Israelites, Hebrew and Jews

[Don9of11]

Using 2 Cor 11:22 as reference, the understanding I have is that all three Israelite, Hebrew and Jews are one in the same persons/nation is this correct? What is the relationship between the 3?

For example Moses was Hebrew and a Israelite was he also a Jew? Jesus was a Jew, but would he also be considered an Israelite and Hebrew?

 

[NotWorthy]

Using 2 Cor 11:22 as reference, the understanding I have is that all three Israelite, Hebrew and Jews are one in the same persons/nation is this correct? What is the relationship between the 3?

For example Moses was Hebrew and a Israelite was he also a Jew? Jesus was a Jew, but would he also be considered an Israelite and Hebrew?

Hebrews were a tribe. Whereas Israel was a nation. Notice, in Exodus, that Pharaoh calls them Hebrews, until after the last plague, Pharaoh finally tells Moses to take all the Israelites with them because he finally accepts that the Hebrews form the nation of Israel.

There were only Israelites until the rebellion after the death of King Solomon when the 10 northern tribes broke away from the United Kingdom. It’s a little confusing, because the United 12 tribes were called “Israel” prior to the rebellion. But aftwards, the 2 tribes that remained loyal to the Covenant of Moses were called Jews. Jews were the remnants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The other ten tribes who broke away from the kingdom of Israel were still called “Israel”. They could be called Israelites, but definitely not Jews.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

I think Jew derives from Judah. So strictly speaking only the tribe of Judah are Jews. However, the term usually includes all who remained loyal to the descendant of David, which includes all Hebrews today.

 

[NotWorthy]

I think Jew derives from Judah. So strictly speaking only the tribe of Judah are Jews. However, the term usually includes all who remained loyal to the descendant of David, which includes all Hebrews today.

The tribes of Benjamin and Judah comprised the “Jews” of Jesus’ time. St. Paul, for instance, was a member of the tribe of Benjamin in addition to being a Jew.

 

[patrick457]

The way I look at it:

According to Genesis, “Hebrew” properly refers to any descendant of Noah’s son Shem’s great-grandson, Eber; so as per Genesis there are actually many ‘Hebrew’ nations, all of them descendants of Eber and his offspring, the later Israelites (descending from “Abraham the Hebrew”; Genesis 14:1) only being one of them. Thus, one could also consider the Ishmaelites, Edomites, Ammonites, Midianites, Qahtanite, and Moabites as being ‘Hebrews’ in a sense because they all share the same distant ancestor.

“Israelite” (or ben Yisrael, ‘son of Israel’) refers to a descendant of Jacob/Israel, the ones divided into twelve ‘tribes’, each descended from one of twelve sons or grandsons of Jacob.

Originally, “Judahite”, “Judean” or “Jew” just referred to someone from the tribe of Judah. With the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of Judah in the south (comprising of the “rods”/tribes of Benjamin and Judah) became the sole Jewish state and the term Yehudi was therefore applied to all Israelites. When the word makes its first appearance in writing (in the book of Esther) the word’s meaning has already expanded to include converts to the Jewish religion as well as descendants of Israelites.

Of course, around the NT period you are still bound to have some confusion: in 6 AD the client Kingdom of Judea (formerly ruled by the Hasmoneans and the Herodian dynasty) became part of a larger Roman province called Iudaea, formed by combining Judea proper with Samaria and Idumea. Iudaea in turn was a sub-province of Syria. The province did not include the provinces of Galilee, Gaulanitis, nor Peraea or the Decapolis. Thus, “Judean” would also refer at this time period to someone who is from said region, just as “Galilean” denotes someone who is from the province of Galilee.

Confused by all this? I am too.

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7106/firstcenturypalestineu.gif

 

[BerhaneSelassie]

Moses was the son of Amram, and he was a Levite, not a descendant of Judah.
Yes. Hebrews are descendants of Eber, even Abraham, and I believe Joseph too, was called a “Hebrew”. In Italian the origin of the word Hebrew is more clear as Hebrews are called “Eberi”

 

[Joe_Kelley]

Slight thread drift -

Looks like the British courts are trying to define Who Is a Jew?

The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself. Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide? . . .

 

[adriancombe]

Using 2 Cor 11:22 as reference, the understanding I have is that all three Israelite, Hebrew and Jews are one in the same persons/nation is this correct? What is the relationship between the 3?

For example Moses was Hebrew and a Israelite was he also a Jew? Jesus was a Jew, but would he also be considered an Israelite and Hebrew?

The way Scott Hahn explained it in class was:

Semites = descendants of Shem
Hebrews = descendants of Eber
Jews = descendants of Judah
Israelites = descendants of Jacob (Israel)

 

[NotWorthy]

The way Scott Hahn explained it in class was:

Semites = descendants of Shem
Hebrews = descendants of Eber
Jews = descendants of Judah
Israelites = descendants of Jacob (Israel)

In New Testament times, Jews = descendants of Judah and Benjamin. Paul was a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin. You may want to throw a Levite in there as well.

 

[patrick457]

In New Testament times, Jews = descendants of Judah and Benjamin. Paul was a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin. You may want to throw a Levite in there as well.

Correct. To add a bit to the discussion:

It would seem that Jews in Palestine preferred to keep the designation ‘Israel’ (based on literary evidence) when describing themselves as a people and only used Yehudi/Ioudaios rarely; ‘Judean’/‘Jew’ used to identify either people associated with the region of Judea in a broad sense, encompassing adjacent regions such as Galilee, or someone from the tribe of Judah-Benjamin (which comprised the majority of ‘Israelites’ of the period). ‘Judeans’ was primarily an outsiders’ perspective on identifying what insiders would call ‘Israelites’. In the Diaspora meanwhile, the term ‘Judean’ was preferred over ‘Israelite’, which occurs as an identification of a specific group. This is probably why the Jewish leaders refer to Jesus as “King of Israel”, in contrast to the Romans’ “King of the Judeans/Jews”, in the passion narrative (Mark 15:32).

Rather than repeat everything that other people had put more eloquently, I’ll just link to one article: philipharland.com/Blog/category/early-judaism-and-the-diaspora/judaism-in-the-homeland/

 

[patrick457]

Slight thread drift -

Looks like the British courts are trying to define Who Is a Jew?

Ah, the problem which plagued many a court since recent times. The question itself has got its own Wikipedia article!

 

[Don9of11]

Thanks everyone. As a follow up to my question. At some point in biblical history, NT for example, we don’t read about Isralites or Hebrews as much as in the OT. Was this a conscious decision on the part of the NT authors? Even today there is no Israelite nation or Hebrew people. Have they disappeared?

 

[patrick457]

Thanks everyone. As a follow up to my question. At some point in biblical history, NT for example, we don’t read about Isralites or Hebrews as much as in the OT. Was this a conscious decision on the part of the NT authors? Even today there is no Israelite nation or Hebrew people. Have they disappeared?

For one, many of the NT books were written for gentile audiences. As mentioned before, ‘Judean’ or ‘Jew’ is the more common term for Israelites in foreign parlance, so it would be natural that the authors would use the more familiar term in referring to the descendants of Jacob. More confusingly, the NT writers also use the other meaning of “Jew” to refer to someone belonging to the tribe of Judah-Benjamin or to someone who hails from the province of Iudaea and surrounding areas - take for example, John’s numerous references to “the Judeans/Jews” (which were often unfortunately used as support for anti-Semitism!) in his gospel, which probably should be understood in the latter sense: the people of Iudaea region, more specifically Jerusalem.

Now, to touch Israelites (i.e. people who physically descended from people from the twelve tribes of Israel), which we’ll consider here for the moment apart from Israelis, i.e. citizens of the modern state of Israel. I think there are still such people existing right now (after all, there are still descendants of Aaron alive today, a belief corroborated by DNA tests), as for the numbers however, I do not know.

However, one needs to understand that Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation. Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos are equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia - so it would be quite difficult to determine whether a person is a ‘pure’ Israelite in the physical sense nowadays.