Genesis 10:5 (KJV) speaks of the isles of the Gentiles. In Gen. 11:9 God scattered the people at Babel. Were all of these still Gentiles? In Gen. 12:2 God tells Abram (Abraham) He will make of him a great nation, but he does not use the word Hebrew or Jew. When did the Jewish nation begin? Wanda Miller
Moses, by divine inspiration, wrote the first five books of the Bible after the establishment of the Jewish nation. When the historical events occurred that appear in the Book of Genesis, there was not yet a distinction between Israelites or Jews and Gentiles (everybody else). However, by the time that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, there was a distinction between the Israelites or Jews and the Gentiles. Moses spoke accommodatively to his fellow Israelites when he spoke of Gentiles in distinction to himself and his nation.
In addition, the designation of “Jews” was not contemporaneous with the establishment of the Israelite nation, but came along years later. (To complicate things a bit more, sometimes the nation of Israel referred to only ten tribes and not all the tribes, i.e. when for awhile both Saul’s son and David were kings over different tribes and later when the Israelite nation split along the same lines following the death of Solomon.)
Abraham is the father of the Jewish or Israelite nation, as God stated (Joshua 24:3) and first century Jews (and Jewish Christians) avowed (Luke 1:73; 16:24, 30; John 8:53, 56; Acts 7:2; Romans 4:12), but Abraham never saw the promises made to him (Genesis 12:2) respecting the nation of Israel come to fruition in his lifetime. The only land that Abraham owned as far as we know was the burial cave purchased to bury Sarah (Acts 7:16).
Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, underwent a divinely given name change to “Israel” (Genesis 32:28). Though through Jacob whose name was changed to Israel that name came into being, Jacob (Israel) did not live to see the establishment of the nation of Israel. Only about 70 souls of Jacob’s family came to dwell in a section in Egypt called Goshen (Deuteronomy 10:22; Acts 7:15). However, over the years while in Egypt, the descendants of the man Israel experienced a population explosion (Genesis 7:17). Moses led “the children of Israel” out of Egypt and inaugurated a solemn covenant with God at Mt. Sinai (Acts 7:37-38). Now, Israel was a nation.
The term “Jews” first referred to members of the tribe of Judah (2 Kings 16:6). After the Babylonian captivity, the word Jew became synonymous with all the surviving descendants of the Israelite nation that formerly made its exodus from Egypt and settled Palestine. This was the way in which the term was applied in the New Testament literally (Romans 1:16; 2:9). However, aside from physical ancestry, today, under Christianity, a true Jew is equivalent to a Christian (Romans 2:28-29; 9:6). Christians are Jews today spiritually.
