In the beginning...

Hibernate was started in 2001 by Gavin King as an alternative to using EJB2-style entity beans.  Its mission back then was to simply offer better persistence capabilities than offered by EJB2 by simplifying the complexities and allowing for missing features.

Early in 2003, the Hibernate development team began Hibernate2 releases which offered many significant improvements over the first release and would go on to catapult HIbernate as the "de facto" standard for persistence in Java...

Hibernate3, JPA, etc...