Jews

From Judah's Tribe to a National Name

'Jew' derives from Judah, one of Jacob's twelve sons and the tribe from which David's royal line came. After the northern ten tribes were carried into Assyrian exile (2 Kings 17) and the southern kingdom of Judah persisted (later itself exiled to Babylon and eventually returning), 'Jew' became the standing term for the covenant people descended from Israel generally, not only the tribe of Judah specifically — the term the New Testament uses far more often than 'Israelite.'

Jews in the New Testament

Every central figure of the New Testament's founding events was Jewish: Jesus himself (John 4:9 has a Samaritan woman address him plainly as 'a Jew'), all twelve apostles, and the entire earliest Jerusalem church. Paul, 'a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia' (Acts 21:39), later describes his own credentials as 'circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews' (Philippians 3:5) even after coming to see all such privilege as nothing compared to knowing Christ. The Gospels record recurring tension between Jesus and certain Jewish religious authorities (particularly some Pharisees and Sadducees, and the Jerusalem leadership that handed him to Rome), but this was conflict within Judaism, not Jesus or his first followers standing outside it — the church's expansion to include Gentiles (Acts 10-15) was itself a major internal Jewish-Christian question the earliest, entirely Jewish church had to work through.

Scripture references

• John 4:9 — 'Jews have no dealings with Samaritans'
• Acts 21:39 — Paul: 'I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia'
• Philippians 3:5 — Paul's Jewish credentials, 'a Hebrew of Hebrews'
• Romans 1:16 — The gospel 'to the Jew first, and also to the Greek'

Further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Jew