved in the Book of Numbers.  “There is a fire gone out of Heshbon,” it said, “a flame from the city of Sihon:  it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon.  Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh:  he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites.” (Num. xxi. 28, 29.) In the south, again, the Amorites do not seem to have made their way beyond Hazezon-Tamar, while the Tel el-Amarna tablets make it probable that neither Bashan nor Jerusalem were as yet Amorite at the time they were written.  It may be that the Amorite conquests in the south were one of the results of the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Hittite irruption.

Between the Hittite and the Amorite the geographical table of Genesis interposes the Jebusite, and the Book of Numbers similarly states that “the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains.”  The Jebusites, however, were merely the local tribe which in the early days of the Israelitish occupation of Canaan were in possession of Jerusalem, and they were probably either Hittite or Amorite in race.  At any rate there is no trace of them in the cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna.  On the contrary, in these Jerusalem is still known only by its old name of Uru-salim; of the name Jebus there is not a hint.  But the letters show us that Ebed-Tob, the native king of Jerusalem and humble vassal of the Pharaoh, was being hard pressed by his enemies, and that, in spite of his urgent appeals for help, the Egyptians were unable to send any.  His enemy were the Khabiri or “Confederates,” about whose identification there has been much discussion, but who were assisted by the Beduin chief Labai and his sons.  One by one the towns belonging to the territory of Jerusalem fell into the hands of his adversaries, and at last, as we learn from another letter, Ebed-Tob himself along with his capital was captured by the foe.  It was this event, perhaps, which made Jerusalem a Jebusite city.  If so, we must see in the enemies of Ebed-Tob the Jebusites of the Old Testament.