Ιούδα - Judah - Son of Jacob, line of the kings of Israel Ιούδας - Judea - Israel’s Southern Kingdom, territory of the tribe of Judah, Roman province akin to the former Southern Kingdom Ἰουδαῖος - Judean - Those from Judea The word “jew” is a mistranslation of the word Judean. Judea was the “seat of power” for Israel. Jerusalem was the capital city, centered in the territory of the tribe of Judah, aka Judea, prior to the split between the tribes into Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Following the decreee of Artaxerxes and the work of Nehemiah, the twelve tribes reunited in their homeland, with God granting them a few decades to get their act together and resume correct worship of the One True God. They failed again, ushering in 400 years of silence, culminating in the arrival of Jesus Christ, God incarnate. During the silence they divided into two heretical camps: spiritualists and pragmatists. The spiritualists practiced divination and sorcery brought back from their time in Babylon, blood magic rituals, and φαρμακεία (pharmakeia - drug induced hallucinations for “visions”). Meanwhile the pragmatists pursued legalism and “salvation through piety,” heaping their own laws and regulations atop God’s Mosaic Law, despite their inability to follow the Mosaic Law in the first place. By the arrival of John the Forerunner (some call the Baptist), the Temple, itself, had fully codified the evils of those adulterating the Way of following the One True God. The whole nation, top to bottom, was in apostasy, led that way by Judea, much the way DC continues to lead America astray from its small but significant geographic foothold. The “synagogue of Satan” was precisely this. It was the formerly Judean leadership, scattered after the razing of Jerusalem in AD 70, consumed with evil, having rejected God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.