Deuteronomy 23:2 bars 'those born of an illicit union' (traditionally rendered 'bastards') from the assembly of the LORD, to the tenth generation.

The Hebrew term mamzer (likely denoting a child of incest or another forbidden union, not simply an unwed couple's child) and the phrase 'assembly of the LORD' (qahal YHWH) refer to a specific technical legal category — most plausibly full civic/marital incorporation rights into the core congregational lineage, per later Jewish legal tradition (e.g., Mishnah Yevamot 8) — rather than a blanket ban on worship, sacrifice, or divine favor; a mamzer could still worship at the sanctuary. The idiom 'to the tenth generation' functions in Hebrew as a rhetorical superlative meaning something like 'permanently/in perpetuity' (compare the same phrase applied to Moabites and Ammonites in the immediately following verse, v. 3) rather than a literal genealogical bureaucratic tracking statute — which matters because Ruth the Moabite is fully incorporated into Israel and becomes King David's own great-grandmother within a few generations, showing Scripture itself does not apply the letter of this statute mechanically. This tension between Deuteronomy 23 and the book of Ruth is real, and Scripture appears to know it: Ruth reads as an intentional narrative and theological corrective, dramatizing God's welcome overriding a rigid application of the exclusion statute. That internal tension should be stated honestly rather than dissolved by force.

The canon's own trajectory — Ruth's inclusion, Isaiah 56:3-8's promise that even eunuchs and foreigners will receive 'a name better than sons and daughters... an everlasting name that will not be cut off' (deliberately answering Deut 23's language of being 'cut off'), and the New Testament's explicit incorporation of exactly these excluded categories (Acts 8's Ethiopian eunuch, Gal 3:28's 'neither Jew nor Greek... all one in Christ') — shows an intentional redemptive-historical movement toward inclusion that the Torah's own later canon anticipates and resolves.