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Concept
Gentile
Summary
Gentile (ˈdʒɛntaɪl) is a word that usually means "someone who is not a Jew". Other groups that claim Israelite heritage, notably Mormons, sometimes use the term gentile to describe outsiders. More rarely, the term is used as a synonym for heathen or pagan. As a term used to describe non-members of a religious/ethnic group, gentile is sometimes compared to words used to describe the "outgroup" in other cultures (see List of terms for ethnic exogroups).
In some translations of the Quran, gentile is used to translate an Arabic word that refers to non-Jews and/or people not versed in or not able to read scripture.
The English word gentile derives from the Latin word gentilis, meaning "of or belonging to the same people or nation" (). Archaic and specialist uses of the word gentile in English (particularly in linguistics) still carry this meaning of "relating to a people or nation." The development of the word to principally mean "non-Jew" in English is entwined with the history of Bible translations from Hebrew and Greek into Latin and English. Its meaning has also been shaped by Rabbinical Jewish thought and Christian theology which, from the 1st century, have often set a binary distinction between "Jew" and "non-Jew."
Gens and Goy
"Gentile" derives from Latin gentilis, which itself derives from the Latin gens, meaning clan or tribe. Gens derives from the Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh1tis, meaning birth or production. The original meaning of "clan" or "family" was extended in post-Augustan Latin to acquire the wider meaning of belonging to a distinct nation or ethnicity. Later still, the word came to refer to other nations, 'not a Roman citizen'.
In Saint Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, gentilis was used along with gentes, to translate Greek and Hebrew words with similar meanings when the text referred to the non-Israelite peoples. The most important of such Hebrew words was goy (, plural, goyim), a term with the broad meaning of "people" or "nation" which was sometimes used to refer to Israelites, but with the plural form goyim tending to be used in the Bible to refer to non-Israelite nations.
Official source
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