In his book What Price Israel, Jewish author Alfred M. Lilienthal testified that the term "Jew" is not automatically synonymous with the term "Israelite." His statements leave no doubt that there is a general misunderstanding and misapplication of the word "Jew(s)": The Jewish racial myth flows from the fact that the words Hebrew, Israelite, Jew, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been used synonymously to suggest a historic continuity. But this is a misuse. These words refer to different periods in history. Hebrew is a term correctly applied to the period from the beginning of Biblical history to the settling in Canaan.
Israelite refers correctly to the members of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Yehudi or Jew is used in the Old Testament to designate members of the tribe of Judah, descendants of the fourth son of Jacob, as well as to denote citizens of the Kingdom of Judah, particularly at the time of Jeremiah and under the Persian occupation. Centuries later, the same word came to be applied to anyone, no matter of what origin, whose religion was Judaism.
In The History of Ancient Israel, Michael Grant echoes Lilienthal by pointing out that the terms "Jew," "Hebrew" and "Israelite" are not always interchangeable:
‘Jew,' ‘Hebrew,' ‘Israelite' are sometimes regarded as interchangeable, but that is not always strictly the case. The word ‘Jew' (originally defining the descendants of Jacob's son Judah) carries a wide range of implications - religious, cultural, ethnic, biological - which mean that the term can hardly be employed without misleading effect before the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, or even, some would say, before the return of the exiles [from Babylon].... The designations ‘Israelites' or ‘people of Israel' are available for the earlier periods.... But once we havereached the epoch when the country has become dividedbetween the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ‘Israelites' and‘people of Israel' will evidently have to be abandoned as ageneric term.
Expand
