עברי

see also heyeberi

The 'yeberi' refers to the “Hebrews” - the main character group of the Hebrew texts. They are also sometimes called “Israelites”, “children of Iseral”, the ihodim, and a few other terms as noted below. A more modern term “Jew” is roughly approximate, having evolved from the ancient term ihodit(aka yehudit).

The 'yeberi' take their name from yeber (aka Eber), a character from Genesis who was Abraham's great-great-great-great-grandfather.

For some strange reason, the academic and “mainstream” community tends to downplay the use of the word within the ancient Hebrew texts themselves, making statements such as “It does not appear very often in the Bible”, or “to interpret the term as referring to the Hebrews …[is] unlikely.”¹⁾ Despite this popular academic view the term occurs around 70 times, certainly not a rare occurrence.

Other scholars are quick to point out the occurrence of the word in non-Hebraic ancient texts such as the ancient Egyptian “Amarna Letters” and many other text written in Akkadian or Ugaritic. These scholars generally interpret the term as a social slur roughly indicating “dirty bandits”, based on some fairly weak etymology that might simply reveal the underlying longevity of antisemitism.

Let's do a quick comparison of each word:

• yeberim/yeberi: the descendants of Yeber (used 56 times)
• ihodim: “the People of Ihoh” (used 65 times)
• ihodi: “the People of Ihoh” or “the man of Ihoh”, an abbreviated form of ihodim. (used 18 times)
• ihodeh: “the nation of the people of Ihoh”, ie. “Judah” (used 891 times)
• ihod/ihodia: “Judea” - Aramaic spellings (used 7 and 10 times respectively)
• ihodit: “a member of the nation of Judah” - a Judah-ite, or the language spoken by those people (used 6 times)
• iseralit: “an Israelite” (used 3 times)
• iserali: “an Israeli” (used 2 times)
• iseral: “Israel” (used 2591 times)

LexID 95674, 5674, 5680