462 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



Age. The I^enites, who were native to the country, and whose very 

 name reveals that they were smiths, were the ones who probably 

 introduced the Israelites, whose leader Moses had apparently taken 

 a Kenite wife and who retained ever afterward the closest relation- 

 ship with them, and the Edomites, to whom they were related through 

 the Kenizzites, to the arts of mining and metallurgy. Was it from 

 the Kenites that Moses learned how to make a copper serpent? (Gen- 

 esis 21:9.) Saul was mindful of the close connection between the 

 Israelites and the Kenites, and spared them in his battles with the 

 Amalekites. 



That the Kenites were at home in Edom and in the Wadi 'Arabah 

 is indicated by Balaam's punning proverb with regard to them in 

 Numbers 24 : 21 : "Everlasting is thy habitation, and set in the Rock 

 (Sela) is thy Nest (Qen)." The pun on Qen and t>enite (Qenite) is 

 obvious, and Sela is to be identified with Umm el-Biyarah in Petra.^* 

 The Bible tells that Tubal-Cain (a Kenite) was the first forger of cop- 

 per and iron instruments (Genesis 4 : 22) . It is stated in I Chronicles 

 4 : 12-14 that the Kenizzites lived in the Valley of Smiths. We believe 

 that this means the Wadi 'Arabah, with its many copper and iron min- 

 ing and smelting sites, and that the City of Copper mentioned in con- 

 nection with the Valley of Smiths is to be identified with the large 

 Iron Age mining and smelting site of Khirbet Nahas (the Copper 

 Ruin), located near the north end of the Wadi 'Arabah.^^ Confirmed 

 wanderers, the Kenites seem to have retained throughout their history 

 a Bedouin form of life, like the related Rechabites and Jerahmeelites. 

 The presence of individual Kenites in Judah and Israel, pictured as 

 wandering about from place to place, can be understood when it is 

 realized that they were itinerant smiths. 



The smelter-refinery was literally the center of the first Ezion- 

 geber, or Ezion-geber I, as we shall call it. Some distance removed 

 from it, and around it, was built a square of foundry and factory 

 rooms. This industrial square was only one room thick. The rooms 

 were formed by thin partition walls, between the spaced, parallel 

 inner and outer walls. There seems to have been an entrance guarded 

 by a strong square tower on the southwest side. The plan of the 

 smelter, together with the industrial square, may be likened somewhat 

 to that of a strong stockade wall, with a row of houses one room 

 thick, built against the inside of the walls of the stockade square, 

 and with an isolated, commanding building in the center of the 

 square. There is, furthermore, some reason for believing that con- 

 siderably beyond the industrial square, whose outer wall is strength- 



" Glueck, Nelson, Explorations in Eastern Palestine. Ann. Amer. Schools Oriental Res., 

 vols. 18-19, p. 26, 1937-1939. 



« Glueclj, Nelson, The other side of the Jordan. P. 83. Amer. Schools Oriental Ees., New 

 Haven, 1940. 



