PART 1: WHEN DID THE HEBREWS BECOME JEWS?

 

Genesis | Joshua | 1 Chronicles | Ruth | Gospel of Matthew

WARNING: Lethal masturbation, murder, retroactive prophecy
CONTEXT: ~ 2000 BCE – 30 AD The patriarch of three religions wanders with his herds into Egypt and back to Canaan.

Jesus’s family tree is so important to Christians that the first gospel in the “New Testament” Gospel of Matthew opens with an eight hundred year genealogy starting with that patriarchal Iraqi fellow Abraham. The improbability of this genealogy notwithstanding (in direct contradiction of the family tree described in Luke), the early Church fathers’ true objective was to legitimize various sketchy prophecies.¹ However, there are numerous stops along this timeline that are enlightening, perplexing and more or less hilarious (depending on your sense of humor). Since you are reading FUN Bible Stories, we are committed to furnishing entertaining context you most likely haven’t encountered previously. This is not conspiracy theory. It’s all right there in the Bible if you choose to read it.

You do read it, don’t you?

Part 1: When did the Hebrews become Jews?

“Only Noah saw it coming,
Forty days and forty nights
Took his sons and daughters with him,
Yeah, they were the Israelites.”

These lyrics from “All You Zombies” – an otherwise awesome 1984 recording by the Hooters – are problematic. Simply put, Noah was neither an Israelite nor a Jew. Furthermore, we don’t have any idea what his ethnic or religious affiliation would have been even if he were not a mythical character. Since we don’t know where Noah lived, we don’t know how far the imaginary Ark floated before it ended up in Turkey or Armenia. We have no point of embarkation. We do know that all humans are necessarily descended from Noah, biblically speaking. So whatever ethnicity Noah was, so are you as well. Even if you’re Hindu or Confucist. 

It is stunning how many people get annoyed when informed that Noah was not Jewish, revealing just how poorly most people understand the biblical timeline.² According to the Bible’s internal timeline, if Noah was real he would have lived around 3,000 BCE. A merging of scriptural and historical analysis makes it clear there will not be any “Jews” for at least 2,000 years. 

In fact, it is relatively ambiguous as to when Jews became Jews. There is no question that the term is derived from Judah or Yehuda, an etymological descendant of the Tetragrammaton, which are four Hebrew letters representing the desert battle deity YHWH (generally called Yahweh, Yehuda or Jehovah). 

The Patriarchs Were Not Jewish

The most important biblical personage who was not Jewish is Abraham. As the first of the three or four biblical patriarchs, Abram/Abraham is popularly regarded as founding father of the Jewish people; he is also the patriarch of Islam and the forebear of Arabs. He is important to Christians in that this Jesus-based offshoot cult relies heavily on Hebrew scripture for both context and physical heft. The Bible would be embarrassingly thin without the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.

According to Genesis, not only was Abraham not Jewish, he was the opposite of Jewish: he was Iraqi or Chaldean; in other words, ethnically Arab. Descended from Noah’s son Shem, he was born and raised in Ur, a city in eastern Mesopotamia. You can’t get more Arabic than that. There is nothing in the actual Bible that indicates the patriarch of the Jewish people was anything other than Arab. Furthermore, his father was a manufacturer of pagan idols. 

As corroboration, consider this excerpt from Ezekiel 16.

“And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.” – Ezekiel 16:3 [KJV]

This is a curious statement from the Lord, which supports the prevailing opinion of scholars regarding the historical origins of the Israelite/Jews. The Bronze Age Israelites were Canaanites, who assimilated into the culture of the hill country around Jerusalem. There is no record outside of the Bible that supports the Exodus myth.

The whole family moves to Haran in Syria and Abraham embraces “the Lord” (in the form of YHWH’s predecessor, the Canaanite deity El). It is not clear why this happened. Although much is written about God choosing him because of his great faith, we don’t really know how he acquired this faith or whence the Lord appeared (absent a burning bush moment such as that experienced by Moses in Exodus 3). The first thing we know about their relationship is that the Lord told Abraham to move west. Following God’s instructions, Abraham travels to Canaan and settles there.

Abraham’s offspring:

For our immediate purposes, we will discuss only Abraham’s first two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. Both of these kids are 100% Arab on both sides. Isaac is Iraqi through his mother Sarah, while Ishmael is half Iraqi and half Egyptian through his mother Hagar the Slave. 

Continuing with the Abrahamic lineage, we follow the number one patriarch’s second son Isaac back to Syria to find a wife. He weds Rebekah, who is Syrian and therefore Arab. She bears him Jacob and Esau, who are therefore both 100% Arabic. We can move Esau off the board for the time being, noting only that scripture identifies him as the forebear of the Edomites, an Arabic people who figure into other Old Testament stories. Note also that Abraham has many other offspring through less important wives, all of whom also beget Arabic nations.³ Indeed, Mohammed, who lived in a polyglot society that included Jews and Christians, reached back millennia to rehabilitate Ishmael (see chart above) as the founder of the Arab peoples. 

Similarly, Isaac’s son Jacob is instructed to return to Syria to acquire a wife because his father doesn’t want him marrying the local Canaanite women, who are idolaters. The Syrians are also idolaters, so it is not clear why that doesn’t trouble Isaac: it’s another scriptural mystery.

It is not clear why Laban is Syrian and Jacob is not.

In the event, the two wives he does marry are both his first cousins, Leah and Rachel. His sketchy uncle is identified as Laban the Syrian, and yet it is not clear why Laban is Syrian and Jacob is not.

Of the 12 (13) tribes⁴, six are descended from Leah and two are descended from Rachel, so members of these eight groups are all Syrian/Iraqi. The sons are the offspring of two slave concubines, who we must assume are also ethnically Syrian. ⁵

At this point, we encounter the term “Israelite” for the first time, as God changes Jacob’s name after an all-night wrestling match. It is fascinating that the term means “struggles with God” and equally interesting that the deity at this point in the Genesis saga is El (Isra-EL) and not YHWH. They are not different names for the same god – they are different gods.

It is from Israel’s fourth son Judah that we derive the term “Jew.” After Canaan/Palestine⁶ was divided among the tribes (twelve got land portions, the Levites got the temple swag – see 13 Tribes of Israel article) the region that contained Jerusalem became known as Judea, because the southern kingdom was inhabited by the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The remaining tribes eventually comprised the northern kingdom, known as Israel.

This is all confusing to the modern reader and is many centuries in the future on the Bible timeline. It is not until about 1100 BCE that the scriptural story begins to reflect actual history. Judea remained the name of the southern region from that point on, although it existed as a subject province to other nations for most of this time. Today, the nation of Israel is located in Judea, as are the Palestinian Territories.

There is no point that the Hebrew Bible “converts” the Iraqi/Syrian Israelites to an ethnic/religious group known as Jews. For some period of time, it is logical that the term would have applied specifically to members of the tribe of Judah. As time went on, inhabitants of Judea the Southern Kingdom were identified Jews, as referenced in 2 Kings as “men of Yehuda.” When Judea and Israel went their separate ways around 922 BCE and then again following the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, use of the term expanded to more generally include the citizens of the Judean region.

Because the ten (11) tribes of the north were never mentioned again in scripture, the only remaining populace still identified with the people of Israel was that of the Kingdom of Judea. So the people of Israel and Judeans were merged to some degree, the former term referencing a people that no longer existed politically. Which is to say, Israel was no longer a political entity.

When the deportees returned to the Persian province of Yehud/Judea following the Babylonian exile in 534 BCE, the residents began to specifically assume an identity as “Jews.” The word is therefore marked by an evolving connotation: first members of the tribe, then citizens of a geographic region and finally followers of the ancient desert battle god YHWH. The transition was gradual and ultimately resulted in the term that identifies this people. 

Hundreds of years later, Joshua ben Joseph (Joshua also being a derivation of YHWH meaning “Yahweh is salvation”) was born in the Roman province of Judea. And although at this point there is no question that Jesus was Jewish, it is also clear from scripture that his official genealogy was complex and fraught. 

To see how this came about, we must pick up the thread where we left off with Judah in the middle of Genesis. In Part II, we will see that Jesus’s lineage runs through Tamar, a Canaanite woman who tricks Judah into getting her pregnant, a Canaanite “harlot” known as Rahab and an adulterous concubine of King David.

This is just one of the sordid events attached to Jesus’s family line, facts mostly unknown – and if known, infrequently discussed – by believing Christians. This is the topic of Jesus’s Lineage Part II in our next Fun Bible Story.

 

“And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.”

 

NOTES:

1. The key to accurate prophesizing is to wait and see what happens, and then project it backward in time. In other words, pretend the prophecy was written before the events, when it was actually written afterwards.
2. As I have mentioned any number of times, your average garden variety Christian gets their scripture from leftover Sunday School lessons, and if they attend church, they hear only what the pastor selects for that week.
3. At age 140, Abraham married Keturah, who bore him six children. Her name may or may not mean “perfumed with savory spices.”
4. See entry on the Twelve-ish tribes of Israel.
5. Bilhah and Zilpa. Bilbah was also fornicating with Jacob’s son Reuben. which is at the root of how we ended up with thirteen tribes..
6. Palestine is named after the Philistines, who inhabited the Mediterranean coast while the Israelites commanded the hill county inland.
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