That sounds odd, but it could just be an artifact of the chosen transliteration into English. The King James bible often refers to Israelites (so via Greek, apparently) instead of simply Israelis (closer to the Hebrew).
The date you mention is the birthday of the country of Israel. Before that date, there was no adjective “Israeli”, because there was no country of that name.
So the word “Hebrew” was used–in the Hebrew language*, as well as in English.
It died out quite quickly after 1948, when the newly created, and newly named, country of Israel intentionally stopped using the word Hebrew, and proudly switched to the adjective “Israeli”.
*It’s pronounced “ivri”-. For fun, and language buffs here’s why: the first letter I represents the H , the second letter V is a B in the English alphabet, the R is,yes, an R, and the second letter I is the W . So HBRW in the English alphabet becomes IVRI in Hebrew, and it actually makes sense.
Folk/joke etymology? The first I is attached to the consonant ʕ, not H (there is no H in the word), and the final I is… an I, not W. The English word again derives from the Greek.
There’s a famous quote from a speech David Ben-Gurion made in 1963: “Let every Hebrew mother know that she has placed the fate of her sons in the hands of worthy commanders.” It’s become an Israeli army motto; I’ve seen it stenciled on the walls of many a base.
“Hebrew”, in this sense, has become one of of those archaic/poetic words popular among pundits and politicians. It’s similar to referring to the British as “Britons”, or using the word “Gallic” to describe the French.
Wow. You sure got me. A 70-year-old usage, yeah, that’s real cutting edge stuff. I said usage dropped after Israel became a country and you’ve provided an example … that didn’t occur after Israel became a country but on the day of its birth when Hebrew was still the ordinary term. So take that, me. I mean, I said explicitly that nobody has ever used musty in those 70 years since. No, wait, I tangled that sentence. I meant to write, nobody has ever said explicitly that the term hasn’t been used since. That would be nuts. Hard to imagine anyone trying to make a case for them. But there you went and implied it. Oh, I tangled an earlier sentence too. I should have written, you sure got you. So much nonsense packed into so little space.
I was just wondering if the use of the word in the 1948 example would have passed completely without notice back then, or was it a poetic use of the word as is obviously the case in the 1963 example. That does not contradict your contention that such uses are today exclusively archaic or poetic. One could hardly argue otherwise.
In the 1948 quote, was it an ordinary term among others used at the time, or was it potentially politically loaded? Or an unremarkable use of a word in a way that was already kind of old-fashioned in 1948 but not eyebrow-raising as it would be today?