HORITE
(Horʹite).
A people inhabiting the mountains of Seir in patriarchal times. They are called in the Bible “the sons of Seir the Horite.” (Ge 36:20, 21, 29, 30) The Edomites “proceeded to dispossess them and to annihilate them from before them and to dwell in their place.”—De 2:12, 22.
At Genesis 36:2, in the Masoretic text, the grandfather of one of Esau’s wives is called “Zibeon the Hivite.” At verses 20 and 24, however, he is shown to be a descendant of Seir the Horite. “Horite” may mean merely “cave dweller,” from Hebrew chor (“hole”). This would make Zibeon a Hivite who was a cave dweller.
At Joshua 9:7 the Greek Septuagint calls the Gibeonites “Chorrean” (Horites) instead of “Hivites,” but this apparently is an error, in view of the fact that the Gibeonites belonged to one of the seven Canaanite nations devoted to destruction (the Horites did not). The Masoretic text has “Hivites.”—Jos 9:22-27; De 7:1, 2.
Hurrians. Many modern scholars now believe that the Horites are actually a people whom they call Hurrians. This conclusion is based primarily on linguistic similarities, particularly similarities in proper names in ancient tablets that were discovered in recent times over a wide area reaching from modern Turkey into Syria and Palestine. So they hold that the “Hurrians” came to be called Horites. But note E. A. Speiser’s comments in The World History of the Jewish People (1964, Vol. 1, p. 159). He first advances this argument:
“Biblical Jebusites, too, proved to be Hurrians in disguise. They were of foreign stock (Jud. 19:12), a description borne out by the Jebusite personal name Awarnah (II Sam. 24:16, Kethib). A 14th century ruler of Jerusalem, or Jebus, bore a name containing the attested Hurrian element Hepa. Thus Jebusites and Hivites alike—two of the featured pre-Israelite nations—were merely subdivisions of the wide-spread Hurrian group.” But then he adds:
“The above conclusion, however, must now be modified in one significant respect. The required change detracts nothing from the position of the local Hurrians in early Biblical times; but it does affect the automatic identification of Hurrians with Horites. . . . There is no archaeological evidence whatever for a Hurrian settlement in Edom or Transjordan. It follows, therefore, that the Biblical term Hori—much in the same manner as Cush—must have been used at one time in two distinct and unrelated meanings.”
Therefore, though the scholars wish to use a name not found in the Bible to apply to a widespread people who, they say, include the Horites, Hivites, and Jebusites, they admit that, for example, there is no evidence of Hurrian population in Edom, where Biblical Horites lived. The Bible, then, in calling the pre-Edomite inhabitants of Seir “Horites” evidently restricts the name to that group in Seir.