Deuteronomy 23:1 excludes a man 'whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off' from the assembly of the LORD.

This statute belongs to a broader Levitical 'wholeness' symbolism running through Israel's cultic law, in which the ritual boundaries of cultic service symbolically encode Israel's identity as a called-to-be-whole, undivided covenant people. The closest parallel is Leviticus 21:16-23, which restricts priests with physical 'blemishes' from officiating at the altar specifically — yet such priests are explicitly still permitted to eat the sacred food and remain full members of the priestly community (v. 22); the restriction is on one specific cultic function within a living symbolic system, not exclusion from grace or the community as such. Historically, castration in the ancient Near East was frequently forcible, imposed by conquering empires (notably Assyria, later Persia) on captives who then served as eunuch court and temple officials — so this restriction plausibly functions partly as a protective boundary distancing Israel's cult from foreign eunuch-staffed pagan cultic institutions, rather than as a moral judgment on the man's worth. Crucially, and this should be stated as the decisive point rather than a footnote, Scripture itself explicitly and dramatically reverses this exclusion within the same canon: Isaiah 56:3-5 has God promise foreigners and eunuchs who 'keep my sabbaths' 'a monument and a name better than sons and daughters... an everlasting name that shall not be cut off' — deliberately answering Deuteronomy 23's language of being 'cut off.' Acts 8:26-39 narrates the Ethiopian eunuch's conversion and baptism by Philip as a Spirit-directed fulfillment of exactly this Isaiah 56 promise — notably, the eunuch is reading Isaiah when Philip meets him. This is one of Scripture's clearest self-aware examples of a redemptive-historical movement from cultic-symbolic restriction to explicit, celebrated inclusion, treated by the New Testament as something to embrace, not hide.

The same progressive redemptive-historical unfolding traced for Deut 23:2 (specific-issues-037) applies here: the canon culminates in Galatians 3:28's radical inclusion, which Isaiah 56 and Acts 8 already anticipate and enact from within the Old and New Testaments themselves.