Entity beans persist. Entity beans exist. Entity beans are. They are object representations of something in an underlying persistent store. (Think: database, because most entity beans represent something from a relational database.) If you have a Customer entity bean, then one bean might represent the entity Tyler Durden, ID #343, while another is the entity Donny Darko, ID #42. Two beans, representing two real entities. An entity bean is simply a realization of something that already exists in a persistent store. Something that already is. And these suckers are hard to kill! As long as the data is in the database, it can keep coming back in the form of an entity bean.