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Who are the gentiles?
Your question led me to an entry in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia on the subject of Gentiles. It begins as follows:
A word of Latin origin (from “gens”; “gentilis”), designating a people not Jewish, commonly applied to non-Jews. The term is said (but falsely so) to imply inferiority and to express contempt. If used at all by Jews of modern times—many of them avoiding it altogether, preferring to speak of “non-Jews”—this construction of its implications must certainly be abandoned as contrary to truth.
The meat of your question, though, is not what the term gentile means, but how gentiles came to exist in the first place. I Googled around and discovered several decent sources — all Christian. To provide an answer, I consulted one of the more reputable-looking sites that addressed your question: the aptly named GotQuestions.org.
The site says there are two main theories. The first is that the descendants of Seth, himself a descendant of Adam and Eve, were “always separate from the rest of humanity” and became Jews while all others were Gentiles. The second theory is that Jews and Gentiles went their separate ways when God selected Abraham “to be the father of His chosen nation.”
The site adds that until Abraham came along, there was no requirement that a chosen people, the Jews, not intermarry with gentiles. The anti-intermarriage rule was fleshed out when Moses received the commandments. GotQuestions.org claims that Abraham is commonly considered the first Jew, though it was the tribe of Judah (get it? “Jew”-dah?) that produced the actual term.
Still, when it comes to pinpointing the Jew-Gentile fork in the road, the safest bet seems to be Jacob, one of Abraham’s grandsons. All of his descendants were members of the chosen people. In contrast, Abraham’s grandson Esau, son of Ishmael, “was not of the chosen line.” Jacob’s 12 sons became the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. Once you’re talking about the 12 tribes, you’re talking about the ancient Jewish people.
