Foreign Marriages and Citizenship in Persian Period Judah

Abstract

The problem of foreign marriages occurs in several places in the Hebrew Bible and these occurrences show both differences and commonalities.1 In this paper I will not engage in a detailed exege- sis of any of these references; rather, I am aiming at identifying the underlying political concepts that may have induced the respective texts, namely the concept of citizenship, and in connection with that, the notion of membership in the popular assembly, and the question of inheritance of membership. A comparison with texts from ancient Greece which also deal with the problem of foreign marriages will prove to be helpful in this investigation.