ten people from all the
tongues of the nations shall grasp the border of a Jew’s garment. This
vivid image conveys the sense of throngs of foreigners desperate to join the
people with whom God dwells. The term yehudi, “Jew,” never appears in
earlier biblical literature, although it occurs frequently in Esther, which
also belongs to the Persian period. Yehudi is palpably moving toward the
meaning of “Jew” because it is now hard to speak of a “Judahite” (Hebrew, ben
yehudah), given that the kingdom of Judah no longer exists, having been
replaced by the Persian province of Yehud. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew
Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:1370)
