Biblical period Patriarchs and Matriarchs and
Sarah,
Isaac and
Rebecca,
Jacob and
Leah in
Bethlehem. Photo The stories of the
patriarchs and
matriarchs in
Genesis are generally compatible with matrilineal descent, if one makes the assumption that
Abraham's extended family was "Jewish": • Abraham fathered children with three wives or
concubines:
Sarah,
Hagar, and
Keturah, although it is likely that there were only two, as Hagar and Keturah appear to be different names used for the same person. According to Jewish tradition, Sarah was a member of Abraham's extended family, and her descendants became Jewish. The descendants of Hagar/Keturah were considered non-Jewish. •
Isaac had one wife (
Rebecca, a member of Abraham's extended family) and two sons,
Jacob and
Esau. Jacob's descendants became Jewish.
Esau's descendants were non-Jewish: assuming matrilineality, this was a result of his wives being
Hittite and
Ishmaelite. • Jacob had two wives (
Leah and
Rachel, members of Abraham's extended family) and two concubines (
Zilpah and
Bilhah, who entered the family as maidservants of Leah and Rachel). All of Jacob's children were considered Jewish. As for why Zilpah and Bilhah's children were considered Jewish despite their mothers having unspecified ancestry, rabbinic sources posit that Zilpah and Bilhah were actually the half-sisters of Leah and Rachel. Alternatively, as Zilpah and Bilhah were maidservants, their children were considered to belong to their mistresses Leah and Rachel. The stories are generally incompatible with patrilineal descent, in that a single father (Abraham or Isaac) had children, some of whom were considered the ancestors of Jews and others of non-Jews. In God refers to Hagar's son as "the son of the maidservant" rather than "your [Abraham's] son" (while also referring to Hagar's son as Abraham's seed); later rabbinic sources deduce from this that a Jewish man's child is considered "his" child only if the mother is Jewish.
Moses Moses married
Zipporah, a
Midianite woman. They had two sons,
Gershom and
Eliezer, both born before
the Exodus. The sons of Moses—with an Israelite father and Midianite mother—are absent from the genealogies of
Levi, which do include the sons of Moses' brother
Aaron (
whose wife was Israelite).
Ruth and Naamah In the accounts of the
Prophets and
Writings (which covers a time period of nearly a millennium) there are two cases of non-Israelite women who voluntarily (not resulting from conflict) married Israelites where their children were considered Israelite. According to the Talmud, both of these women,
Ruth and
Naamah, formally converted. Both the
Moabite and
Ammonite nations were descended from
Lot, the nephew of Abraham. In the
Book of Ruth,
Naomi and her husband
Elimelech were a Judean couple. Their family moved to Moab during a famine, but Elimelech died there. Naomi's two sons married Moabite women, named Ruth and
Orpah. Naomi's two sons then died. Naomi and Ruth then journeyed back to Judah. Then in selling her late husband's land in Judah and the estates of her sons, Naomi set up the stipulation that her financial redeemer also marry her former daughter-in-law. The first potential redeemer declined, lest this marriage "ruin [his] inheritance".
Boaz, the next of kin, became Naomi's redeemer, married Ruth and became the father of
Obed, who was the ancestor of
David. Ruth was the mother of Obed, but Naomi cared for the child, and their neighbors would say "A son has been born to Naomi".
Solomon "loved many foreign women". Among them was
Naamah the Ammonite. Solomon and Naamah's son
Rehoboam was a Judean king of the
Davidic line.
Tamar bat David In
2 Samuel 13,
Tamar, daughter of
King David, attempted to persuade her half-brother
Amnon not to rape her, by suggesting that he could legitimately marry her instead. This suggestion is difficult to understand, as prohibits marriage to half-siblings by either father or mother.
Rashi (1040–1105 CE) attempted to resolve this problem by noting that Tamar's mother was a non-Israelite—
Maacah, daughter of
Talmai king of
Geshur. If Jewish descent is matrilineal, and Maacah was not converted to Israelite religion at the time Tamar was conceived, then Tamar would be born non-Israelite, legally unrelated to Amnon (despite being his half-sister) and thus permitted to marry him.
Ezra describes how many Israelite men had intermarried with non-Jewish women, and tells the story of their renunciation of intermarriage and separation from the non-Jewish wives and from their children. While Ezra and
Nehemiah prohibited intermarriage by both men and women, only regarding intermarriage between a Jewish man and non-Jewish woman was it necessary to separate from the children. The necessity of separating from the children as well as the wives suggests that the children were not considered Jewish despite having Jewish fathers. In rabbinic sources, this verse is understood to be proof of matrilinearity.
Jewishness of half Israelites Several Biblical individuals appear to have been treated as Jewish despite having a non-Jewish father.
Hiram the craftsman was employed to build
Solomon's Temple despite having a
Phoenician father (and Israelite mother).
Amasa was entrusted with control of an Israelite army, despite having a non-Israelite father (and Israelite mother).
Post-biblical The
Hellenistic Jewish philosopher,
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–50 CE) calls the child of a Jew and a non-Jew a
nothos (bastard), regardless of whether the non-Jewish parent is the father or the mother. A recent article shows that Philo was at least considering the matrilineal principle.
Flavius Josephus (c. 37–100 CE), the Romanized Jewish historian, describes
Antigonus II Mattathias (c. 63–37 BCE) denigrating
Herod—whose father's family were Idumean Arabs forcibly converted to Judaism by
John Hyrcanus and whose mother, according to Josephus, was non-Jewish (either an Idumean Arab or Arabian (
Nabatean-Arab))—by referring to him as "an Idumean i.e. a half-Jew" and as therefore unfit to be given governorship of Judea by the Romans (as requires the king to be Jewish).
Modern period Rabbi
Immanuel Jakobovits offers some possible reasons for the law of matrilineality: Rabbi
Louis Jacobs wrote in a review of an article by
Shaye J. D. Cohen on matrilineal descent in Judaism:There has been a development of the law in these instances from Biblical and pre-Rabbinic times. The attempt to find reasons for the change, however, has proved to be elusive and is quite unnecessary since it can be explained entirely economically by the logic of the law itself and is typical of Rabbinic thinking in general. But the development in the law had already taken place before the redaction of the Mishnah at the very latest. With the exception of the Rabbi in the Jerusalem Talmud (Qiddushin, 3:12) who permitted the child of a gentile mother and Jewish father to be circumcised on the Sabbath and whose opinion was vehemently rejected, the law is accepted unanimously in both Talmuds. It is recorded as the law in all the Codes without dissenting voice and has been the universal norm in all Jewish communities. For such a law to be changed, only the weightiest religious and ethical advantages will suffice and it is difficult indeed to discover any such in the change in this particular instance. To change this particular law would strike at the heart of the whole halakhic process and would involve a theological as well as an halakhic upheaval. And for what? The potential loss is great. The gains, if any, are few and the price is far too high. Cohen does admit one circumstance in which the Bible accepted the matrilineal status of children of an Israelite woman and non-Israelite man: a "matrilocal" marriage in which the husband moved to the wife's location and joined her clan, rather than the more typical reverse. and Cohen himself does not rule this out as a possibility. legal system..." Instead, Jacobs offers another explanation. Jacobs believes that an Israelite man who married a non-Israelite woman and had a child, that woman and child were considered not part of the "family clan" and therefore were not considered Israelite: "A child born of a Jewish father and a gentile mother cannot be given the status of the father since the patrilineal principle is stated only with regard to unions within the clan. How can the father who steps out of the clan bestow a clan status on the child whom he sires?" and applied the same standard to humans as well.
Lawrence Schiffman noted that Josephus described Herod as being criticized as unsuitable for Jewish monarchy, due to his non-Jewish mother and the Biblical prohibition () on installing a non-Jewish king. According to Schiffman, this indicates that matrilineality was a broadly accepted norm at the time, assumed by Josephus as well as the Mishnah. Schiffman further asserted that a matrilineal principle likely already existed at the time of Ezra, due to the natural relationship between mother and child. According to Schiffman, in the First Temple period those women who moved to Israelite territory effectively underwent "informal conversion" to join the Jewish people. But upon the loss of national territory with the
Babylonian captivity, Jewish status became an individual matter, and the matrilineal principle was established. According to
Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, in a polygamous setting like Biblical society, identity was more closely tied to the mother than the father. Each wife had her own dwelling which was shared with her children, and where the husband was a visitor. The rabbinic principle of matrilineality was an adaptation of this model to a reality in which polygamy had become rare. Arnold Goodman argued that the halakhic norm of patrilineal tribal descent and matrilineal Jewish status is a logical one: Children naturally take the status of their mother, except when the mother has been "acquired" as wife by the husband, in which the status is that of the husband. But as marriage between Jew and non-Jew is invalid in halakha, the father has no connection to the children, and status remains with the mother. Avi Shveka argued that in both the Hebrew Bible and records of other
Ancient Near East societies, clan status was transmitted patrilinearly while "social" status (e.g. status as a slave or free-born) was transmitted matrilinearly; and when a father and mother separated or divorced (breaking up the clan), the children followed the mother both physically and in status. Thus, examples of "patrilineal" status in the Bible (e.g. Solomon and Naamah, or normal tribal membership) involve intact couples within the clan, while examples of "matrilineal" status (e.g. Hagar and Ishmael, or Ezra's expulsion of both the foreign wives and their children) involve couples that separate or divorce. ==Effect of matrilineality on personal Jewishness==