Footnotes

1. wounded by crushing. The standard method for making a man a eunuch. ↩

2. pourer. I.e., the organ of pouring: the penis. ↩

3. into the muster of Yahweh. Traditionally “assembly.” But what specifically is this, from which such a man is being excluded? Leviticus 4:13–15 is instructive: “And if all the assembly of Israel err, and the thing be hidden from the eyes of the muster, and they have done any from all the commands of Yahweh that should not be done, and are guilty, and it is known, the sin that they have sinned against it—and the muster shall bring near a bull, a son of the herd, for the sin, and bring him before the face of the tent meeting, and the old ones of the assembly shall lay their hands upon the head of the bull before the face of Yahweh, and the bull shall be slaughtered before the face of Yahweh.” Here the muster is evidently demarcated from the more general assembly of Israel: the nation may err, but who is responsible for noticing this? The same people who must then bring the sin offering. We see that it is not the whole assembly who must bring near the bull—that would be logistically impossible—but “the muster,” which is then equated with the “old ones of the assembly,” the elders of Israel, who lay their hands upon it. In Deuteronomy 31:12, Moses writes to “Muster the people, the men, and the women and the children…” The choice of where to put the commas is all that stands between rendering the “muster” as properly referring to the men, with the women and children added to it, or properly referring to them all; I have taken it to refer to the men, because of its interpretation in Joshua 8:35, where Joshua reads before “all the muster of Israel, and the women and the children…” Moreover, in Deuteronomy 31, Moses further “musters” only the elders of Israel (Dt 31:28), whom he afterward addresses as “the muster” (Dt 31:30). Much more could be said, as this is a widely-used word in scripture; but in short, my view is that the muster properly refers to the legitimate governing members of Israel, and especially to what we now call magistrates. It is this which is denied to those who are mutilated and mongrels, Ammonites and Moabites. They are not excluded from citizenship in Israel (or Ruth could not have become a citizen), but they are excluded from the franchise of Israel: they may not exercise any form of rulership. Eunuchs are excluded because they have no responsibilities to the future, being unable to sire children; mongrels are excluded because they have no responsibilities to the past, being disconnected from the covenantal structure that ensured a rightly-ordered continuation of Israel’s seed, and probably having mixed loyalties. The Ammonites and Moabites were excluded as a judgment upon them for not showing Israel hospitality in their passage through the wilderness, but instead hired Bala’am to curse them. ↩

4. mongrel. Or bastard, but it isn’t clear to me that the term refers specifically to illegitimate birth; it seems to also include illegitimate marriage; it would thus cover a man like Avi-Melek, born to a Kana’anite slavewife, as well as a man like Yiphtach, born to a whore. ↩

5. time-immemorial. A single word in Hebrew that presents considerable translation difficulties, referring to both the past and future with no “visible” terminus. The English phrase “time immemorial” is the only term that captures the basic gist of the term. ↩