Genesis 14:6 names them as the original inhabitants of Mount Se'ir, defeated in the War of the Kings; Se'ir later became Edom. Amongst the European historians of the ancient world - other than the Biblical - a people named as the Hurrians inhabited Kena'an; it is highly probable that "Hurrians" is a pronunciation of Chorim.
Genesis 36:20 ff lists the family of Se'ir the Chori.
Deuteronomy 2:12/22 tells how the Chori were defeated by Esav (Esau) and became Edom.
Genesis 36:2 tells how Esav married Ahali-Vamah, daughter of Anah, son of Tsiv'on the Chorite, or possibly Chivite; the inference of the text is that Chivite may be a synonym for Chorite, as elsewhere it appears to be a synonym for Beney Chet (Hittite). This is probably a generalisation, in the way that we speak of the British without necessarily distinguishing Angles from Saxons, Scots from Welsh, Cornish from Cumbrians, etc.
Numbers 13:5 - one of Yehoshu'a's spies was Shaphat ben Chori from the tribe of Shim'on. Is it not odd that the name of one ethnic group should become a patronymic in another ethnic group? Perhaps his mother married out!
The root means "troglodyte" or "cave-dweller", which suggests they were another of the aboriginal tribes of the region, presumably, from the other references, of the mountain region of Se'ir/Edom.
However the root also gives:
1) Chori = "chavar" = "to whiten"; used for bleach, and thus linen-workers are Chorim (see notes to CHIRAH of the Beney Adul-Am).
2) because white is a good colour it gives the idea of nobility - which may be a better explanation of Shaphat's father than my bracketed ironic suggestion, above.
Chur (חור) as a name occurs in Numbers 31:8 and Joshua 13:21 as a Midyanite king; and in Exodus 17:10 and 24:14 as the husband of Mir-Yam (Miriam), Mosheh's sister (I will return to this shortly)
And then there is Ben Chor, or Ben Hur as he was made famous by Lew Wallace's novel and Charlton Heston's portrayal in the film of the book of the movie of the novel of the crossword puzzle of the video game of the tale. There are in fact several Biblical men named Ben Chor, besides the one who may or may not have witnessed the Crucifixion.
1 Kings 4:8 names him as one of the twelve officers appointed by Shelomoh (Solomon) "who provided victuals for the king and his household: each man had to make provision for a month in the year." This Ben Chor came from the hill-country of Ephrayim.
Numbers 31:8 has a king of the Beney Midyan named Chur, who was killed, along with four other Beney Midyan kings (it is unclear how one country can have five kings; presumably the word MELECH is being used here to mean "tribal sheikhs"), by a Bene Yisra-El raiding party sent by Mosheh under the command of Pinchas ben El-Azar, Aharon's grandson. Bil'am (Baalam) ben Be'or, the pseudo-Prophet who was sent to curse Yisra-El but ended by blessing it, was also killed in the raid (Joshua 13:21).
Nehemiah 3:9 has Repha-Yah ben Chur, (רְפָיָה בֶן חוּר), the ruler of half the district of Yeru-Shala'im, and one of the much-approved by the Prophet, the rich and powerful who got their hands dirty by personally joining Nechem-Yah's (Nehemiah's) team of masons for the restoration of the city walls.
And then there is Chor, who is usually rendered as Chur, in English and in Yehudit, the latter by the use of the dageesh rather than the cholem vav (which is to say, a dot inside the letter - חוּר - rather than on top of it; though generally the Yehudit text for Chor leaves out the Vav altogether and short-cuts by placing the dot above the Chet - חֹרִי - click here for the grammar of this); though without pointing, and etymologically, the two names are the same; this Chur - who may or may not be the same one that Mir-Yam married - became famous for holding up Mosheh's left arm during the battle of Rephidim against the Beney Amalek, while Aharon held up his right arm (Exodus 17). Why he got chosen is not clear (though it seems likely that his being Mosheh's brother-in-law would have been a factor, if it is the same Chur), but he reappears in a role of significance in Exodus 24, supporting Aharon in managing the camp while Mosheh went up into Mount Sinai, his the secular role as he is not included in the list of those summoned for costuming in Exodus 28, nor was he asked to help in the making of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32, nor admonished by either YHVH or Mosheh as having any responsibility for its making. He is, however, named as the grandfather of Betsal-El (Bezaleel) in Exodus 31:2, the Frank Lloyd Wright of the Beney Yisra-El, the man tasked with constructing the entire holy Ark and Tabernacle all their contents.
He is also named in 1 Chronicles 2:50 as the father of Kalev (Caleb), though it could be the son of Kalev - the text is decidedly ambiguous and the lack of punctuation decidedly unhelpful. The text is problematic anyway, because the famous Kalev of the period that seems to be under investigation in this chapter was a son of Yephunneh; so this has to be a different Kalev, or an error, or not a list of people but of places.
The authors of the Talmud were very aware that there was a problem, and tackled it with much earnestness, probably because Kalev is a very important figure in relation to the city of Chevron, because really his descendants and not King David should have been king there, which is not an insignificant matter inside Judaism (see under Kalev for the fuller details of this).
Sanhedrin 69b and Sotah 11b retain this belief, and even extend the tradition, making Chur not the husband but a son of Mosheh's sister Mir-Yam, a consequence of Mir-Yam taking Kalev for a husband (or the other way around).
However, 1 Chronicles 2:19 names Kalev's second wife as Ephrat (his first was Azuvah - עֲזוּבָה - meaning "the abandoned one", by which name there must hang a tale, though sadly the text does not tell it), and more importantly (see my notes on Ephratah) it names this man as Kalev ben Chetsron, and not Kalev ben Yephuneh at all, so it is a different man, so the Davidic problem is irrelevant, so the Talmudists need to cross-check their sources more carefully and not go wandering off down the wrong cul-de-sac!
But wander off down it they nonetheless do, convinced that this is Kalev ben Yephuneh, and they explain it by cheating - no of course not god forbid - by saying that Ephrat was the name that Mir-Yam used on occasions when... well, when it was convenient for Rabbis spouting nonsense to have her do so.
There is also a Talmudic tradition that Chur was murdered to stop him stopping Aharon from making the Golden Calf, but then there is also a Talmudic tradition of uncles sitting shiva for their nephews, and there is no mention of Mosheh doing this in the Exodus story either.
Chor (חור) is used for "a hole in the ground", particularly "a viper's hole" and any subterranean prison. Was Chor then once a god too, of the underworld, and thus we have found the eponymous god-name of the tribe that all tribes have? (cf Isaiah 42:22 and Nachum 2:13). And if so, can we then regard the Chorim and Chivim as sibling-tribes, the one worshippers of the underworld god, the other of the mother-goddess, as Egyptians were divided between Set and Eshet (Isis)? And then, if so, which were the tribes that made up the Hor (Horus) and the Osher (Osiris) parts? In fact, these we have already seen elsewhere…
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