"Israelite" refers to the whole 12-tribe nation of Israel. The term "Israelean" was coined by H.L. Ginzberg to refer to the northern kingdom. "Israeli" is a totally modern term, coined by Ben-Gurion, to refer to citizens of the modern state of Israel (of whom 20% are not "Israelite").
I have to admit the term "Israelean" is kind of cute. Israelite and
Israeli just don't work for you?
The forms given in the Bible are no proof of anything, since the Bible isSeems like a sweeping generaliziation Yigal. There is such a large
Judahite, and even the "pre-exilic" books were as least heavily edited in
the post-exilic period.
All this was noted by Tur-Sinai decades ago, when he published the Lachish
ostraca found in the 1930's.
corpus of data and many different origins. I would find it
unbelievable to say it is all just Judahite. Surely some of the books
originated from the north and would have preserved some of their
character as such. I would agree though that it might be quite a
jigsaw puzzle at this point to decipher dialects in the recieved text.
I believe some studies have been done on proper names from the Israel
and Judah kingdoms in the Tanakh and some trends were noted.
Unfortuately, I don't have a reference on hand.
Joel Stucki
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