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Kjv online bible gateway1/4/2024 In 2006, the academic David Novak wrote, with limited exceptions, "The Bible can be seen as one long discussion of what differentiates Israel from all the other peoples of the world." See also: Who is a Jew? The Hebrew Bible The word "Goy" is now also used in English, principally by Jewish people as an exonym (a word used within a group to describe outsiders) – see goy. The Hebrew word "goy" went through a change in meaning which parallels the journey of "gentilis/gentile" – both words moving from meaning "nation" to "non-Jew" today. These developments in Bible translation practice were related to developments in Jewish Rabbinical and Christian thinking which – in the centuries after the Old and New Testament were written – created an increasingly clear binary opposition between "Jew" and "non-Jew". The first English translators followed this approach, using the word "gentile" to refer to the non-Israelite nations (and principally using the word "nation(s)" to translate goy/goyim in other contexts). Other words translated in some contexts to mean "gentile/s" in the modern sense were the Biblical Hebrew word nokhri ( נכרי – often otherwise translated as 'stranger') and for the New Testament Greek word éthnē ( ἔθνη). The most important of such Hebrew words was goy ( גוי, plural, goyim), a term with the broad meaning of "people" or "nation" which was sometimes used to refer to Israelites, but with the plural form goyim tending to be used in the Bible to refer to non-Israelite nations. In Saint Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, gentilis was used along with gentes, to translate Greek and Hebrew words with similar meanings when the text referred to the non-Israelite peoples. Later still, the word came to refer to other nations, 'not a Roman citizen'. The original meaning of "clan" or "family" was extended in post-Augustan Latin to acquire the wider meaning of belonging to a distinct nation or ethnicity. Gens derives from the Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh₁tis, meaning birth or production. "Gentile" derives from Latin gentilis, which itself derives from the Latin gens, meaning clan or tribe. Its meaning has also been shaped by Rabbinical Jewish thought and Christian theology which, from the 1st century, have often set a binary distinction between "Jew" and "non-Jew." The development of the word to principally mean "non-Jew" in English is entwined with the history of Bible translations from Hebrew and Greek into Latin and English. Archaic and specialist uses of the word gentile in English (particularly in linguistics) still carry this meaning of "relating to a people or nation." The English word gentile derives from the Latin word gentilis, meaning "of or belonging to the same people or nation" (from Latin gēns 'clan, tribe, people, family'). In some translations of the Quran, gentile is used to translate an Arabic word that refers to non-Jews and/or people not versed in or not able to read scripture. More rarely, the term is generally used as a synonym for heathen or pagan. Other groups that claim Israelite heritage, notably Mormons, sometimes use the term gentile to describe outsiders. Gentile ( / ˈ dʒ ɛ n ˌ t aɪ l/) is a word that usually means "someone who is not a Jew".
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