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Israelites or Jews?
Sermon in an Israelite Oratory, Édouard Moyse, 1897. Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme
Scholars have long presumed that after the collapse of the northern kingdom of Israel (722–720 B.C.E.), when only Judah remained, יהודי (Yehudi), “Jew,”[1] came to be synonymous with “Israelite” as a way of referring to any member of the covenantal people, Israel.[2] Indeed, scholars often alternate these terms for style (avoidance of repetition, etc.) and even frequently translate an original “Israelites” as “Jews.”[3]
Theoretically, if the two ethnonyms had become functionally equivalent, we would expect to find them evenly, or randomly, distributed in texts from the Second Temple period and beyond. In reality, however, the terms tend to cluster in certain texts and contexts.
For example, in the first eleven books of his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus, the first-century C.E. Jewish historian writing under the auspices of the Flavian emperors, refers to “Israel/Israelites” 188 times, while Ἰουδαῖος (Ioudaios), “Jew,” occurs only 26 times in the first ten books.[4] In the remaining nine books of the Antiquities and in his other extant writings, however, he only uses “Jew” (approximately 1162 times).
For nearly a century, attempts to explain the uses of the two terms have been shaped by the model proposed by Karl Georg Kuhn (1906–1976) in “Ἰσραήλ, Ἰουδαῖος, Ἑβραῖος [Israel, Jew, Hebrew] in Jewish Literature after the OT” (Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament/ Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 1938):[5]
The observable distinctions may be expressed as follows, ישראל [Israel] is the name which the people uses for itself, whereas יהודי-Ἰουδαῖοι [Yehudi-Ioudaioi] is the non-Jewish name for it.[6]
In other words, “Israel” is the term insiders use, while “Jew” is preferred by outsiders. Kuhn further asserts that when used by outsiders, the term “Jew” sometimes carries a derogatory sense:
Thus ישראל always emphasises the religious aspect, namely, that “we are God’s chosen people,” whereas Ἰουδαῖος may acquire on the lips of non-Jews a disrespectful and even contemptuous sound, though this is not usual, since Ἰουδαῖος is used quite freely without any disparagement.[7]
Kuhn argues that because Palestinian Jews were less impacted by outside factors, texts written in the Land tend to prefer “Israel/Israelite” terminology, whereas Hellenistic Jews were more inclined to accommodate to the outside nomenclature imposed by their non-Jewish neighbors, which accounts for the frequency of the term “Jew” in diaspora literature.
Does the Insider/Outsider Theory Make Sense?
Kuhn’s insider/outsider explanation, however, is inconsistent with the evidence from early Jewish sources. For one thing, it is implausible that Jewish texts that use both terms shift between them to convey insider or outsider perspectives. For example, Jeremiah uses בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, “the children of Israel,” to refer to the Exodus generation:
ירמיה כג:ז לָכֵן הִנֵּה יָמִים בָּאִים נְאֻם יְ־הוָה וְלֹא יֹאמְרוּ עוֹד חַי יְ־הוָה אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלָה אֶת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם.
Jer 23:7 Assuredly, a time is coming—declares YHWH—when it shall no more be said, “As YHWH lives, who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt.”
But the prophet’s purchase of a field is witnessed by כָּל הַיְּהוּדִים , “all the Judahites,” in Jerusalem:
ירמיה לב:יא וָאֶתֵּן אֶת הַסֵּפֶר הַמִּקְנָה אֶל בָּרוּךְ בֶּן נֵרִיָּה בֶּן מַחְסֵיָה לְעֵינֵי חֲנַמְאֵל דֹּדִי וּלְעֵינֵי הָעֵדִים הַכֹּתְבִים בְּסֵפֶר הַמִּקְנָה לְעֵינֵי כָּל הַיְּהוּדִים הַיֹּשְׁבִים בַּחֲצַר הַמַּטָּרָה.
Jer 32:12 And he gave the deed to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah in the presence of my kinsman Hanamel, of the witnesses who were named in the deed, and all the Judahites who were sitting in the prison compound.
Does the former reflect an insider context and the latter an outsider context? Also implausible is the idea that Josephus wrote the first eleven books of Antiquities for insiders but the final nine books (and the rest of his corpus) for outsiders. In fact, Josephus explains his use of the two terms in Antiquities.
The first eleven books cover the history of Israel through the Babylonian exile. The change in terminology marks a specific point in which only the two[8] southern tribes associated with Judah returned to the Land. These people Josephus labels “Jews” (Ioudaioi):
Ant. 11.132–33 When these Jews (Ioudaioi) learned of the king’s piety towards God, and his kindness towards Ezra, they loved [him] most dearly, and many took up their possessions and went to Babylon, desiring to go down to Jerusalem. But all the people of Israel remained in that land. So it came about that only two tribes came to Asia and Europe and are subject to the Romans, but the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates until now and are a countless multitude whose number is impossible to know.[9]
A few paragraphs later, Josephus again calls attention to his own terminological shift at this point in the story:
Ant. 11.173 From the time they went up from Babylon they were called by this name [Ioudaios] after the tribe of Judah. Since the tribe was the prominent one to come from those parts, both the people themselves and the country have taken their name from it.
Henceforth, Josephus’ historical narrative focuses on this subset of Israel, so he uses the appropriate term for that subset: Jews. Elsewhere in the Josephan corpus, he only uses “Jew”—never “Israel/Israelites”—because he is talking about the descendants of people from the ancient kingdom of Judah.
This distinction between the terms holds up with remarkable consistency in sources from across the Second Temple period and beyond.[10] Philo, for example, uses the term Israel(ite) eighty times in his extant Greek works, but he never uses it synonymously with Jew, nor does he ever refer to the contemporary people as Israel or Israelites. Like Josephus, he uses Ioudaios to refer to contemporary Jews.[11]
More significantly, the extant “insider” memos, letters, and inscriptions from the Second Temple era consistently treat “Jew” as the default ethnonym used by insiders as well as outsiders. For example, most of the second century B.C.E Jewish papyri from Herakleopolis, Egypt, contain appeals to leaders of the Jewish community for resolution of an internal quarrel. Yet in these insider communications, “Jew” is the standard internal self-identifier.[12]
Moreover, when the Hasmoneans established a kingdom in the second century B.C.E., they did not call it “Israel” but “Judah” (Yehud/Ioudaia). In other words, there is no epigraphic or historical evidence supporting the insider/outsider hypothesis, and more than a little evidence against it.
Thus, the terms “Israel” and “Israelites” can and do refer to Jews in the Second Temple period, often in historical, liturgical, and eschatological contexts befitting their reference to the larger covenantal people of YHWH—a people including but not limited to Jews. A larger nuance persists, however, that “Jews” are a subset of the superordinate category of Israel.
Perhaps the biggest problems for Kuhn’s proposal, however, are that there is no evidence that “Jew” ever carried a derogatory or contemptuous sense in pre-Christian antiquity, nor that it originated as an outsider term.
“Jews” in the Bible
The earliest instances of the term are found in the book of Jeremiah,[13] where it serves as an ordinary ethnonym for people from the kingdom of Judah—“Judahites,” as it were.[14] It is used, for example, to describe the people who fled when the Babylonians conquered Judah:
ירמיה מ:יב וַיָּשֻׁבוּ כָל הַיְּהוּדִים מִכָּל הַמְּקֹמוֹת אֲשֶׁר נִדְּחוּ שָׁם וַיָּבֹאוּ אֶרֶץ יְהוּדָה אֶל גְּדַלְיָהוּ הַמִּצְפָּתָה וַיַּאַסְפוּ יַיִן וָקַיִץ הַרְבֵּה מְאֹד.
Jer 40:12 And all the Yehudim returned from all the places where they had been driven, and they came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mitzpah, and they gathered wine and summer fruit in great abundance.
Of note, this label appears to include people from other tribes within the kingdom of Judah; the traditional Benjaminite city of Mitzpah is referred to as in “the land of Judah,” and the people with Gedaliah in Mitzpah after the destruction of Jerusalem are all referred to as Yehudim.[15] It also describes the Judahites (presumably including Benjaminites and Levites) who are taken into exile:
ירמיה נב:כח זֶה הָעָם אֲשֶׁר הֶגְלָה נְבוּכַדְרֶאצַּר בִּשְׁנַת שֶׁבַע יְהוּדִים שְׁלֹשֶׁת אֲלָפִים וְעֶשְׂרִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה.
Jer 52:28 These are the people whom Nebuchadnezzar took into exile in the seventh year: 3,023 Yehudim.[16]
Instances of Yehudi in post-exilic literature—including fifty-eight in Esther, two in Daniel, eight in Ezra, eleven in Nehemiah, and one in Zechariah—consistently refer to someone descended from the people of the kingdom of Judah, either from the tribe of Judah itself or of southern stock generally. Nowhere is the term Yehudi used for someone from one of the tribes traditionally associated with the northern kingdom of Israel.
Thus, within the Bible itself, Yehudi is simply the natural ethnonym for someone from Judah—a “Judahite”—in the same way “Greek” is the natural label for someone from the people of Greece, even if several generations removed from actually having lived there.
“Israel(ite)” in the Bible
“Israel(ite)” has a broader and more varied usage in the Bible.[17] This is the name divinely bestowed on the patriarch Jacob after his wrestling match at Peniel (Gen 32:29).[18] His descendants then come to be called בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, “the sons/children of Israel,” the עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל, “people of Israel,” or just יִשְׂרָאֵל, “Israel.”[19] In Exodus through Judges, these labels refer to “all Israel”—that is, all the people of the twelve tribes descended from the patriarch and covenantally chosen by YHWH.
This larger sense of “all Israel” persists throughout the Bible, but in the accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah in Samuel and Kings, “Israel” is more frequently used of the northern tribes that eventually comprise the northern kingdom, over and against the southern kingdom of Judah. This more restrictive meaning also holds through much of the prophetic corpus.[20]
In texts about the post-exilic period, Israel carries a broader sense. In Ezra-Nehemiah, “Israel” is frequently used of the returnees from Babylon, who were from the southern kingdom of Judah. Ezra-Nehemiah does not suggest, however, that the returnees are the whole of remaining Israel. Rather, they are a subset of Israel.[21] The post-exilic prophets similarly use Israel language (usually in a partitive, non-restrictive sense) to refer to returnees originally from Judah (e.g., Zech 12:1) and in its larger sense of “all Israel” extending beyond Judah (e.g., Zech 8:13; 9:13; 10:6–10).
Samaritans
This distinction also helps account for the Samaritans, a non-Jewish rival group in the Second Temple period and beyond. Despite the fact that the Samaritans observe their own version of the Torah and worship YHWH and even claim descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, they do not claim to be Jews, nor are they identified as such by Jews or outsiders.[22]
Instead, Samaritans identify themselves as “the Samarian Israelites” (בני ישראל השמרים), “the community of the Samarians” (עדת השומרים), or “guardians [of the Torah]” (שמרים).[23] Among ancient Jews, Samaritans were typically called “Cutheans/Kutim” or other labels, but not “Jews.”[24]
However, thanks to the presumption that after the fall of the northern kingdom, all worshipers of YHWH henceforth are Jews, many modern scholars have treated the Samaritans as a subset of Jews. But once we recognize that “Israel” continues to designate a superordinate category including but not limited to Jews, we are better able to account for Samaritan claims without forcing a label on them that they do not apply to themselves.
The Origin of the Insider/Outsider Theory
How, then, did Kuhn so significantly misinterpret the term “Jew”? Kuhn’s explanation perfectly describes the situation in his own native Germany in the 1930s, where Jude (German for “Jew”) was often employed as a slur by hostile outsiders.
“Israel,” on the other hand, was a term associated with the biblical chosen people and was generally treated with respect—not least because Christians regarded the church itself as a new or true Israel. German Jewish communities thus understandably preferred to call themselves the israelitische Gemeinde, “Israelite community,” while outsiders who wished to be respectful to the Jews also tended to use the term Israelite rather than Jude.[25]
Kuhn himself was no disinterested bystander, either. He was an early member of the Nazi paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung, “Storm Detachment”), and he joined the Nazi party in 1932. Within a year, he had delivered a speech in the Tübingen marketplace advocating the boycott of Jewish businesses. When he was appointed as a lecturer in oriental languages and history at Tübingen in 1934, he delivered his inaugural lecture on “the spread of Jewry in the ancient world,” arguing that Judaism had spread because Jews had emigrated to other countries and then refused to assimilate to their host nations.[26]
In a postwar review of one of his mentor’s books, Dutch biblical scholar M. A. Beek (1909–1987) recalls how Kuhn demonstrated his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause by delivering his lectures (on rabbinic Judaism!) wearing a full SA uniform complete with an honorary dagger featuring an inscription of Nazi comradeship:[27]
Reading this booklet reminded me of an idyllic time in the summer semester of 1934 when Dr. Kuhn was still a private dozent at the University of Tübingen. At that time, he wore an SA uniform with an “Honorary Dagger [Ehrendolch] with Dedication” clinking at his side because he was among the first thousand people in the SA.[28]
Kuhn penned several articles on the so-called “Jewish Problem” (Judenfrage) in the late 1930s, and shortly after the November Pogrom (1938), euphemistically known as Kristallnacht (“night of shattered glass”),[29] he gave a lecture—later to become a booklet—on “The Judenfrage as a World History Problem.”[30] This was the same year in which his Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) entry on the terms Israel, Jew, and Hebrew was published. Kuhn’s participation in the TDNT was no accident; the project as a whole was headed up by editor Gerhard Kittel, an avowed anti-Semite and enthusiastic Nazi.[31]
By now the point of highlighting Kuhn’s own biases should be clear: Rather than evaluating the ancient evidence on its own terms, Kuhn superimposed the idiom and social context of Nazi Germany upon antiquity, producing the insider/outsider explanation that has been so influential ever since.[32]
Whole/Part, Not Insider/Outsider
Kuhn is simply wrong: In the Second Temple period “Israelite” and “Jew” were not synonymous terms referring to the same people, with one being an insider term and the other primarily used by outsiders or in outsider contexts. To find such usage, we must go centuries later, after Christian anti-Judaism and claims to Israelite heritage combined to make “Jew” into a slur while continuing to treat “Israelite” as a term worthy of respect.[33]
Instead, in antiquity, “Jew” is the label for someone from the subset of Israel derived from the historical/biblical southern kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem as their central holy city, while “Israelite” refers to anyone from that larger set of people including, but not limited to, Jews.
This treatment of “Israel” as a larger category even persists in later rabbinic materials. For example, shortly after the famous declaration that כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל יֵשׁ לָהֶם חֵלֶק לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא, “all Israel has a place in the world to come” (m. Sanh. 10:1), the Mishnah takes up the question of whether the northern tribes of Israel will share in that future, with R. Aqiva declaring of the ten tribes, הֵם הוֹלְכִים וְאֵינָם חוֹזְרִים “they go [into exile] and will not return,” and R. Eliezer (who gets the last word) disagreeing (m. Sanh. 10:3; cf. t. Sanh. 13:12).[34]
This more expansive conception of “Israelite” ultimately facilitated later Christian claims to Israelite heritage without being Jews (and to the development of Christian anti-Judaism), but that is a subject for another time.
Appendix
Revisions of Kuhn’s Theory
Kuhn’s insider/outsider model is often taken for granted in modern studies, but some scholars have attempted to refine or revise the model to better fit with the evidence.
Jewish Historian David Goodblatt (1942–2019), for instance, replaces Kuhn’s geographical distinction with a linguistic one, arguing that texts composed in Hebrew—the “insider” tongue—prefer the term “Israelite,” while those composed in “outsider” tongues like Greek or Aramaic instead tend to refer to “Jews.”[35] This solution is unconvincing, however, since too many exceptions to this proposed rule persist, such as the frequent use of Yehudi in the Hebrew sections of Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther.[36]
More recently, Lawrence Wills (Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA) has attempted to explain such problematic cases by arguing that, in much the same way that some modern groups have adopted and reappropriated outsider slurs for insider use, Jews eventually reappropriated the outsider term “Jew” to serve as a “more assertive, even emotive term of identity” compared to the “default Israel/Israelite,”[37] which he suggests helps account for the numerous exceptions to Kuhn’s model. But since there is no evidence that “Jew” was an outsider slur in pre-Christian antiquity, Wills’ proposal is untenable.
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Published
September 30, 2025
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September 30, 2025
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Footnotes
Dr. Jason A. Staples is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He holds a PhD in Ancient Mediterranean Religions from the University of North Caronina – Chapel Hill. Staples is a specialist in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, focusing primarily on Early Judaism and Christian Origins. He is the author of Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Former Jews, Gentiles, Israelites (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
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