"HEBREW" AS AN ETHNIC SLUR

Don't Call Me Hebrew! The Mysterious Origins of the First Anti-Semitic Slur
Article at www.thetorah.com

The word Hebrew [IVRI] simply means "cross-over". It was applied to Abraham to mean that he crossed over the Euphrates in order to enter their land. Yet it may have very well coined as a negative description of someone who is from the outside, a foreigner. The events of history, Biblical as well as narrative, have shown that his descendants were also treated as outsiders.
This is explicit in the book of Numbers, chapter 23 [NIV], where Balak, the king of Moab, asks the gentile prophet, Balaam, to curse the Israelites.

How can I curse those whom God has not cursed?
How can I denounce those whom the Lord has not denounced?
From the rocky peaks I see them; from the heights I view them.
I see a people who live apart and do not consider themselves one of the nations.

This is probably the Torah's way of complimenting Israel, the New Testament is less complimentary.

1 Thessalonians 2:
For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are contrary to all people

I'm not sure that we killed prophets or that we displease God but Paul was right about one thing. We are very contrary to all people.

I remember, as a child, asking the mother of a Catholic friend of mine, what does the word "gentile" mean. Her answer was something like, Well that's because of you people. That's what you call us.

I was about 10 years old and I was not calling anybody anything.

However, when I was older and had another Christian girlfriend, she asked me, Why did God create Jews and gentiles? I said that God didn't create Jews and He didnt create gentiles. He created people.

However, once the People of Israel accepted the TORAH, they became Jews and all other people became nonJews. I don't think the word "gentile" came into use until much later, under the Greeks and Romans, although the TORAH calls nonzjews NOCHRIM. It simply means a foreigner.

Though the word Hebrew started out as a slur, the Hebrews took it on as an ironic compliment. See the article at https://www.rd.com/list/insults-into-compliments/

Something similar happened with the word YANKEE. Yan Kees, a Dutch expression meaning, John Cheese, was used by the Dutch in the New World to describe the English whom they considered interlopers on their own territory on the American Atlantic coast. What happened? Americans turned it into a complementary term.

I am almost certain, without evidence, that that also happened with the term Christian.
http://lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVanswers/2015/07-31.html

This web page asks the question, Were the people at Antioch calling them this as a derogatory term?

Not necessarily meanspirited but mocking.

The term Xristos is Greek for the Hebrew meshiach, meaning "anointed". Jewish kings were anointed with oil at their coronation, and the term meshiach later came to be the designation of the expected future king of the world in history's end time.

The Greeks [gentiles] may have been unfamiliar with this concept and hearing that the people who believed in Jesus as messiah were calling him the Anointed One, started calling his followers something like "Oily Folks". Well, Christians, like Yankees, like Hebrews, took it on as a proud designation.

The rabbis said that Abraham separated himself from people who did not believe in God. He crossed over from the side of idolatry to the side of HASHEM and established what Paul later called MECHITSAH, "the middle wall of partition".

It was the aspect of Paul's teaching in Galatians that

Galatians 3:28 - There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. [NIV]

which turned the Jews of his own time off. To them, it meant the obliteration of Jewish identity.

This was in contradistinction to what YESHUA said in the Sermon On The Mount when he said to the simple Galilean Jews gathered to hear him, YOU ARE THE SALT OF THE EARTH. Salt is used to make meat KOSHER. YESHUA compared the Jews to koshering salt. He said that it is the Jews that make the world KOSHER. He probably was not refering to the meat on our tables but to the meat offered as sacrifice in the Temple.

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