goy

This is the word for a nation in the fullest public sense: a population that holds territory, has rulers, and stands as one body among the powers of the world. It pictures a people from the outside, by the marks a stranger would notice, its land, its kings, its armies, its sheer numbers, rather than from the inside by shared blood or family memory.

Because it views a people this way, it can name any nation at all, including Israel. God's promise to make Abraham into a great one of these (Genesis 12:2) and his calling of Israel to be a holy one (Exodus 19:6) use this very word, framing Israel as a real nation on the world stage. So do the lists in Genesis 10 that sort all of humanity into its peoples after the flood.

The heavy use of the plural for the surrounding peoples (see the second meaning) grew out of this basic sense and never fully separated from it. When the prophets scatter Israel "among the nations," the same word covers both Israel and the peoples she is scattered among.

In the plural this word became the standard name for everyone who was not Israel: the foreign peoples, what later tradition calls the gentiles. It is less a count of separate nations than a single category, the outside world set over against the covenant people.

The tone is often dark. These peoples are the ones whose practices Israel must not copy (Deuteronomy 18:9), who rage against the Lord and his anointed (Psalm 2:1), whom God will judge, and among whom a disobedient Israel is scattered as punishment (Ezekiel pictures this again and again). The word carries the sense of the unclean outsider so strongly that the prophets can shame Israel by calling her one of them.

Yet the same word also carries the hope that this outside world will one day be drawn in. The peoples will stream to the Lord's mountain (Isaiah 2:2 to 4), all of them will be blessed through Abraham's offspring (Genesis 18:18; 22:18), and the servant is given as a light to them (Isaiah 49:6). So the category that names those far off is also the category God means to gather.

A handful of times the plural form is frozen into a name rather than used as an ordinary noun. Tidal is called king of Goyim (Genesis 14:1, 9), as though "Nations" were the name of his realm or coalition, and the same name appears in a list of conquered kings (Joshua 12:23).

It also stands in the compound place name Harosheth-hagoyim, the base of Sisera's forces in the Deborah story (Judges 4:2, 13, 16). English Bibles usually keep this untranslated as a place name. These uses are the reason the lexicons separate out a proper-name entry; the meaning is simply a label, carrying none of the rich sense the common word has elsewhere.