How did Judaism Get its Name?
Below is a script I wrote at BimBam, a Jewish Educational Media Company.
So why is it called Judaism? Christianity is obviously named after Jesus. Buddhism after Buddha. Judaism, less obviously, is named after Judah, which begs the question – who?
Abraham was the first Jew. His grandson Jacob had twelve sons. One of them – not even the most famous one [Go Go Joseph you know what they say] – yeah not that one – one of the other twelve is Judah. So why name it after this guy?
For that, I need to give a little context. At the beginning of the iron age, so around the 10th century BCE, there were 12 tribes, each named after one of the brothers. The tribes joined forces into one Kingdom – kind of like how in America we went from the 13 Colonies and the Article of the Confederacy to a full blown United States. Also like America, there was a Civil War about a hundred years later. Unlike America, the Civil War permanently split the area into two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
The Northern Kingdom was destroyed, and the people who lived there are lost to history – often referred to as the ten lost tribes. All that remained was the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Now, the Bible is the only source we have for any of this so we’re not 100% sure what actually happened 3,000 years ago.
It’s not surprising that, other than the Bible, there’s no written record of any of this. The written records talk about the Egyptians, Babylonians and a dozen other nations that you probably have heard of, as they were all much bigger nations. The Kingdom of Israel and Judah were small players on the world stage. The chances of a written record surviving would be like the chances of someone in the year 5016 discovering a document from modern day France that talks about Idaho. Not impossible, but very hard to find.
But Judah - the Kingdom of Judah is the first place in the bible that’s historically verifiable. It’s the first culture in the bible that’s referenced by other nations in documents that we still have today. And this is the Kingdom Judaism gets its name from. In other words, the religion is named after the first group of people in the bible that we know historically to have actually existed.
After Israel was destroyed, Judah lasted for over a century, until the Babylonians came through, kicked them out, and destroyed the first temple.
Less than 50 years after that, Persia took over the land. The Persian King, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return and to build the second temple. That temple stood for 600 years.
During those 600 years, the name Judaism stuck. By the time the Romans kicked the Jews out, even though there was no longer a kingdom in one solid place, the name Judaism (those formerly from the Kingdom of Judah) was there for good.
So short answer: It’s named after Judah the brother, but more so, it’s named after the Kingdom that survived and seeded the religion we have today.