Interfaith Marriage in Judaism - in The Bible

In The Bible

The Biblical position on exogamous marriage is somewhat ambiguous; that is, except in relation to intermarriage with a Canaanite, which the majority of the Israelite patriarchs are depicted as criticising. This attitude is formalised in the Deuteronomic Code, which forbids intermarriage with Canaanites, on the basis that it might lead to a son, resulting from the union, being brought up to follow the Canaanite religion. The principle is essentially a general one, and the deuteronomic explanation doesn't clarify why it singles out the Canaanites in particular; one of the Talmudic writers took it to forbid all intermarriage with non-Jewish nations. In Numbers 25, Phineas is praised by God for having punished an Israelite prince who publicly cohabited with a Midianite woman (not from the seven Canaanite nations); this took place at a time when foreign (Moabite) women were inducing the Jews to perform idolatry.

In several places in the Jewish Bible, there are relations which appear to be intermarriages - for example, King David is described as marrying the daughter of the king of Geshur, and Bathsheba as having married Uriah the Hittite. Deuteronomy itself implies that intermarriage to Edomites or Egyptians was acceptable, by permitting the grandchildren of such people to be treated as Israelites. Traditional commentators generally explain such verses as referring to situations where the Gentile partner had converted, and explicitly so in the latter case, where grandchildren are understood as being the grandchldren of converts. In places, traditional commentators suggest that the person involved is not a Gentile, but a Jew who has lived in a Gentile country, or that the law of the captive woman is involved.

In any case, after the Babylonian Captivity disquiet seems to have arisen about such exogamy; the Book of Malachi declares that the intermarriages that had occurred were a profanity, and several Jewish leaders eventually made a formal complaint to Ezra about these marriages. Ezra definitively extended the law against intermarriage to forbid marriage between a Jew and any non-Jew; he also excommunicated those people who refused to divorce their foreign spouses.