Times that Israel is Called “Goy” or “Goyim” in the Bible

Typically speaking, the word “goy” (plural “goyim”) is used to mean a Gentile, aka a non-Jew. Merriam-Webster Dictionary simply defines the word as “a non-Jewish person.” The Hebrew word “גּוֹי” (gôy) from which it derives simply means a nation or nations, but is frequently translated as “Gentiles” or “heathen” in the Hebrew Bible (Strong’s H1471).

But despite the way “goy(im)” is commonly used today, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) occasionally used the word to refer to Israel, Judah, their ancestors, and their descendants. Given how the word is often used in contrast with Israel and Judah, this may be surprising.

Some of the notable times in which Israel and Judah are called “goy(im)” in scripture are:

• Genesis 35.10-11 (KJV): “God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel. And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins”
• Exodus 19.6 (KJV): “ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.”
• Psalm 83.4 (KJV): “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.”
• Isaiah 1.4 (KJV): “Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters”
• Isaiah 10.6 (KJV): “I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge”
• Jeremiah 28.11 (KJV): “Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years.”
• Jeremiah 33.24 (KJV): “The two families which the LORD hath chosen, he hath even cast them off? thus they have despised my people, that they should be no more a nation before them.”
• Ezekiel 2.3 (KJV): “Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me”
• Ezekiel 37.22 (KJV): “I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel”

As I linked to BlueLetterBible, the reader can see for themselves that the word used for “nation” here is “goy,” and the word for “nations” is “goyim.”

Not only that, but this trend continues in the New Testament as well. In the Gospel of Luke, we read how the Jews spoke of a Roman centureon saying:
“For he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue.” (Luke 7.5)

The reader is free to look at that verse and see that the word used for “nation” is “ἔθνος” (ethnos), which St. Paul uses to refer to gentiles in his epistles (see Strong’s G1484).

How is this the case? Because, put simply, the concept of “gentiles” or of “goyim” as a collective whole is simply not present in the Old Testament. To the prophets, a “goy” is a nation, not an individual non-Jew.
Yes, I know that there are verses which contrast Israel with “the nations” (“goyim”), but that doesn’t mean that “goyim” meant non-Jews back then. Today, anyone from any nation can use the term “the nations” in contrast with their own nation. Someone from the present-day United States or the United Kingdom could speak of “the nations of the world” as some other force which their countries engage with, and they would not be saying that their home country is not a nation. Put simply, the idea of “goyim” as non-Jews is a later development.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz had published an article acknowledging this fact in a 2019 article.

In the Scriptures, then, a goy is a people. Israel itself is a “holy goy,” whereas in connection with non-Jewish outsiders the Bible used the terms ger and nokhri (stranger, foreigner), which are roughly equivalent in meaning. They are differentiated from the people of Israel principally by their customs, but non-Jews do not belong as individuals to meta-categories shared by all of them. There is no binary division in terms of essence.

Tomer Persico. “How the Jews Invented the Goy” (Haaretz, 9 Nov. 2019). Archived on 25 Jun. 2022.

But that leads us to ask:

Where do “goyim” come from?

(That is, where does “goy” as the opposite of “Jew” come from?)

The answer is actually quite surprising: it came from Christianity. Sort of. Yes, really!

The above-quoted Haaretz article is a review of a paper by an Israeli scholar named Ishay Rosen-Zvi and his colleague Adi Ophir. In said paper, Rosen-Zvi and Ophir argue that the whole notion of “goyim” as non-Jews is an invention of St. Paul in the New Testament. According to them, there was a semantic shift in the word “goy” in the 1st century AD which led to the word slowly referring to non-Jewish nations, but also that Paul latched on that shift and used it so frequently in his epistles that it changed the meaning of the word. In reaction to Paul, or so says Rosen-Zvi, the later talmudic rabbis adopted his terminology later on.

Prof. Ishay Rosen-Zvi (image from Tel Aviv University).

By citing these specific verses, Paul thus discloses the biblical ethnic origin of the term and highlights its semantic shift. And thus the old meaning of “gentiles” as peoples does not disappear altogether: it is still encapsulated in the word ethnê, articulating the recognition that the effort to overcome ethnic markers occurs in a world that remains ethnic and is populated by ethnic gods.

Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir, “Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 105, no. 1 (Winter 2015): pp. 37-38.

In his other papers, Ishay Rosen-Zvi gives more evidence to support this view of his. For a 2016 paper, he read through pre-Pauline Jewish texts of the time — namely the Book of Jubilees, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Book of Judith, the Book of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Letter of Aristeas — and he found no solid concept of “goyim” in it’s modern sense. In his words:

There are Jews and there are Greeks here, the Jewish way and the Greek way. But there are no “gentiles.” A Hellenistic Jew of Paul’s time could speak about the torah and its complex relationship to his non-Jewish milieu, without feeling the need to lump together all non-Jews under one category.

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “What if We Got Rid of the Goy? Rereading Ancient Jewish Distinctions,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, Vol. 47, no. 2 (June 2016): p. 176.

If you have a JSTOR account (or any other way to read academic papers), you can see his arguments for yourself. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and I think the contrast between Second Temple-era Hellenistic Judaism and the later rabbinic, Talmudic Judaism is quite striking. In an older post of mine, I said that “I don’t think that many people … entirely realize just how much the rise of the Church changed the history of the Synagogue forever.” One of the ways you can see that is in how later Judaism developed a full concept of “goyim” and integrated it into their doctrine.