001_naman_co_481-497 13/02/15 11:20 Pagina 493 JEBUSITES AND JABESHITES IN THE SAUL AND DAVID STORY-CYCLES 493 tribes were willing to come to its aid. No reasonable explanation has been offered so far for Saul’s campaign to the city of Jabesh and for the willingness of the Jabeshites to risk their lives and carry the bodies of the king and his sons from Beth-shean to Jabesh (1 Sam 31,12-13). I put forward the hypotheses that (a) the Jebusites and Jabeshites were two segments of a pastoral clan that settled in the early Iron Age in the two remote regions; and (b) that the Je- busites were the southernmost of the clans that formed the gradu- ally growing tribe of Benjamin. The latter hypothesis contrasts the recently suggested theory that the tribe of Benjamin settled as an organized tribal unit and developed as a separate entity, independent of the other highland clans and tribes 54. Among the Amorite personal names attested in cuneiform tablets of the early second millennium BCE, several names are de- rived from the verb YBŚ, “to be dry”. Some of the names are writ- ten with /s/ (Yabusum, Yabasi-Dagan) and others with /š/ (Yabišum, Yabušum, Mebišum). The alternative rendering of the third sibilant radical clearly reflect the proto-Semitic /ś/ 55. Scholars have further noted the resemblance of the name Jebusite to the clan name Yabisa/Yabasa/Yabusu in the Mari documents 56. In this context, it is worth noting that already Forrer suggested that “the Amorite father was the Amorite tribe Jebus, which we know from very early times, since its name occurs as that of the city of Jabušum on the north-west frontier of Babylonia, mentioned by Šamšu-ilu-a […]. It is impossible to determine whether Jabušum on the Euphrates and Jebus (Jerusalem) were founded by parts of the same Amorite tribe, or whether the Jabuše-Amorites were driven out from Mesopotamia and settled in Jerusalem or the reverse” 57. 54 See D. FLEMING, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible. History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition (Cambridge 2012) 144-161. 55 GELB, Computer-Aided Analysis, 21, 600, Nos 3159-3160, 3163-3165; cf. H.B. HUFFMON, Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts. A Structural and Lexical Study (Baltimore, MD 1965) 177; ABRAHAMI, “Yabisa”. 56 HUFFMON, Amorite Personal Names, 177; H.Y. PRIEBATSCH, “Jerusalem und die Brunnenstrasse Merneptahs”, ZDPV 91 (1975) 19; ID., “Die amori- tische Sprache Palästinas in ihrem Beziehungen zu Mari und Syrien”, UF 9 (1977) 252, 254. 57 E. FORRER, “The Hittites in Palestine, I”, PEFQst 68 (1936) 199.