Judah () was, according to the Book of Genesis, the fourth of the six sons of Jacob and Leah and the founder of the Tribe of Judah of the Israelites. By extension, he is indirectly the eponym of the Kingdom of Judah, the land of Judea, and the word Jew.
According to the narrative in Genesis, Judah alongside Tamar is a patrilineal ancestor of the Davidic line. The Tribe of Judah features prominently in Deuteronomistic history, which most scholars agree was reduced to written form, although subject to exilic and post-exilic alterations and emendations, during the reign of the Judahist reformer Josiah from 641 to 609 BCE. According to the Christian narrative, he was the ancestor of Jesus.
The Hebrew name for Judah, Yehuda (יהודה), literally "thanksgiving" or "praise," is the noun form of the root Y-D-H (ידה), "to thank" or "to praise." His birth is recorded at Gen. 29:35; upon his birth, Leah exclaims, "This time I will praise the LORD/YHWH," with the Hebrew word for "I will praise," odeh (אודה) sharing the same root as Yehuda. Alternatively, Edward Lipiński connected Hebrew yĕhūdā with Arabic whd / wahda "cleft, ravine".
Judah is the fourth son of the patriarch Jacob and his first wife, Leah: his full brothers are Reuben, Simeon and Levi (all older), and Issachar and Zebulun (younger), and he has one full sister, Dinah. Through his father, he also has six half-brothers: Dan and Naphtali (whose mother is Bilhah), Gad and Asher (whose mother is Zilpah), and Joseph and Benjamin (whose mother is Rachel).
Following his birth, Judah's next appearance is in Gen 37, when he and his brothers cast Joseph into a pit out of jealousy after Joseph approaches them, flaunting a coat of many colors, while they are working in the field. It is Judah who spots a caravan of Ishmaelites coming towards them on its way to Egypt and suggests that Joseph be sold to the Ishmaelites rather than killed. (Gen. 37:26-28, "What profit is it if we slay our brother and conceal his blood? ... Let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our flesh.