It is important to use terms appropriately when referring to biblical people. Before Israel became a nation its ancestors would not have been called Israelites. Properly speaking, the ancestors were Hebrew. The term Israelite should be reserved for the people of God from the time of Moses until the time of the exile. The term Jew should be reserved for the descendants of the Israelites beginning with the period after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century B.C.E. when Judaism emerged. The term derives from the name of the tribe of Judah, the only tribe to survive destruction, and still applies to the descendants of Judah today. The term Israeli should not be applied to any biblical people. It refers to citizens of the modern state of Israel, founded in 1948.
