So what is a child whose parents could marry but choose not to, or whose mother refused to reveal the father?
Sidenote: I heard a televangelist addressing this one time and saying that “It doesn’t mean a child born to unmarried parents” because, you know, it would be wrong and unreasonable to ban a child AND his descendants to the tenth generation from entering the temple because he was illegitimate. It meant “a child whose parents were a religiously mixed marriage”.
Well, that’s alright then. Banning the great-great-great-great-grandsons of those kinds of people just makes good sense.
For another perspective, I just checked an Artscroll (major Orthodox Jewish publishing company) chumash and their English version is “A man with crushed testicles or a severed organ shall not enter the congregation of Hashem.” The commentary explains, “Any man whose reproductive organs have been severely damaged, so that he is impotent, may not marry. If, however, the disability came about through natural means, such as a birth defect or illness, this prohibition does not apply (Rambam, Hilchos Issurei Biah 15).” The entire section is under Parsha Ki Seitzei and is titled “Forbidden and restricted marriages.”
At least a trace of this continued in the Catholic Church: people with deformed hands were not permitted to become priests and say Mass. This even applied to already ordained priests who were injured. Even if the injury happened in the service of the church.
Father (eventually martyr & saint) Saint Isaac Jogues, a French missionary in North America, was captured and tortured by a Mohawk tribe, including cutting off his right thumb. After that, he recieved a special dispensation from the Pope to allow him to continue to say Mass with a deformed hand.
Who the father was didn’t matter to whether the child was a bastard or not. Only a child born to a married woman but not fathered by her husband was a bastard. A child born to an unmarried woman could not be a bastard, so it wouldn’t matter if the parents married or not.
Solomon, who built the Temple, was the son of an adulteress and his older brother (who God killed in infancy) was conceived through adultery. Did Solomon get a pass because God killing the baby evened out everything and now that David had gotten Uriah killed they were considered legally married (whatever that entailed in a royal polygamous household)?
I don’t think Solomon himself was the product of an adulterous union - Bathsheba and David were married to each other when he was conceived and born. The child born first to David and Bathsheba would have been considered a bastard in that sense, since he was conceived when Bathsheba was still married to Uriah the Hittite. But that child died, as you mention.
So Solomon didn’t need any pass - his parents were married to each other.
A bit off topic, but the Bible always distinguishes between wives and concubines, even with Solomon who had 700 of the one and 300 of the other respectively. Does anybody know if there would have been a formal ceremony for taking an umpteenth polygamous wife as with David and Solomon, or if the king declaring “this woman is my wife” was enough?
For that matter, when Absalom chased his father from Jerusalem he shagged all of the concubines his father left behind. Assuming hypothetically he had fathered a child with one while doing this, would that child be considered a bastard in that sense, OR were concubines incapable of committing adultery since they were not wives?
David and Batsheva’s first child would have been a mamzer, I believe, but after they married their children were legally legitimate. It isn’t anything to do about morally evening anything out, it’s about legal and ritual status. (David, in case you hadn’t noticed, had a real thing about other men’s wives; the brilliant Abigail is another case in point, as is the very uncomfortable part of the story where he only decides he definitely fancies Michal after she’s already married someone else.)
The Bible makes a point of saying Michal was childless with both husbands, but either husband that she had kids with (other than David on the first go-round) an argument could be made for legitimacy or illegitimacy.
This agrees with what I’ve heard. The ban isn’t on entering a physical space. It’s a ban on marriage. And the ban only applies to those who have willingly mutilated themselves. A few other religions have required castration or emasculation.
An interesting note, IIRC one of the apostles says in the NT “Some have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. . . . He that can receive it, let him receive it.”
