advocate the dissolution of these marriages, although he removed the son of a High Priest who had entered such an alliance.
Each of these statements prohibiting mixed marriage was subjected to detailed Talmudic discussion, which provided a totally different interpretation. We should remember that all of these Biblical statements which dealt with mixed marriage or prohibited it, did not declare such a marriage invalid. That thought was foreign to the Bible and did not appear until a later period.
Mixed marriages were discussed by the Book of Jubilees, which opposed them with the same vigor as Ezra and Nehemiah earlier. In it, Abraham , and later Rebeccah, condemn marriages between Israelites and Canaanites (Jub. 20:4, 25:1). This theme also continued in later portions of the book(Jub. 22:16ff) Those who permitted their daughters to marry Gentiles were to die through stoning and the daughters through fire(Jub. 30:7ff). There could be no atonement for this sin, and the act was considered akin to presenting the child to Moloch.
The Book of Maccabees reported mixed marriages as part. of the general pattern of assimilation to the Hellenistic culture and condemned them(I Macc. 1:5, 11:18). The Prayer of Esther, an interpolation to the Biblical Esther, stressed her detestation“of the bed of the uncircumcised and of any alien.” It was only necessity which brought her into the palace and into her position(Prayer of Esther, 115f). Charles considered this and other additions as dating from the first century of our era or earlier.
The same reluctance to engage in public intercourse or
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