style, and had taken every opportunity of pillaging central and Southern
Palestine. As we shall see, Labai and his ally, Malchiel, were among the
chief adversaries of Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem.

On one occasion, however, Labai was actually made prisoner by one of the
Egyptian officers. There is a letter from Biridî stating that Megiddo
was threatened by Labai, and that although the garrison had been
strengthened by the arrival of some Egyptian troops, it was impossible
to venture outside the gates of the town for fear of the enemy, and that
unless two more regiments were sent the city itself was likely to fall.
Whether the additional forces were sent or not we do not know. Labai,
however, had to fly for his life along with his confederate Yasdata, who
was the governor of some city near Megiddo, as we learn from a letter of
his in which he speaks of being with Biridî. Of Yasdata we hear nothing
further, but Labai was captured in Megiddo by Zurata, the prefect of
Acre, who, under the pretext that he was going to send his prisoner in a
ship to Egypt, took him first to the town of Khinatuna ('En'athôn), and
then to his own house, where he was induced by a bribe to set him free
along with his companion, Hadad-mekhir (who, by the way, has bequeathed
to us two letters).

It was probably after this that Labai wrote to the Pharaoh to exculpate
himself, though his language, in spite of its conventional
submissiveness, could not have been very acceptable at the Egyptian
court. In one of his letters he excuses himself partly on the ground
that even "the food of his stomach" had been taken from him, partly that
he had attacked and entered Gezer only in order to recover the property
of himself and his friend Malchiel, partly because a certain Bin-sumya
whom the Pharaoh had sent against him had really "given a city and
property in it to my father, saying that if the king sends for my wife I