That the “Jews” are neither Israel nor Judah may be difficult for some to grasp. With this paper it will be shown that there is an appropriate usage for each of these three terms. Therefore, to use them synonymously (as if all three had the same identical meaning) exhibits gross ignorance on the part of the one speaking or writing with such an inference. It will be demonstrated that the house of Judah is not the house of Israel, nor is the house of Israel the house of Judah in a national sense! It was after the death of Solomon, under King Rehoboam, that the house of Israel and the house of Judah became two separate entities. Now one might properly call all twelve and/or thirteen tribes of Israel “Israelites”, but it would be improper to call any one or all of the ten northern tribes by the term “Judah”. It is also urgently imperative that we do not use the term Judah to mean “Jew”, nor the term “Jew” to mean Judah! (“ ” around Jew = disowning the term.)
180° DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JEW & JUDAH
To grasp the extreme contrast between “Jew” and Judah, one must comprehend some of the activity involved in the worship of Baal among both the northern kingdom of Israel as well as the southern kingdom of Judah. Baal is a term that designates several gods, but in particular the god Hadad, a popular fertility-god of Canaan. Another Baal-god of note is Dagon. There was also the Amorite Baal representing the god of rain and storm. Israel and Judah had been warned by Yahweh not to get involved in the gods of Canaan, but to drive all the Canaanites out of the land, and their gods with them, which they failed to do. Because most of the Bible dictionaries and commentaries use veiled language to describe Baal worship, many do not realize the danger it imposed to Israel and Judah. For instance, the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible says this in vol. 1, p. 433 under “Baal”: “... It was attended by the appropriate response from the worshipers, culminating in grossly sensuous rites accompanying the sacred marriage, in which ritual prostitution of both sexes was a prominent feature.” Had this source described these rites as sexual orgies practiced with reckless abandon, the reader might absorb what is being said. To make a long story short, some of the women of Judah and Israel were becoming pregnant, giving birth to half-breed Canaanite children. Not only that, but by the same sexual rites, Canaanite women were also giving birth to half-breed Judahite children.
I will now borrow a passage from William Finck’s Broken Cisterns, #2: “In the first tract of this title, the sexual nature of certain ancient pagan cult religions was investigated, namely those of Baal (Bel or Belus) and Ashtaroth (Astartê or Aphroditê). Hopefully the realization was made – from the historians’ descriptions of these cults and from the utterances of the Hebrew prophets – that by following the so-called ‘religious’ cults of the alien peoples, it was necessary to have sexual relations with those peoples: for sex was at the core of those pagan cults!