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.

The letters of Ebed-Tob are so important that it is as well to give them
in full. They all seem to have been written within a few months, or
perhaps even weeks, of one another, when the enemies of the governor of
Jerusalem were gathering around him, and no response came from Egypt to
his requests for help. The dotted lines mark the words and passages
which have been lost through the fracture of the clay tablets.

(I.) "To the king my lord [my] Sun-god, thus [speaks] Ebed-Tob thy
servant: at the feet of the king my lord seven times seven I prostrate
myself. Behold, the king has established his name at the rising of the
sun and the setting of the sun. Slanders have been uttered against me.
Behold, I am not a governor, a vassal of the king my lord. Behold, I am
an ally of the king, and I have paid the tribute due to the king, even
I. Neither my fath