possessed in Portugal about fort}' commanderies, and since 1550 the grand mastership of the order has been in the crown. — Helyot, Ordres Reliy. i, 350; Landon, Eccl. Diet, i, 674.
A'vite (Heb. Avvi', only in the plur. D^jlS, gen- tile from Ava), the name of two tribes of people.
1. (Sept. Eimloi, Auth. Vers. "Avims," in Deut. ; Eocrioc, "Avites"' in Josh.) A people who originally
occupied the southernmost portion of that territory in Avignon {Avenio), an episcopal see of France, on ! Palestine along the Mediterranean coast which the the Rhone, capital ofthe department of Vaucluse, 20 ] Caphtorim or Philistines afterward possessed (Deut. miles N.E. of Nismes. In 1348 it passed into the pos- j ii, 23). They are usually considered a branch of the session of Pop? Clement VI and his successors, and j Hivites, a people descended from Canaan (Gen. x, 17). was the see ofthe pontiffs from Clement X to Gregory ; See IIivite. As the territory of the Avites is men- XI, i. e. for sixty years. Baluze's Vies des Rapes [ tioned in Josh, xiii, 3, in addition to the five Philis- d'A vignon (1G93, 2 vols. 4to) is an admirable refutation i tine states, it would appear that it was not included in of the ultramontane pretensions. It maintains that '' theirs, and that the expulsion of the Avites was by a the holy see is not necessarily fixed at Rome. By the Philistine invasion prior to that by which the five Concordat of 1801 Avignon ceased to be a metropolis, principalities were founded. Their territory began
but by that of 1821 it was re-established. See Pa- pacy
Several councils were held in Avignon. The most important were . 1, in 1209, in which 29 canons were adopted, some concerning discipline, and the others against heretics ; the inhabitants of Toulouse were ex- communicated for not having expulsed the Albigenses ; 2, in 1327, against the antipope Pierre de. Corbiere. — Landon, Manual of Councils, Smith, Tables of Church Hist. I
at Gaza, and extended southward to "the river of Egypt" (Deut. ii, 23), forming what was the Philistine kingdom of Gerar in the time of Abraham, when we do not hear of any other Philistine states. There were then Avites, or Hivites, at Shechem (Gen. xxxiv, 2), and wc afterward find them also at Gibeon (Josh. ix, 7), and beyond the Jordan, at the foot of Mount Hermon (Josh, xi, 3) ; but we have no means of know- ing whether these were original settlements of the Avites, or were formed out of the fragments of the
AVITII
570
AWAKENING
nation which the Philistines expelled from southern Palestine. See Gerak; Philistine. According to Ewald (Geschkhte, i, 310) and Bertheau, the Avvim ■were the aborigines of Palestine Proper. They may have been so, but there is nothing to prove it, while the mode of their dwellings points rather to a no- madic origin. Thus they may have made their way northward from the Desert (Stanley, Sinai and Pal. App. § 83). In Dent. ii. 23, we see them "dwelling in 'the' villages" (or nomade encampments — Ckat- -_, rim) in the south part of the " plain," or great west- ern lowland, "as far as Gaza." In these rich posses- sions they were attacked by the invading Philistines, "the Caphtorim which came forth out of Caphtor," and who, after '-destroying" them and "dwelling in their stead," appear to have pushed them farther north. This must be inferred from the terms of the passage in Josh. xiii. 2, 3, the enumeration of the rest of the land still remaining to be conquered. (The punctuation of this passage in our Bibles is not in ac- cordance with the Hebrew text, which has a full stop at Geshuri [vcr. 2], thus : " This is the land that yet remaineth, all the herders of the Philistines and all the
Geshurite. From Sihor even to the border of
Ekron northward, is counted to the Canaanite," etc.) Beginning from" Sihor, which is before Egypt," prob- ably the Wady el-Arish, the list proceeds northward along the lowland plains of the sea-coast, through the five lordships of the Philistines- — all apparently taken in their order from south to north — till we reach the Avvim, as if they had been driven up out of the more southerly position which they occupied at the date of the earlier record into the plains of Sharon. It is per- haps worth notice, where every syllable has some sig- nificance, that while "the Gazathite the Ekron-
ite," are all in the singular, "the Avvim" is plural. So with the other aboriginal names. Nothing more is told us of this ancient people, whose very name is said to signify " ruin." Possibly a trace of their existence is to be found in the town " Avim" (accurately, as in the other cases, "the Avvim"), which occurs among the cities of Benjamin (Josh, xviii, 23), and which may have preserved the memory of some family of the extinct people driven up out of their fertile plains to take refuge in the wild hills of Bethel ; just as in the " Zemaraim" of the preceding verse we have probably a reminiscence of the otherwise forgotten Zemarites. But, on the other hand, it is possible that the word in this place is but a variation or corruption of the name ofAi. SeeAviM. The inhabitants of the north-cen- tral districts of Palestine (Galila?ans) were in later times distinguished by a habit of confounding the gut- turals, as, for instance. " with H (see Lightfoot, Chor. Cent. ch. 87 . P.uxtorf, Lex. Talm. col. 134). It is pos- sible that "^It, Hivite, is a variation, arising from this cause, of ""'. Avite, and that this people were known to the Israelites at the. date of the conquest by the name of Ilivitcs. At any rate, it is a curious fact that both the Sept. and Vulg. identified the two names, and also that the town of ha-Avvim was in the actual dis- trict of the Hivites, in the immediate neighborhood of Gibeon, Chephirah, and their other chief cities (Josh, ix, 7, 17. compared with xviii, 22-27). The name of the Av\ im lias been derived from Avva (Ava), or Iv- vah ( I '.ali), as if they had migrated thence into Pales- tine; but there is no argument for this beyond the mere similarity of the names. See Ava.