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heyeberi
העברי
'Heyeberi' (also pronounced 'hebri' or 'habiru') refers to the main character group within the ancient Hebrew texts, “the Hebrews”, also sometimes called Israelites, “children of Iseral”, ihodim, and a few other terms. A more modern term “Jew” is roughly approximate, having evolved from the ancient term yehudit.
'heyeberi' 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:
- heyeberi/heyeberim: an etymological step between 'yeberi“ and “Hebrew” (used 39 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)
- ihodit: “a member of the nation of Judah” - a Judah-ite, or the language spoken by those people (used 6 times)
- iseralit: “an Israelite”
- iserali: “an Israeli”
- iseral: “Israel” (used 2582 times)
LexID 95674, 5674, 5680