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Are you a Gentile?
- Bob Lampkin
- Jun 28, 2023
- 4 min read
You may change your mind when you find out what it means.
The Lord is opening my eyes to a great many things through language. Several months ago, I told someone that his maternal grandmother is probably Jewish given her last name after I did some reading about forced conversions in medieval Spain. They recently confirmed through some genetic testing that it is true, his grandmother is Jewish by descent. The Lord moved me today to really press in on these ideas. I just watched another plea, this time by Dr. Michael Brown about the distinction between Jews and Gentiles. I have a burning question though. Why are these words so divisive and problematic? What is a Gentile anyway? Why does it feel like a bad thing? Well, these were my questions. Here is what the Lord led me to find.
THE GENTLEMAN
Despite the fact that my grandmother frequently told me that she wanted me to grow up to be a gentleman, the fact is that I am the son of a bricklayer, who was the son of a bricklayer, and so on. I was not surrounded by the gentlemanly example growing up. But what does a gentleman have to do with being a gentile? Everything actually. Gentile and gentleman both come from Latin, gens (or gente). It refers to the original upper-crust Etruscans and others who ruled Rome from the beginning. They had established family names, land and were considered nobility. Others who were not gens were called, plebes.
Plebes were not all poor from birth, but most were. If you were a gens, there was no question that you were of the upper echelons of Rome and a well-established member. Why was "gentile" chosen as the word to mean non-Jews in the bible? It must have been because Latin-speaking Romans acquired much from the Greeks including the New Testament scriptures. Somewhere, someone decided that the Latin gens was the best way to say a Greek word written in scripture.
In Greek, the parallel word is ethnikos from which we get ethnicity but it was used differently. In ancient times, the idea of race as we use it today was not existent. For ancient Greece, at least according to Polybius, ethnikos included all people that followed certain customs, not just those who had direct blood lineage.
WHAT IS MY ETHNIKOS?
Does the Roman idea of gens/gente fit with scripture? No. The Lord has made no promise to the upper-crust Etruscans who established and ruled Rome. They were not the chosen people. Does the Greek idea of ethnikos fit with scripture? Possibly. There are many verses that speak to joining the Holy Nation and being grafted in. This is in line with the Torah. Any foreigner willing to worship YHWH and follow the laws of the land of Israel was to be treated as part of the nation.
GOY or NO GOY
In today's ethnically charged language set adrift and still dogged by concepts from eugenics theories of the past, we can turn to scripture for clarity, if we are willing to let go of our pre-supposed ideas. Greek ethnikos was chosen because of its closeness in meaning to the Hebrew word goy. This word simply means nation in Biblical Hebrew. In fact, Israel is a goy nation according to scripture. It is a goy kadosh, a holy nation. This holy is not as it is in English meaning lofty and perfect, but rather set apart.
If the Hebrews of antiquity saw no loss in meaning going from Hebrew to Greek using the word ethnikos and understood that whoever lives according to the customs is actually part of the ethnikos, who am I to argue? The question is if everyone is a goy (member of a nation), of what ethnikos (tradition) is your goyism?
PARADOX
Here is the problem with being called a gentile believer. First of all, calling yourself a gentile means accepting the Roman value system of establishing an identity here on earth tied to established power. This is not of the Kingdom. Secondly, if you are Christian and say that Christians are a Holy Nation as goyim (gentiles) then Israel is no longer a Holy (uniquely set apart) nation. If all nations are now separate from Israel and set apart, then Israel has no meaning and no promise because it would be common.
I don't believe that Israel is common by any stretch of the imagination. It is completely unique in the history of humanity. If you were born again, what were you born into if not Israel? If you were grafted in, what were you grafted into if not Israel? To be a believer and deny being a small branch of Israel is to deny the truth. In order to be a Holy Nation, you must be part of the ethnikos of Biblical Israel.
Each day, our ethnikos is to reflect more and more what we find in the Torah. What would you call that according to the people who wrote the scriptures? If you were cut off from the original wild plant (ethnikos) you knew but now are attached to the eternal plant (ethnikos), the one that's uniquely set apart, why do you still call yourself wild?
I am certainly not a gentile.
Are you?
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