On one occasion, however, Labai was actually made prisoner by one of the Egyptian officers.  There is a letter from Biridi stating that Megiddo was threatened by Labai, and that although the garrison had been strengthened by the arrival of some Egyptian troops, it was impossible to venture outside the gates of the town for fear of the enemy, and that unless two more regiments were sent the city itself was likely to fall.  Whether the additional forces were sent or not we do not know.  Labai, however, had to fly for his life along with his confederate Yasdata, who was the governor of some city near Megiddo, as we learn from a letter of his in which he speaks of being with Biridi.  Of Yasdata we hear nothing further, but Labai was captured in Megiddo by Zurata, the prefect of Acre, who, under the pretext that he was going to send his prisoner in a ship to Egypt, took him first to the town of Khinatuna (’En’athon), and then to his own house, where he was induced by a bribe to set him free along with his companion, Hadad-mekhir (who, by the way, has bequeathed to us two letters).

It was probably after this that Labai wrote to the Pharaoh to exculpate himself, though his language, in spite of its conventional submissiveness, could not have been very acceptable at the Egyptian court.  In one of his letters he excuses himself partly on the ground that even “the food of his stomach” had been taken from him, partly that he had attacked and entered Gezer only in order to recover the property of himself and his friend Malchiel, partly because a certain Bin-sumya whom the Pharaoh had sent against him had really “given a city and property in it to my father, saying that if the king sends for my wife I shall withhold her, and if the king sends for myself I shall give him instead a bar of copper in a large bowl and take the oath of allegiance.”  A second letter is still more uncompromising.  In this he complains that the Egyptian troops have ill-treated his people, and that the officer who is with him has slandered him before the king; he further declares that two of his towns have been taken from him, but that he will defend to the last whatever still remains of his patrimony.

Malchiel, the colleague of Labai in his attack upon Gezer, as afterwards upon Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, does not appear to have been of Beduin origin.  But as long as the Beduin chief could be of use to him he was very willing to avail himself of his assistance, and it was always easy to drop the alliance as soon as it became embarrassing.  Malchiel was the son-in-law of Tagi of Gath, and the colleague of Su-yardata, one of the few Canaanite governors whom the Egyptian government seems to have been able to trust.  Both Su-yardata and Malchiel held commands in Southern Palestine, and we hear a good deal about them from Ebed-Tob.  “The two sons of Malchiel” are also mentioned in a letter from a lady who bears a Babylonian name, and who refers to them in connection with an attempt to detach the cities of Ajalon and Zorah (Joshua xv. 33) from their allegiance to Egypt.  The female correspondents of the Pharaoh are among the most curious and interesting features of the state of society depicted in the Tel el-Amarna tablets; they entered keenly into the politics of the day, and kept the Egyptian king fully informed of all that was going on.