Goyim

גוים


Genesis 14:1: Tid'al (תדעל), king of the Goyim, fought in the War of the Kings. Tidal is identified with Tudkhalya, a Chitite king-name, for which cuneiform texts give Tudghula. The Beney Chet (Hittites) were the progenitors of the northern Kurds, who at that time were called Gutians. Their capital was Gutium which may have given rise to the Yehudit "Goyim".

The term came to mean a people, and later non-Jews in general, probably an ancient recognition that all the peoples of eastern Europe, north Africa and the Levant, which was everybody that the proto-Jews knew, came from the same "Common Source", which was the Hittites (though William Jones never worked that part out!).

Then, when did that change take place, from a specific tribe to a universal generalisation? Genesis 25:23 uses GOYIM to mean "nations", and the context is unequivocal - Rivkah (Rebecca), who came from the absolute heartland of the Hittite reals, Padan Aram, struggling with the twins kicking in her womb, is told by the deity that "SHNEY GOYIM BE VITNECH - two nations are in your womb" - which is usually reckoned to mean the Beney Yisra-El from her second-born Ya'akov (Jacob), and the Beney Edom, from her first-born Esav (Esau)

But: was this how the story had been told for centuries, or did the Ezraic Redactor insert the word GOYIM, replacing, perhaps, the word AMIM? But no, as per the illustration, the earliest known written version, using the Paleo-Hebrew script of Ugarit, has GOYIM.

The root is Gavah (גוה) - though much corrupted - which means "a flowing together"; it is used to mean a valley, in the sense of the confluence of two rivers, though in time dry valleys were also described as Gi'im (e.g. Gey-Hinnom, for example, Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom in Yeru-Shala'im). Is it possible then that Goyim meant "valley-dwellers", as a contrast to Chorim, which originally meant "mountain-dwellers", as did Chivim (Hivites)?

Aside from my speculations, above, the choice of Goyim for "the non-Beney Yisra-Eli nations of the world" appears is generally regarded as something that came about entirely arbitrarily; in exactly the same way Ashkenaz came to be used for the Jews of Europe and Sepharad for the Jews of Spain and its global dominions. Jews from the Middle East are known as Mizrachi, which means "easterners".

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