Miscegenation

Miscegenation is a modern term — coined in English in 1863 in an American pamphlet arguing for racial blending — for marriage or sexual union between people assigned to different races, and it is not a biblical word or a biblical category. Neither biblical Hebrew nor New Testament Greek has a term corresponding to the modern biological notion of "race"; the Scriptures given speak instead of peoples, nations, and kinship groups, and they regulate marriage by covenant loyalty rather than by phenotype. Historically and linguistically, then, the term belongs to nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial ideology, not to the vocabulary of the biblical text.

What the text does say, in the passages at hand, is that Israel is barred from marriage alliances with particular neighbouring peoples. Genesis 24:3 has Abraham bind his servant by oath not to take a wife for Isaac from "the daughters of the Canaanites"; Deuteronomy 7:3 states plainly, "You shall not make marriages with them." The reason given is consistently religious rather than racial: "For that would turn away your sons from following me, that they may serve other gods" (Deuteronomy 7:4), and Exodus 34:15–16 warns that taking their daughters will lead Israel's sons to "play the prostitute after their gods." Joshua 23:12–13 repeats the warning that such marriages become "a snare and a trap," and the narrative of Numbers 25:1 and Judges 3:7 shows the pattern the law anticipated — Israel "began to play the prostitute with the daughters of Moab" and "served the Baals and the Asheroth." In each case the stated danger is idolatry and apostasy, and the prohibitions are directed at specific Canaanite and Moabite populations in a specific land-and-covenant setting.

Established historical fact bears on how the term has been used. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some Christian majorities in segregated societies — including the American South and apartheid South Africa — cited texts such as these to defend laws against interracial marriage. Mainstream biblical scholarship, across confessional lines, judges that appeal to be a misapplication: the passages' stated rationale is worship of other gods, and the peoples named are defined by cult and covenant rather than by ancestry in the modern racial sense. That is a historical and exegetical judgment, not a doctrinal one, and it is widely though not universally shared.

Christian traditions read the underlying command differently. Catholic and most mainline Protestant teaching treats these texts as covenant-fidelity and religious-endogamy passages, and grounds its own counsel about marriage in the New Testament rather than in the ethnic prohibitions of the conquest narratives. Evangelical and Reformed traditions commonly extend the principle to a general warning against marriage outside the faith, reading it through passages about being "unequally yoked." Jewish tradition reads the prohibitions as governing intermarriage with non-Jews while holding that a convert is fully part of Israel, so the boundary is drawn by covenant membership rather than descent. One way to read the whole is that Scripture's concern is whom Israel would worship, not what its neighbours looked like — though readers differ over how far the principle extends.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.