The term Hebrews usually refers to the Children of Israel before and not too long after the excursion into Egypt. After the revelation at Mt. Sinai described in the Book of Exodus, the most common name for this people was the Israelites, until the Kingom of Solomon was split into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Around the time of the Babylonian Captivity, the survivors of the southern kingdom came to be known as Jews (or Yehudi, to use the Hebrew word for a Judaite, although they were not all from the tribe of Judah). This transition shows up clearly in the book of Esther. The term Jews (or other cognates of the Hebrew word Yehudi) remained the dominant term for this group for the next 2500 years, up to the present. Note that in many languages, the term Jew took on such negative connotations that it was not used in polite conversation. This is the case in Russian today and was the case in English 120 years ago). In such cases, words like Hebrew or Israelite came back into use as "polite" euphemisms.