goy

Goy (Hebrew: גוי‎, regular plural goyim גוים or גויים) is a Hebrew biblical term for "nation".^[1] By Roman times it had also acquired the meaning of "gentile".^[2] The latter is also its meaning in Yiddish.

In Biblical Hebrew

A page from Elia Levita's Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary (16th century) contains a list of nations, including word goy (גוי) translated to Latin as ethnicus

In the Torah/Hebrew Bible, goy and its variants appear over 550 times in reference to Israelites and to Gentile nations.^{[citation needed]} The first recorded usage of goy occurs in Genesis  10:5 and applies innocuously to non-Israelite nations. The first mention in relation to the Israelites comes in Genesis  12:2, when God promises Abraham that his descendants will form a goy gadol ("great nation"). In Exodus  19:6, the Jewish people are referred to as a goy kadosh, a "holy nation."^[3] While the earlier books of the Hebrew Bible often use goy to describe the Israelites, the later ones tend to apply the term to other nations.

Some Bible translations leave the word Goyim untranslated and treat it as the proper name of a country in Genesis  14:1, where it states that the "King of Goyim" was Tidal. Bible commentaries suggest that the term may refer to Gutium.^[1]

In Rabbinic Judaism

One of the more poetic descriptions of the chosen people in the Old Testament, and popular among Jewish scholarship, as the highest description of themselves: when God proclaims in the holy writ, goy ehad b'aretz, or 'a unique nation upon the earth!' (2 Samuel 7:23 and 1 Chronicles 17:21).

The Rabbinic literature conceives of the nations (goyim) of the world as numbering seventy, each with a distinct language.

On the verse, “He [God] set the borders of peoples according to the number of the Children of Israel,”(Deut., 32:8) Rashi explains: “Because of the number of the Children of Israel who were destined to come forth from the children of Shem, and to the number of the seventy souls of the Children of Israel who went down to Egypt, He set the ‘borders of peoples’ [to be characterized by] seventy languages.”

Chaim ibn Attar^[4] maintains that this is the symbolism behind the Menorah: “The seven candles of the Menorah [in the Holy Temple] correspond to the world's nations, which number seventy. Each [candle] alludes to ten [nations]. This alludes to the fact that they all shine opposite the western [candle], which corresponds to the Jewish people.”

Modern usage

As noted, in the above-quoted Rabbinical literature the meaning of the word "goy" shifted the Biblical meaning of "a people" which could be applied to the Hebrews/Jews as to others into meaning "a people other than the Jews". In later generations, a further shift left the word as meaning an individual person who belongs to such a non-Jewish people.

In modern Hebrew and Yiddish the word goy is the standard term for a gentile. The two words are related. In ancient Greek, ta ethne was used to translate ha goyim, both phrases meaning "the nations". In Latin, gentilis was used to translate the Greek word for "nation", which led to the word "gentile".^[5]

In English, the use of the word goy can be controversial. Like other common (and otherwise innocent) terms, it may be assigned pejoratively to non-Jews.^[6][7][8] To avoid any perceived offensive connotations, writers may use the English terms "gentile" or "non-Jew".

In Yiddish, it is the only proper term for gentile and many bilingual English and Yiddish speakers use it dispassionately ^[9] or even deliberately.

The term shabbos goy refers to a non-Jew who performs duties that Jewish law forbids a Jew from performing on the Sabbath, such as lighting a fire to warm a house.

See also

• Am ha'aretz

References