Horites

The Horites (Hebrew ḥōrîm, cave-dwellers) were an ancient people who inhabited the mountainous region of Seir (later Edom) before the descendants of Esau displaced them. Genesis 14:6 mentions them at Mount Seir in the account of the four kings' southern campaign, and Genesis 36:20–30 provides a substantial genealogy of Horite clans—Lotan, Shobal, Zibeon, Anah, Dishon, Ezer, and Dishan—whose chieftains Esau's descendants supplanted, just as Israel would displace the Canaanites west of the Jordan.

The identification of the biblical Horites with the Hurrians, an important non-Semitic people known from ancient Near Eastern texts (the Mitanni kingdom and Nuzi documents), was once widely accepted but has been questioned in recent scholarship. The Hurrians were a significant power in Mesopotamia and northern Syria during the second millennium BC, but their connection to the cave-dwelling Horites of Mount Seir is linguistically and geographically uncertain. The biblical Horites appear to be a Canaanite/Edomite group, while the Hurrian connection remains a hypothesis requiring caution. Deuteronomy 2:12 and 2:22 use the Horite displacement as a parallel to Israel's own coming displacement of Canaan.