Today I got this exception. Pretty obvious? Well, no. The named parameter IS there. (Sidenote: this exception generally means that when trying to call setParameter(..) with a certain param name, that name is not found in the query, in the form :paramName)
The query is generated dynamically on different entities. And it works, except for one.
And that “one” turned out NOT to be an @Entity. But Hibernate wasn’t too helpful on that.

So to summarize, when you attempt to make a query on a non-entity, Hibernate will not complain that it is not an entity – it will complain about other things.