Editing Goy (section)

== Evolution of the term ==
{{see also|Gentile}}

While the books of the [[Hebrew Bible]] often use {{lang|he-Latn|goy}} to describe the Israelites, the later Jewish writings of the [[Hellenistic Period]] (from approximately 300 BCE to 30 BCE) tended to apply the term to other nations.<ref name=Rosen-Zvi />

Goy acquired the meaning of someone who is not Jewish in the first and second century CE. Before that time, academics 
Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have argued, no crystallized dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew existed in Judaism.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Rosen-Zvi | first=Ishay | title=What if We Got Rid of the Goy? Rereading Ancient Jewish Distinctions | journal=Journal for the Study of Judaism | publisher=Brill | volume=47 | issue=2 | date=June 10, 2016 | issn=0047-2212 | doi=10.1163/15700631-12340458 | pages=149–182| s2cid=163738717 }}</ref> Ophir and Rosen-Zvi state that the early Jewish convert to Christianity, [[Saint Paul|Paul]], was key in developing the concept of "goy" to mean non-Jew:

{{blockquote
|text="This brilliant Hellenist Jew [Paul] considered himself the apostle of the Christian gospel "to the gentiles," and precisely because of this he needed to define that category more thoroughly and carefully than his predecessors. Paul made the conception that "goyim" are not "peoples," but rather a general category of human beings, into a central element of his thought... ...In the centuries that followed, both the Church and the Jewish sages evoked Paul's binary dichotomy." |author=Haaretz journalist Tomer Persico discussing views of Ophir and Rosen-Zvi<ref name=Persico />}}

The Latin words gentes/gentilis – which also referred to peoples or nations – began to be used to describe non-Jews in parallel with the evolution of the word {{lang|he-Latn|goy}} in Hebrew. Based on the Latin model, the English word "gentile" came to mean non-Jew from the time of the first English-language Bible translations in the 1500s (see [[Gentile]]).

The twelfth century Jewish scholar [[Maimonides]] defines ''goy'' in his [[Mishneh Torah]] as a worshipper of idolatry, as he explains, "Whenever we refer to a gentile [goy] without any further description, we mean one who worships false deities".<ref>{{cite book |last=Maimonides |title=Ma'achalot Assurot |url=https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/968267/jewish/Maachalot-Assurot-Chapter-11.htm |at=chapter 11 verse 8 |translator-last1=Touger |translator-first1=Eliyahu |access-date=2022-11-12 |archive-date=2022-11-12 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221112205412/https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/968267/jewish/Maachalot-Assurot-Chapter-11.htm |url-status=live }}</ref> Maimonides saw Christians as idolators (because of concepts like the [[Trinity]]) but not Muslims who he saw as more strictly monotheistic.<ref name=Yanover />