In mainstream Judaism, the Judaism established by the Rabbinic sages of the first through sixth centuries AD, the following has been prohibited for millennia: any marriage in which one partner is Jewish and one partner is not. Aware, undoubtedly, that some Jews were not beyond flouting decrees from on high, the Rabbis also tackled the question of children born to Jewish/gentile parents. After much back and forth, a fateful (and to some, utterly inscrutable) decision was rendered. The offspring of a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish man was accorded the status of a Jew. Conversely, the child of a Jewish male and a gentile female was deemed a gentile. It was as a result of these deliberations that the prohibition on intermarriage and the principal of matrilineal descent (i.e., basing a child's identity on that of the mother) were soon to become integral and lasting features of normative Judaism.

The Hebrew Bible, whose various texts predate the aformentioned Talmudic decrees by centuries, thinks differently, so to speak, about these issues.