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.

Before Babylonian culture had been brought to the West, Amalek already
existed. He was older than the oldest of the civilised kingdoms of the
earth. But civilisation had raised a barrier against him which he was
ever on the watch to break through. He never lost the opportunity of
raiding the inhabitants of the cultivated lands, and escaping again into
the desert with his booty before he could be overtaken and punished. The
desert between Palestine and Egypt was his chief camping-ground. He had
occupied the wadis of Mount Seir before the Edomites had entered them,
and a part of the later population of the country traced its descent
from a mixture of the Bedawi with the Edomite. The Egyptians had many
names for the Bedawin hordes. Sometimes they were the Herusha or "Lords
of the Sands," sometimes the Shasu or "Plunderers," sometimes again the
Su