Not too long ago, M.M. wrote:

Hi, found your site and think it is great. Keep up the good work. I personally hate dealing with atheists, not my calling, but I do run a countercult ministry. In my work I was sent an email regarding an alleged bible discrepancy. I don't find the answer in the usual places, so I thought I'd provide you with the excerpt and perhaps you could explain it to me:

"No Ammonite or Moabite or any of his descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, even down to the tenth generation." Deut. 23:3.

"Can you explain to me why David, one-fourth Moabite, was not only a member of the assembly of the Lord, but King of Israel? Why his grandmother, Ruth, was admitted to the assembly?"

I could use help here.

Thanks!

This one is actually fairly easy to deal with, but we should point out first here that at the very least, what we have here is not a contradiction or a discrepancy, but a case where an order was disobeyed - i.e., Ruth was admitted to the assembly of the Lord in spite of the above.

But in fact, we don't even need to consider that point, because the basic answer is that the command was not violated with Ruth, because in the ANE (and even today in the Near East) nationality was determined by fatherhood, so that any of Ruth's kids were automatically Israelites and therefore eligible to be members of the assembly of the Lord. This is the concept of patrilineal descent. (In fact, this is indicated in the Hebrew, where the verse uses the male pronoun exclusively to refer to those whom the command applies to!)

Now when this answer was posed, our skeptic got a little frustrated and stretched for a counter-reply, thusly:

...this explanation does not square with Neh. 8:2 ("congregation" consisted of men and women).

Well, like most skeptics, our friend here tends to speak his mind without filling it with the right data first! Let's look at this verse:

So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand.

"The assembly" - not the "assembly of the Lord." The Hebrew word here is qahal, and it is used in Neh. 8:2 in a generic sense, as Strong's indicates it can be used:

6951. qahal, kaw-hawl'; from H6950; assemblage (usually concr.):--assembly, company, congregation, multitude.

Our skeptic then scraped the barrel bottom a bit more with this argument:

Yet, this explanation does not square with Nehemiah 13:25, where the mixed congregation is told: "Ye shall not give your daughters unto their (Moab) sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons." It was considered a "great evil" to marry "strange wives." Neh. 13:27....Thus, the explanation (M.M.) has given makes no sense, given that the denounced "great evil" is exactly what occurred with Ruth married Boaz. That act disentitled Boaz's children from the mixed congregation. For the final proof, see Neh 13:1: "On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever;"

Some comments here:

1. The problem with using Nehemiah in any way in this situation is that we are dealing with an entirely different social situation wherein the male Jews were marrying foreign wives and allowing their cultural mores to supersede Jewish mores, leading to a sort of zealous nationalism - for example, Nehi was disgusted to find that many of the children of these marriages did not speak the native tongue of Judah, and got pretty ticked about it! The "great evil" was not then the marriages themselves, but what sort of marriage they became. (In other words, the MAIN concern with Nehi here [and Ezra] was the pagan influence these "strange wives" were having on their husbands - who were SUPPOSED to be the ones "converting" the women to Judaism! What was done in that day was a calculated "over-reaction" to counter the influx of paganism.)
2. Second, re Neh. 13:1 - our skeptic here quotes out of context; verse 3 goes on to say that "When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent." This says nothing about who these people were; the foreign wives, however, were clearly not excluded at this point, because they are dealt with not until v. 23. (This fits with the idea that wives of foreign descent, and their children, absorbed the nationality of the father.)

In sum: There is absolutely no violation of Deut. 23:3 where Ruthie is concerned. But here's a secondary issue proposed by C. Dennis McKinsey, who sees this verse as a "false prophecy": Deut. 23:3 is not a prophecy, but a command! McKinsey can hardly refer to this as a failed prophecy even IF Ruth had joined the Congregation!(Though there is a difference from being a resident living in Israel and being involved in the specific covenant relationship [i.e. citizenship in the nation of Israel] that God shared with the Jewish people. We can see from Exodus 12:48 that there were aliens that fit that description. This does not mean, however, that Ruth would have been excluded from a relationship with Yahweh. A modern analogy to this is church membership. One can attend a church regularly for many years without officially joining.)