The lexica record the biblical derivation from the root ידה (hiphil הוֹדָה, "give thanks, praise, confess") as the narrator's own etymology rather than an assured one: BDB files יְהוּדָה under ידה ("celebrated, praised"), while HALOT and DCH register the name and treat Genesis 29:35 and 49:8 as paronomasia. The standard comparative argument against the praise derivation is that יְהוּדִית (Judith, Genesis 26:34) predates Judah son of Jacob in the narrative and that יָהְדָּי (Jahdai, 1 Chronicles 2:47) carries the same consonants without any cultic sense. Martin Noth (Die israelitischen Personennamen, 1928, 56) concluded that Judah was in origin a place name later transferred to the tribe, a position followed in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. Two topographic proposals develop it: Shemuel Yeivin derived the name from Arabic wahd ("low ground"), tying it to the Shephelah and to the tribe's originally modest standing and heavy Canaanite admixture (Genesis 38), while Edward Lipiński (Vetus Testamentum 23, 1973, 380-381) connected yĕhūdā with Arabic wahda ("cleft, ravine"), a position he maintained to his 2020 history of the kingdom, where he states flatly that Judah is a toponym and not a people. The theophoric analysis ("may YHWH be praised") remains attractive but morphologically strained: the divine element in Hebrew names is normally vocalized yeho- with holem rather than yehu- with shureq, and the final -āh does not fit a YHWH name, a caution set out in Jeaneane Fowler's Theophoric Personal Names in Ancient Hebrew (JSOTSup 49, 1988). A derivation from הוֹד ("majesty") is a minority variant of the praise family and solves nothing morphologically. Epigraphically Judah first appears in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions of the mid-eighth century: Tiglath-pileser III's Nimrud Tablet K.3751 (Tadmor, RINAP 1 no. 47) lists Ia-ú-ḫa-zi of KUR Ia-ú-da-a-a among western tributaries, and Sennacherib's account of the 701 campaign (Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/1 no. 4, iii 18-37) calls Judah KUR Ia-ú-di and Hezekiah the Judahite. Na'aman's joining of the Azekah fragments (BASOR 214, 1974) added a further 701 witness. The old identification of Zincirli's y'dy (Sam'al) with Judah, floated by Winckler, was refuted by Landsberger (Sam'al, 1948) and is now settled against: Tropper, Dion, and Younger read the northern name as Yādiya, unrelated. The Tel Dan stele's bytdwd ("House of David"), read by Biran and Naveh as a dynastic designation for Judah, is the key ninth-century datum, and the minimalist toponymic reading (Davies) is now a minority view. The date of Judah's statehood remains genuinely open: Finkelstein's Low Chronology places no Judahite state before the eighth century and treats the united monarchy as a later literary construct, Dever and Mazar defend tenth-century state formation, and Na'aman and Faust occupy middle positions, with Khirbet Qeiyafa contested. On the Chronicler's Judah-centrism, Japhet and Williamson stress an idealized David and an "all Israel" centered on Judah, while Knoppers attributes part of the emphasis to the period covered rather than to ideology. The post-exilic province is documented by the Yehud stamp impressions (Lipschits and Vanderhooft, 2011), with the administrative center at Ramat Rahel and Mizpah rather than Jerusalem, and by the Elephantine papyri, where the garrison calls itself yĕhūdaya'. The transition from the geographic gentilic to an ethnic and religious identity is the sharpest live debate: Cohen dates the shift to the Hasmonean period, Mason denies any ancient category of religion at all, and Daniel R. Schwartz, Seth Schwartz, and Reinhartz press back that a religious sense was already emerging in the later Second Temple period.