In the Tanakh, the term "the people of the land" refers to a special social group or caste within the Kingdom of Judah.
[1] By contrast, the plural refers to foreigners, either the nations of the world or the native Canaanite population living in the Land of Israel.
[3] Rubenstein (2003) considers that in the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah, it designates the rural Jews who had remained in the land while the aristocratic and priestly classes were deported to exile in Babylonia.
[6][7][8] In antiquity (Hasmonean to the Roman era, 140 BCE–70 CE), the am ha'aretz were the uneducated rustic population of Judea, as opposed to the learned factions of the Pharisees or Sadducees.
Marriage of a talmid chacham to a daughter of an am ha'aretz is compared to the crossbreeding of grapevine with wild wine, which is "unseemly and disagreeable".