Hivites

A group of people mentioned about two dozen times in the OT, and listed as one of the seven nations occupying Canaan—"the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you"—that God promised to give Abraham and his descendents, and whom Israel was commanded to drive out and destroy.

The so-called Table of Nations in Gen 10 records the Hivites as descended from Canaan, the son of Ham, son of Noah. Within Canaan itself they seemed to have occupied the land north of what would latter become Jerusalem and stretching all the way to Hermon (Jos 11:3; Judg 3:3). The first reference to a specific Hivite comes in the life of Jacob, when his only daughter, Dinah, was raped by Shechem, the son of Hamor, a Hivite (Gen 34:1). The next encounter came when a group of Hivites from Gibeon tricked Israel into making a covenant of peace with them (Jos 9:7). Apart from these two incidences, most of the references to these people have to do with their inclusion in the list of devoted peoples and how Israel failed to annihilate them. The last we hear of them is Solomon's subjection of the remaining Hivites into slavery (1 Ki 9:15; 2 Chr 8:7).

Our understanding of the Hivites is complicated slightly by the fact that the Hebrew word Hivite is easily confused with Horite, especially in their writing. The letter waw 'v' in Hivite and resh 'r' in Horite differs, quite literally, by a mere fraction of an inch of the stroke (Hivite on left, Horite on right):

This complication, it should be stressed, has not theological significance of any kind.