Kamal Salibi wrote three books advocating the controversial "Israel in Arabia" theory. In this view, the place names of the Hebrew Bible actually allude to places in southwest Arabia. As the Arabian Hebrews migrated and many resettled in Palestine where they established the Hasmonean kingdom under Simon Maccabaeus in the second century B.C.. According to the theory, the place names in the Bible were gradually reinterpreted to refer to places in this new region. In this new Israel, the Jewish peoples switched from Hebrew to Aramaic. It was this switch in language that created the confusions which led to the distortion of the immigrants' stories. He also argued that 'Lebanon' itself in high antiquity was a place in the Southern Arabian peninsula.