According to Judges 1: 16, Kenites made their way up from the Arava to Arad. This has led some to identify the village preceding the fortress as a Kenite establishment. Below the floor of the Judean temple, archaeologist Y. Aharoni found what he and others interpreted as an altar and, south of it, a circular high place. B. Mazar then suggested that this Kenite sanctuary may have established the holiness of the site for the Judeans. (The Kenites were a Midianite clan, and Moses had ties to the Midianites.) On re-evaluating the finds, however, Z. Herzog suggests that theymay have been ordinary domestic installations: a wall and a silo. Arad's position on Judah's natural border, at the gateway to the desert, was sufficient to motivate the building of a temple: that God might be here to protect the kingdom.
from The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
ke'-nits (ha-qeni, haqeni; in Numbers 24:22 and Judges 4:11, qayin; of hoi Kenaioi, hoi Kinaioi):A tribe of nomads named in association with various other peoples. ...Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, is called "the priest of Midian" in Exodus 3:1; 18:1; but in Judges 1:16 he is described as a Kenite, showing a close relation between the Kenites and Midian. At the time of Sisera's overthrow, Heber, a Kenite, at "peace" with Jabin, king of Hazor, pitched his tent far North of his ancestral seats (Judges 4:17). There were Kenites dwelling among the Amalekites in the time of Saul (1 Samuel 15:6). They were spared because they had "showed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt." David, in his answer to Achish, links the Kenites with the inhabitants of the South of Judah (1 Samuel 27:10).
In Josephus they appear as Kenetides, and in Ant, IV, vii, 3 he calls them "the race of the Shechemites."
W. Ewing