Israel

The Hebrew name Yiśrāʾēl, both the northern kingdom and, more broadly, the people and the patriarch from whom they descend. In Genesis the name is given to Jacob after he wrestles a divine being at the Jabbok, and the text glosses it as “for you have striven with God,” connecting it to the verb śārāh, “to strive”; the element ʾēl is “God.” After the death of Solomon the name attached to the breakaway northern state, while the south kept the dynastic name Judah, and it is in this political sense that Yiśrāʾēl names the kingdom of Samaria that the Assyrians destroyed in 720 BCE.

Yiśrāʾēl is the headwater of a transmission that reached farther than almost any name in this atlas. Through the Greek and Latin Bibles it became the Israēl and Israel of Christendom, through the Qurʾān the Isrāʾīl of Islam, and it remains a living name today, both of a people and of a modern state. The doubleness built into it from the start, a single word that names at once a man, his descendants, and their kingdom, is what let it survive the kingdom’s fall: when Bīt-Ḫumri, the Assyrians’ political name for the state, died with the state, Yiśrāʾēl lived on, because it had never been only the name of a kingdom.

The Assyrian name for the kingdom of Israel, Bīt-Ḫumri, “the House of Omri,” written É-ḫu-um-ri-i with the sign for “house.” It belongs to a regular Assyrian pattern for naming Levantine states after the founder of their ruling dynasty, and Israel was Bīt-Ḫumri after Omri, the ninth-century king who built Samaria. The name runs through the Neo-Assyrian royal annals from Shalmaneser III, whose Kurkh Monolith records the army of “Ahab the Israelite” at the battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE and whose Black Obelisk shows “Jehu son of Omri” bowing in tribute, down to the records of the kingdom’s destruction.

Bīt-Ḫumri is the great counter-name on this page, the one form for Israel that owes nothing to the Bible. Where every other name here descends from the Hebrew Yiśrāʾēl through scripture, the Assyrians named the kingdom as a political fact, after its dynasty, and they kept calling it the House of Omri for more than a century after Jehu had wiped out Omri’s line in a coup, so fixed had the dynastic name become. The Black Obelisk’s “Jehu son of Omri” is the irony in miniature: the Assyrian scribes file the usurper who destroyed the house under the name of the house he destroyed. It is the difference between how a people remembers itself and how an empire files it.

The Greek form of the name, Israēl, the indeclinable transliteration the Septuagint translators used for Hebrew Yiśrāʾēl when they rendered the scriptures into Greek at Alexandria from the third century BCE. Greek had no need to reshape it into a declinable noun, treating it instead as a sacred foreign name, and in that fixed form it runs through the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament, where “Israel” denotes the people of the covenant rather than the long-vanished northern kingdom.

Israēl is the link through which the Hebrew name entered the languages of Christendom essentially unchanged. Unlike Egypt or Persia, whose names the Greeks reshaped into thoroughly Greek words, Israēl kept its Semitic shape because it came to Greek as scripture, not as geography, and a holy name was left as it was found. From this Greek form the Latin Israel follows directly, and behind both stands the Hebrew original, so that the modern European “Israel” is one of the rare ancient Near Eastern names to reach the present with its consonants almost wholly intact across three thousand years and as many scripts.

The Syriac form ʾIsrāʾēl, the name as it stands throughout the Peshitta, the Bible of the Syriac churches. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic closely akin to Hebrew, and it carried Yiśrāʾēl across with little change, the name of the patriarch, the people, and the kingdom alike. The Syriac-speaking Christianity of Mesopotamia made it as central a word as it was in Hebrew and Greek, and the Syriac historians and exegetes used it freely both for the biblical nation and, typologically, for the Church.

ʾIsrāʾēl shows the name holding its shape within its own Semitic family even as it traveled. Hebrew and Syriac are close enough that the form scarcely needed adapting, and so the Syriac entry stands beside the Hebrew almost as a twin, in contrast to the Greek and Latin forms that had to fit the name to alien phonologies, or the Arabic that reshaped it again. On this page Syriac sits between the Hebrew source and the Arabic Isrāʾīl of the Qurʾān, the Aramaic-family midpoint of the name’s long passage through the Semitic languages of the Near East, where it remained recognizably one word from Jacob’s renaming to the Islamic scriptures.

The Latin name Israel, taken from the Greek Israēl of the scriptures and, like it, left undeclined as a sacred proper name. It is the form of the Vulgate and of the entire Latin Christian tradition, sometimes spelled Israhel in older manuscripts; through the liturgy, the Psalms, and the letters of Paul, who wrestles at length with the meaning of “Israel” in Romans, it became one of the most familiar names in the Latin West, denoting the biblical people and, figuratively, the Church as a new Israel.

Israel is the form that carried the name into the modern European languages, English, French, German, and the rest, all of which take it from the Latin essentially unaltered. It is the end of the scriptural Greek-via-Latin chain that this atlas traces for so many names, but with an unusual property: where most such names were reshaped at each step, Israel passed from Hebrew through Greek through Latin and into the modern tongues as very nearly the same word throughout, the sacredness of the name protecting it from the usual erosion. The kingdom of Samaria has been gone for twenty-seven centuries, but the name the Latin Bible fixed is spoken daily across the world.

The Geʿez form ʾƎsrāʾēl, by which the name entered the scriptures and liturgy of the Ethiopian church. The Ethiopic Old Testament was translated from the Greek Septuagint between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries CE, and it carries the Greek Israēl into Geʿez, the patriarch and people of the biblical narrative. In Ethiopia the name acquired an unusual weight beyond the page: the Ethiopian royal tradition, enshrined in the Kebra Nagast, claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and so styled the realm a new Israel, making ʾƎsrāʾēl not merely a foreign scriptural name but part of the kingdom’s own self-image.

ʾƎsrāʾēl is the southernmost reach of the name’s scriptural diffusion, a Hebrew word carried by way of Greek across the Red Sea into a Semitic language of the Horn of Africa. It belongs with the Greek, Latin, and Arabic forms as part of the great post-biblical spread of Yiśrāʾēl through the scriptures of three religions, the branch that reached Aksum. That a highland African kingdom should adopt the name of an Iron Age Levantine state as a badge of its own legitimacy is a measure of how far, and how strangely, the name of the House of Israel has traveled.

The Classical Arabic form Isrāʾīl, the name as it appears throughout the Qurʾān, where Isrāʾīl is the patriarch Jacob and the Banū Isrāʾīl, the Children of Israel, are a people addressed repeatedly across the text; the seventeenth sūra is traditionally titled Banī Isrāʾīl. From scripture the name passed into the whole Arabic historical and exegetical tradition, naming the biblical people and their prophets in the literature of the Islamic world.

Isrāʾīl completes the name’s passage through the scriptures of the three Abrahamic religions, standing in Arabic beside the Hebrew of the Tanakh, the Greek and Latin of the Christian Bible, and the Geʿez of Ethiopia. It is the same word in every case, Yiśrāʾēl recognizable beneath each script’s adjustments, and its presence in the Qurʾān gave it a second vast life across the Arabic-speaking world to match the one it already had in Jewish and Christian usage. The Iron Age kingdom of Samaria, destroyed by Assyria in 720 BCE and known to that empire only as the House of Omri, survives instead by the name its own people used, carried by scripture into more living languages than perhaps any other name in this atlas.