Ah, the joys of interracial love. You, he and your beautiful little…Gasp!…Mamzers, today known as biracials. Or are they? Take a look at a passage from the good book:

^{Deuteronomy 23:2} A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

A lot of people look at the passage and think, a child born out of wedlock. That’s because we are looking at the word through the eyes of the English language.  The original word, mamzer,  was a lot more damning than simply being born OOW.  It referred to the offspring of a “couple” that could never be recognized or legitimized under Jewish law, even if they wanted to marry. That would include a child of incest, adultery, and yes, a mixed marriage.  But like a lot of concepts in the bible, you have to consider the whole picture and not the isolated verse.  When we think of  mixed marriages in the biblical sense, the image of an Israelite and a pagan should come to mind rather than people of different races per se. If you consider verse 3 within the same chapter, the Moabites are similarly rejected:

3: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever:

As mentioned in my first Biblical Swirling post, Ruth was a Moabitess.

People make the racial argument focusing on the word “generations.” As crazy as it sounds, some actually believe that there is a racial element to the word generation. Racists maintain that it takes ten generations for mixed blood to be erased from the genes of a population. So once the genes are ten generations away from race mixing, they are racially acceptable to the Abrahamic God. So in a sense, segregation did exist but not in the same way that is familiar to us.

If being mixed was an abomination, why would a person of mixed heritage become a recognized inspired figure of the New Testement (Acts 16)?

Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek:

² Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium.

³ Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek.

That’s right! Timothy (of I and II Timothy) was the child of a mixed marriage.  So, are mixed children an abomination? Probably to someone truly ignorant.