Bible translation and the word "Jewish"

A Muslim friend sent me a link to a post on X (since deleted) which tried to make the case that the use of the word “Jew” in the Bible is a mistranslation. The argumentation left quite a bit to be desired (perhaps why it was deleted?), but maybe we could profit by asking what Greek and Hebrew words that are translated as “Jew” in English and what is the sense of these words.

The poster on X pointed out that the Greek word used in the New Testament is Ιουδαιος (Ioudaios), and their proposed translation was Judean rather than Jewish. That is, they were proposing that we should see this as geographic term rather than an ethnic term. A Ιουδαιος would then be a person from the province of Judea, not a descendant of Jacob.

It doesn’t actually require any knowledge of biblical languages to see the fatal problem for this theory. A simple search for the word “Jew” in the New Testament (Ιουδαιος if you want to be precise and you know how) will show that the word is consistently used as a term for a people group that is defined by common descent and not by a shared territory. First of all, there are Jews in Galilee (Jn 6) which is not part of Judea. Not only that, but Ιουδαιοι are found living in every city in the Mediterranean basin in the book of Acts. These people are not from Judea, but they do meet in a synagogue, practice the law of Moses, and count Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as their forefathers. And when we come to the epistles, Ιουδαιος is consistently used in opposition with Greek or Gentile. For example:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Ga 3.28)

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. (Ro 3.1-2)

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Co 1.23-24)

After looking through the New Testament, we need to go back and take a look at the Old. No Greek word study is complete without seeing how the word is used in the Septuagint (abbr. LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament made in the centuries leading up to Christ’s birth. There, we find the word Ιουδαιος systematically translating the Hebrew word יְהוּדִי (yehudi), which is simply the adjective form of the name Judah. It’s essentially Judah-ish, or Judean. Depending on the context, the ESV translates this term as Judean or Jew/Jewish:

So how does Judean, that is, “of the tribe of Judah” become Jewish, replacing the term Israelite? The answer is that in the time leading up to the exile, Israel and Judah were two separate kingdoms. Israelites were those from the northern kingdom, and Judeans those from the southern kingdom (with Jerusalem for its capital and David’s heir for king). The northern kingdom went into exile long before the southern kingdom, and the majority of those descendants of Jacob who maintained their identity through the exile were from the tribe of Judah. Since most of them were Judeans, the term Judean came to be applied to all of them. This is the usage in the book of Esther where Mordecai of the tribe of Benjamin (2:5) is called a יְהוּדִי which is translated Ιουδαιος in the Septuagint and Jew in the ESV. Likewise, when we come to the New Testament, the priests (from the tribe of Levi) are Jews, and so is Paul (from the tribe of Benjamin).

In short, the use of the word Jew in English bibles is not a mistranslation, and as a general rule, if anybody says that practically every version of the Bible in English is wrong about a translation issue, you can safely ignore that person in good conscience.