The One Bar That Held

About This Talk

Issurei Biah 12 sets out the prohibition of marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew, which the Rambam applies to every nation rather than the seven alone and which carries Scriptural lashes, while relations outside marriage are forbidden by the Sages with stripes for rebellious conduct as a fence against marriage, a man who designates a woman for himself being liable under four Rabbinic headings at once and a priest incurring Scriptural lashes through the prohibition of a zonah. The chapter then grants the zealot who strikes during the act before ten Jews the praise of Pinchas and immediately confines that license: only during the act, never a moment after, on pain of execution for murder; no court may authorize it; the zealot may lawfully be killed in self defense because he has the status of a pursuer; and against the daughter of a resident alien he may not act at all. Where neither zealot nor court acted the penalty is karet, stated through Malachi as the loss of descendants among the wise and the scholars. The Rambam grounds the gravity in the child: a child of any other forbidden union is a Jew, even a mamzer, while a child of a gentile mother is not his father's son, and a child of a maidservant follows her into servitude, the maidservant herself standing outside both categories so that her prohibition is only Rabbinic, proved from the Torah's own permission for a master to give his Hebrew servant a Canaanite maidservant. Where identities are confused the court acts rather than waits, compelling manumission of both children in the maidservant case and immersing both as converts where a gentile and a Jewish child were confused. The chapter closes with converts: one law for the native and the convert, immediate permission to marry in, the bar on Ammon and Moab falling on males alone because the Torah's stated reason did not concern the women, Egypt and Edom barred for two generations and permitted in the third, and then the ruling that Sannecherib's mixing of the nations has dissolved all four, leaving only David's permanent bar on the Netinim, imposed for brazenness and cruelty because Israel should be characterized by kindness and mercy.