The Hebrews were the fourth major Semitic people—after the Amorites, Canaanites and Aramaeans—to settle in Syria. In Amorite days the centre of gravity of Syrian affairs was in the north, in the Syrian saddle; in Canaanite times it shifted to the littoral; under the Aramaeans it lay in the interior; with the Hebrews it moved to the south, to Palestine. Hebrew entrance into Canaan, as the southern part of Syria was then called, supposedly came in three ill-defined movements. The first migration had its start in Mesopotamia and was roughly contemporaneous with the eighteenth-century movement which spread the Hyksos and Hurrians over the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The second was connected with the fourteenth-century Aramaeans. The third, about which much more is known, was that from Egypt through Sinai and Transjordan under Moses and Joshua in the late thirteenth century. Canaanites formed the bulk of the population when the pioneers from Mesopotamia, the Patriarchs, came. Amorites inhabited the highlands, which were not thickly occupied by a sedentary population, thus giving the newcomers an opportunity to settle. Smaller nationalities occupied out-of-the-way places. With all these the new settlers intermarried. The result was the Hebrew people, with a composite ethnic origin consisting of Semitic, Hurrian, Hittite and other elements.
Syria's power to absorb nomadic or quasi-nomadic intruders by encouraging them to become sedentary, and inducing them to relinquish their peculiar source of power—mobility—was once more illustrated in the case of the Hebrews. Coming as wanderers, adventurers, mercenaries, footloose soldiers, the future Hebrews gradually settled among the older and more civilized population, learned from them how to till the soil, build homes, practise the arts of peace and, above all, how to read and write. More than that, the Hebrews gave up their Aramaic dialect and adopted the Canaanite one. In brief, the early Hebrews became
