{"id":36249,"date":"2018-07-29T16:23:42","date_gmt":"2018-07-29T13:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=36249"},"modified":"2018-07-30T17:44:50","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T14:44:50","slug":"milimilim-the-hebrew-corner-gen12-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/milimilim-the-hebrew-corner-gen12-2\/","title":{"rendered":"MiliMiliM – The Hebrew Corner – Gen12"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"36249","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":false,"related_cahpter":"12","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"\u05d2\u05d5\u05d9 \u2013 Goy - Nation","content":"

In Gen 12:2 God says to Abraham: \u201cI will make of you a <\/span>goy gadol, <\/span><\/i>a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There are Yiddish words, or Yiddishly inflected words, taken from Hebrew that are close in meaning to the Hebrew source. And then there are those that have put some distance between themselves and their Hebraic origin. This is one of those words. As you can see from the above translation, the word <\/span>goy<\/span><\/i> in Hebrew means \u201cnation.\u201d It makes no sense to read this as God promising Abraham to make him into \u201ca big non-Jew.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Goy<\/span><\/i>, meaning nation, can refer, as here, to the descendants of Abraham, and later, the people of Israel, as a nation. One of the aspirations of Israel is to become a <\/span>goy kadosh<\/span><\/i>, which does not mean \u201ca sanctimonious gentile.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So how did <\/span>goy<\/span><\/i> come to mean specifically \u201cnon-Jew\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

It came to mean “non-Jew” since the plural \u05d2\u05d5\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd, <\/span>goyi\u02cam<\/span><\/i> (in Biblical as in modern Hebrew the stress being on the final syllable, not as in Yiddish) means “nations,” which by definition are not us, and thus non-Jews. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Note that while the original denotation of this term is completely neutral and non-derogatory, the connotations that have since developed are of course something else entirely. <\/span><\/p>\n

A minor linguistic point: the term makes sense in the plural (<\/span>goyim<\/span><\/i> = gentiles), but the backformation that an individual non-Jew is called a <\/span>goy<\/span><\/i> (literally, “nation”), besides the unavoidable disparaging tone that has accreted, doesn’t make great grammatical sense.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":false,"embedded_video":"","video_duration":"","show_fb_comments":true,"credit_media":""},"tile":{"top_caption":"MiliMiliM - The Hebrew Corner","main_caption":"\u05d2\u05d5\u05d9 \u2013 Goy - Nation","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"... a word from the daily chapter...","preview_embedded":"","preview_image":false,"preview_video":"","external_link":"","link_for_pay":false,"tile_gallery_items":false,"credits":""},"alternate_tile":{"top_caption":"","main_caption":"","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"","hide_media":false},"tile_group":{"preview_image_url":false,"main_caption":"","sub_caption":"","":null,"popup_package_extra_content":"","read_time":""},"home_color":"","home_gallery_top":"","home_gallery_middle":"","home_gallery_book":"","home_gallery_bottom":"","seo":{"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","seo_default_title":"","seo_default_description":""}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36259,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36249\/revisions\/36259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}