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HURRIANS*
People (also called Mitannians) who spoke a language different from Semitic and Indo-European and yet played a significant cultural role in the Near East during the second millennium BC, particularly in transmitting the culture of Sumer and Babylon to western Asia and to the Hittites. That the Hurrians were in an area can be inferred from the presence of Hurrian texts, the presence of people with Hurrian names (or Indo-Iranian as explained below), and from statements in other ancient literature, including the OT.
At the beginning of the second millennium, and even somewhat before, Hurrians are found in the northernmost parts of Mesopotamia, having come there presumably from still farther north. They are found in the 18th century BC at Mari and Alalakh, and in the 15th and 14th centuries BC at Nuzi, Ugarit, Alalakh, a few cities in Palestine, and especially in their political center of Mitanni. During this latter period, their rulers were actually an aristocracy of Indo-Iranian extraction, who often retained their Indo-Iranian names, but who in other respects had adopted Hurrian language, religion, and general culture, and so were for all practical purposes Hurrians.
The main question concerning Hurrian presence is the extent to which they were influential in Palestine, and here the evidence is not clear. The Amarna letters, written by the Mitannian/Hurrian kings and by petty kings of Palestine to the Egyptian pharaohs during the 14th century BC, refer to a few Palestinian kings with Hurrian (some Indo-Iranian) names such as Abdikhepa of Jerusalem. However, the letters, written in Akkadian by the scribes of these Palestinian kings, betray a local Canaanite rather than Hurrian speech. Interestingly, the Egyptians referred to Palestine as the land of the Hurrians, and indeed one pharaoh claimed to have captured 36,000 Hurrians there, but this could mean inhabitants of Palestine rather than ethnic Hurrians. In view of the evidence of the Amarna letters, it is likely that Palestine was only nominally Hurrian.