The Hebrews (Hebrew עִבְרִים, ʿIvrim; singular ʿIvri) are, in the Hebrew Bible, Abraham and the people descended from him, a name used mostly by foreigners or in speaking to them; the people call themselves Israel. \nThe Raëlian canon calls the people of Israel the people made by the creator team whose laboratory lay in that land, chosen by the creators and descended from them\n, and offers the link between those two statements tentatively.
\nThe word first appears in Genesis 14:13, when a fugitive from the war of the kings comes to tell \"Abram the Hebrew\" (Avram ha-ʿIvri) that his nephew has been taken captive. The derivation of ʿIvri is one of the long-standing open questions of biblical philology. The commentary of the Wheel of Heaven Genesis translation sets out three readings at that verse, and none of them is settled (GEN-WOH-14:13).
\nThe first reading derives ʿIvri from Eber (עֵבֶר), the descendant of Shem. The Genesis genealogies support it: Shem is \"the father of all the children of Eber\" (Genesis 10:21), and the line runs from Shem through Eber to Terah and Abram (11:14–26). Nahum M. Sarna, the Brandeis University scholar whose JPS Torah Commentary on Genesis (1989) joins philology to traditional Jewish interpretation, takes this derivation at Genesis 14:13 (p. 107). Claus Westermann, the Heidelberg form critic, treats Eber's place in the table of nations in his commentary on Genesis 1–11.
\nThe second reading derives the word from the noun ʿeber, \"the region beyond, across\". Joshua 24:2–3 places the ancestors \"beyond the River\", the Euphrates, and the Septuagint renders Genesis 14:13 with peratēs, \"the one from across\".
\nThe third reading connects ʿIvri with the ḫabiru or ʿapiru of second-millennium texts from Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, including the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE. There the term names a social class rather than a people: displaced and stateless men who appear as mercenaries, labourers, refugees and raiders. The three readings are not strictly exclusive. Some scholars propose that an inherited social term was later attached to the eponym Eber and to the geographical sense (GEN-WOH-14:13).
\nThe distribution of the word is informative. In the Joseph story, Potiphar's wife calls Joseph \"a Hebrew\" before her household (Genesis 39:14), and the Egyptians may not eat with \"the Hebrews\" (43:32). In Exodus, Pharaoh's daughter recognizes \"one of the Hebrews' children\" (Exodus 2:6), and Moses is to tell Pharaoh that \"Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, hath met with us\" (3:18). The Philistines speak of \"the camp of the Hebrews\" (1 Samuel 4:6; compare 13:19). Jonah, asked by foreign sailors who he is, answers \"I am a Hebrew\" (Jonah 1:9). In nearly every case the word is used by foreigners about Israelites, or by Israelites speaking to foreigners. Among themselves the people are benei Yisraʾel, \"the children of Israel\". Some laws keep an older, possibly social sense, as in the rule for \"a Hebrew servant\" (Exodus 21:2).
\nAfter the Babylonian exile the common names became \"Israel\" and Yehudim, \"Judeans\" or \"Jews\", and \"Hebrew\" came to name chiefly the language, the subject of the Hebrew entry. Greek-speaking Jews and early Christians kept the older word as a mark of descent and tradition: Paul calls himself \"a Hebrew of Hebrews\" (Philippians 3:5), and one New Testament epistle bears the title \"To the Hebrews\".
\nThis entry uses \"Hebrews\" for the biblical people as a scope convention. The historical ʿIvrim are cited history here. The canon speaks of \"the people of Israel\", \"the Jews\" and \"the chosen people\", and the framework asserts nothing about the ʿIvrim, the ḫabiru, or any archaeological population beyond what the canon says about Israel.
\nMainstream archaeology traces Israel to the highland villages that appear in the central hill country of Canaan in Iron Age I, from about 1200 BCE. Israel Finkelstein, the Tel Aviv University archaeologist, and Neil Asher Silberman argue in The Bible Unearthed (2001) that this population was largely continuous with the Canaanite culture around it. On their account, its distinguishing traits emerged gradually, and the biblical narratives of the patriarchs and the exodus took their present form during the monarchy. The first mention of Israel outside the Bible is the victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah, from the late thirteenth century BCE, which names Israel as a people in Canaan.
\nThe Hebrew Bible states Israel's election in its own terms. The call of Abraham promises that \"in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed\" (Genesis 12:3). At Sinai the covenant is conditional and vocational: \"if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be mine own possession from among all peoples: for all the earth is mine: and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation\" (Exodus 19:5–6). Deuteronomy gives the reason for the choice and explicitly denies that it rests on any quality of the people:
\n\n\nFor thou art a holy people unto Jehovah thy God: Jehovah thy God hath chosen thee to be a people for his own possession, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth. Jehovah did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all peoples: but because Jehovah loveth you, and because he would keep the oath which he sware unto your fathers, hath Jehovah brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 7:6–8)
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Election in this theology means obligation as much as privilege. Amos makes the point in its sharpest form: \"I have only chosen you of all the families of the earth. Therefore I will punish you for all of your sins\" (Amos 3:2; the Hebrew verb is literally \"known\"). Jewish tradition has continued to read election through covenant and commandment, and the blessing recited before the reading of the Torah thanks God \"who has chosen us from all peoples and given us his Torah\". This self-understanding belongs to Judaism, and the canon's account set out below does not supersede it.
\n\nThe framework reads the Hebrew Bible as a compressed, transmitted and theologically reworked record of the creators' engagement with humanity\n. That posture licenses no specific reading. The reading of Israel rests on the canon's own statements, in The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974), Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975) and Let's Welcome the Extraterrestrials (1979). The three books belong to one authorial tradition, so their agreement counts as one source.
\nThe canon places one of the creator teams, \"one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant\", in \"the country you today call Israel\", then near Greece and Turkey on the single continent. \nIt calls that team's territory \"what you call the earthly paradise\"\n, the subject of the Eden entry, and says \"the man created there was the most intelligent\" (TBWTT-2:28). The canon names the country but no site within it, and the framework identifies none. The canon then refers to competitions among the creator teams, held to judge their work:
\n\n\nEt surtout le peuple d'Israël, qui fut lors d'un de ces concours dont je vous parlais précédemment, élu par le jury scientifique comme le type humanoïde terrestre le plus réussi sur le plan intelligence et génie. Ce qui explique que ce peuple s'est toujours considéré comme le peuple élu de Dieu.
\nAnd especially the people of Israel, who, during one of those competitions I spoke to you about earlier, were chosen by the scientific jury as the most successful terrestrial humanoid type in terms of intelligence and genius. This explains why this people has always considered itself the people chosen by God. (TBWTT-2:43)
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\nThe canon gives the creators' judgement at that competition as the origin of Israel's self-understanding as the chosen people\n. The framework records this as the canon's account of how a self-understanding arose. It does not adopt it as a ranking of peoples, and it makes no claim about the abilities or worth of any person. Where the canon uses the word \"race\" (TBWTT-2:43; LWTE-1:18), that is the canon's 1970s wording, and it is not a category of this corpus.
\nThe second canonical book adds a different statement: \"the Jews are our direct descendants on the Earth … They are the descendants of the sons of Elohim and the daughters of men of whom Genesis speaks\" (ETTMTTP-2:104; restated for \"the people of Israel\" at 2:123). The reference is to Genesis 6:1–4, where the benei ha-elohim, the \"sons of Elohim\" (a Hebrew word plural in form), take wives from among the daughters of men. \nThe framework identifies the unions of Genesis 6 with the exiled creators' unions with human women in the canon's account\n. The questions about who the Watchers and the Nephilim were, which the framework keeps distinct, belong to those entries.
\nThe canon's own readers saw a tension between a people elected as a laboratory creation and a people descended from the creators. In the third book a reader asks directly: \"Is this not contradictory?\" (LWTE-1:17). The answer is the canon's harmonization, given by Raël in his commentary voice rather than in a dictated Message, and it is tentative:
\n\n\nLe peuple qui fut élu par nos créateurs les Elohim comme étant le plus réussi était le peuple d'Israël, le peuple qui avait été créé dans le laboratoire situé à cet endroit de notre planète. C'est peut-être justement parce que ce peuple était le plus réussi que les fils d'Elohim se laissèrent tenter par leurs filles et en eurent des enfants dont descend effectivement le peuple juif.
\nThe people chosen by our creators the Elohim as the most successful was the people of Israel, the people that had been created in the laboratory located at that place on our planet. It is perhaps precisely because this people was the most successful that the sons of Elohim let themselves be tempted by its daughters and had children by them, from whom the Jewish people does indeed descend. (LWTE-1:18)
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\nThe canon reconciles its two statements by making the laboratory-made people of Israel the population by whose daughters the sons of Elohim \"let themselves be tempted\" and had children, so that it became the Jewish people\n. It offers this link with a \"perhaps\" (peut-être). The framework therefore presents the election and the descent as two canonical statements with a tentative bridge between them. It does not present them as one settled genealogy. The canon speaks of descent through the unions of Genesis 6 and does not speak of genetics, and the framework asserts no population-genetic claim.
\nThe canon also narrates Israel's history as a tutelage. It reads the exodus as the creators' work to free the people of Israel, which they guided \"to the country we intended for them\" (TBWTT-3:10). It reads the later deportation and dispersion as a sanction, taking up 2 Kings 17:23, where the Bible gives the exile of the northern kingdom as judgement (TBWTT-3:140–142). The earlier dispersal at Babel has its own reading, set out in that entry. \nThe canon describes Israel as entrusted with a message meant for all humanity, which it kept \"jealously\" instead of spreading, and the Jewish people as the preservers of the Bible, which serves as testimony to the creators' coming\n (ETTMTTP-2:124; TBWTT-4:35, 5:25). It reads the twentieth-century return of Jews to the land as one of the signs it lists for the present age, the people of Israel having \"participated in the safeguarding of the truth\" (TBWTT-3:225; 5:25, 5:31).
\nThe scope of the reading is narrow by design. It makes no population-genetic claim and no claim of biological superiority, and it says nothing about the worth of any individual. It does not identify the canon's \"people of Israel\" with the historical ʿIvrim, with the ḫabiru, or with any archaeological population beyond what the canon itself states. It does not present a single settled line of descent, because the canon does not. It also leaves Jewish election theology in its own terms: Deuteronomy's account of a choice made in love and kept by oath is a different account of election, and the canon's account does not replace it.
\nCovenant election. The strongest textual counter comes from the Hebrew Bible itself. Deuteronomy 7:7–8 grounds Israel's election in love and in the oath sworn to the ancestors, \"not because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all peoples\". The Bible's own theory of election is not based on merit, and on this view the canon's competition reading inverts it, giving as the reason for the choice exactly the kind of quality Deuteronomy rules out.
\nEthnogenesis. On the archaeological account, Israel emerged from an Iron Age I highland population largely continuous with Canaanite culture and is first named outside the Bible on the Merneptah stele. No lineage of this population reaches back to a primordial creation.
\nInternal tension. The canon's two statements, an elected laboratory population and the descendants of the unions, were read as contradictory by the canon's own readers (LWTE-1:17). The harmonization that answers them, Raël's own commentary, is explicitly tentative, so no single genealogy can be presented as the canon's settled position.
\nSociological account. Susan J. Palmer, the Canadian sociologist of new religious movements, studies the Raëlian movement from fieldwork in Aliens Adored (2004), including its project of an embassy in Israel. A sociological reading links the canon's emphasis on Israel to that embassy strategy and to the founder's own account of his Jewish father (TBWTT-1:46; ETTMTTP-1:7), rather than to independent memory.
\nEthical objection. Ranking peoples by \"intelligence and genius\" has a harmful reception history, whatever the intention behind it. Any public statement of the competition clause carries that risk. The objection stands at full strength, and it is the reason for the limits this entry sets out above.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["ʿIvrim (Hebrew עִבְרִים)","ʿIvri (singular, עִבְרִי)","Israelites (benei Yisraʾel)","Hebraioi (Greek)","Hebraei (Latin)"],"category":"Peoples & Groups","claim_type":"framework","core_claim_ids":["woh-claim-0076","woh-claim-0018","woh-claim-0012","woh-claim-0017","woh-claim-0009","woh-claim-0053"],"core_versions":{"woh-claim-0009":"0.1.1","woh-claim-0012":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0017":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0018":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0053":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0076":"0.1.2"},"editorial_pass":"2026-05","entry_type":"people","infobox":{"etymologies":"From the eponym Eber (Genesis 10:21; 11:14–17); from *ʿeber*, 'beyond, across' (Joshua 24:2–3; Septuagint *peratēs*); in connection with the *ḫabiru / ʿapiru* of second-millennium texts. None is settled","first_attested":"Genesis 14:13, 'Abram the Hebrew'","framework_reading":"The canon's people of Israel: made by the creator team of that land, judged the most successful at a competition, and descended from the unions of Genesis 6, a link the canon offers tentatively","hebrew":"עִבְרִי *ʿIvri* (singular); עִבְרִים *ʿIvrim* (plural)","jewish_self_understanding":"Election by covenant, love and oath (Exodus 19:5–6; Deuteronomy 7:6–8)","mainstream_origin":"Israel emerges from an Iron Age I highland population; first named outside the Bible on the Merneptah stele (late 13th century BCE)","type":"Biblical name for Abraham and his descendants; in the canon, the people of Israel","usage":"Mostly by foreigners about Israelites, or by Israelites speaking to foreigners (Genesis 39–43; Exodus 1–3; 1 Samuel 4, 13–14; Jonah 1:9)"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","references":[{"id":"the-book-which-tells-the-truth","locator":"TBWTT-2:28 (the Israel team; the man created there the most intelligent); 2:43 (the competition; 'le peuple élu'); 3:9–10 (the liberation); 3:140–142 (the dispersion); 3:225 (the return as a sign); 4:35; 5:24–25, 5:31 (the return; the Bible preserved by the Jewish people)"},{"id":"extraterrestrials-took-me-to-their-planet","locator":"ETTMTTP-2:104 and 2:123 (the Jews as the creators' direct descendants through the unions of Genesis 6); 2:124 (the message kept 'jalousement')"},{"id":"lets-welcome-the-extraterrestrials","locator":"LWTE-1:16–18 ('Le peuple d'Israël et les juifs': the reader's question and the canon's tentative answer)"},{"id":"genesis","locator":"GEN-WOH-14:13 (first occurrence of ha-ʿIvri, with the commentary's three etymologies); GEN-WOH-6:1–4 (the sons of Elohim and the daughters of men); 10:21, 11:14–17 (Eber)"},{"id":"exodus","locator":"Exodus 1–3 and 21:2 (the Hebrews in Egypt; 'the God of the Hebrews'; the Hebrew servant); 19:5–6 (the covenant at Sinai)"},{"id":"deuteronomy","locator":"Deuteronomy 7:6–8 (election grounded in love and oath, 'not because ye were more in number')"},{"id":"sarna-genesis-jps","locator":"p. 107, on Genesis 14:13 — ʿIvri derived from the eponym Eber (as cited in the GEN-WOH-14:13 commentary)"},{"id":"westermann-genesis-1-11","locator":"On the table of nations, Genesis 10:21–25 — Shem as 'the father of all the children of Eber' (page not verified)"},{"id":"finkelstein-bible-unearthed","locator":"The archaeological account of Israel's emergence from the Iron Age I highland population; the Merneptah stele"},{"id":"aliens-adored","locator":"The academic account of the Raëlian movement, its embassy project and its reading of Israel"}],"same_as":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrews"],"see_also":[{"description":"The language named after the people, and the language of most of the Hebrew Bible.","path":"wiki/hebrew","title":"Hebrew"},{"description":"The first person the Bible calls a Hebrew (Genesis 14:13).","path":"wiki/abraham","title":"Abraham"},{"description":"The leader of the exodus, the canon's account of the creators' liberation of the people of Israel.","path":"wiki/moses","title":"Moses"},{"description":"The territory of the creator team whose laboratory lay, in the canon's account, in the land now called Israel.","path":"wiki/eden","title":"Eden"},{"description":"The offspring named in Genesis 6:4, the chapter the canon cites for the unions of the sons of Elohim with the daughters of men.","path":"wiki/nephilim","title":"Nephilim"},{"description":"The dispersal episode of Genesis 11, which the canon reads as a post-flood recovery project.","path":"wiki/babel","title":"Babel"},{"description":"The record the canon says the Jewish people preserved as testimony.","path":"wiki/hebrew-bible","title":"Hebrew Bible"},{"description":"The sanctuary of the wilderness narrative, which the canon reads as a residence built to the creators' plans.","path":"wiki/tabernacle","title":"Tabernacle"}],"summary":"The Hebrews (ʿIvrim) are, in the Hebrew Bible, Abraham and the line descended from him, a name used mostly by foreigners or in speaking to them. The Raëlian canon speaks instead of the people of Israel: the people made by the creator team in that land and judged the most successful at a competition among the teams, and the people descended from the unions of Genesis 6, two statements the canon links only with a 'perhaps'. Jewish tradition grounds Israel's election in covenant, love and oath."} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/hebrews/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/hebrews/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "hebrew", "title": "Hebrew", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/hebrew/" },{"slug": "abraham", "title": "Abraham", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/abraham/" },{"slug": "moses", "title": "Moses", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/moses/" },{"slug": "eden", "title": "Eden", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/eden/" },{"slug": "nephilim", "title": "Nephilim", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/nephilim/" },{"slug": "babel", "title": "Babel", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/babel/" },{"slug": "hebrew-bible", "title": "Hebrew Bible", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/hebrew-bible/" },{"slug": "tabernacle", "title": "Tabernacle", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/tabernacle/" }] } }