OBSERVATION JAMES A. DIAMOND OCT. 11 2021 About the author James A. Diamond is a professor of Jewish studies I n this week’s Torah reading of Lekh-l’kha, which deals with Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan and his early adventures there, we see the first appearance in the Bible of one of its most confounding, but also most enduring, words: ivri, which, via Greek and Latin, has come into English as “Hebrew.” How the Bible first uses a word often provides some root sense of what it means, and that is very much the case with this one—which, as I The Confounding Origins of the Term "Hebrew" The word is freighted with both theological and national meaning, which points not just to a semantic tension but to a permanent tension within Jewish identity itself. Abram’s Counsel to Sarai by James Tissot, 1896-1902. The Jewish Museum, New York.