What is a Bastard?

[wmfinck]

I just typed this out for the opening of my program this evening, which just so happens to be titled The Prophecy of Zechariah – Part 6: Burdens and Bastards

Evidently it is rather easy for some people to hear a definition of a word, or actually define a word for themselves, that allows them to remain comfortable with some wicked idea, and they use their device to support a lie, and then they spread that false definition and that lie without shame. But these people even claim Strong’s Concordance as their authority on the matter. I have encountered this recently from several people, and found a couple of them lying in regard to the word bastard. Evidently some Jew from Chicago, pretending to be a Christian Identity pastor, has been telling people that a bastard, a mamzer in Hebrew, is specifically a person “born of a Jewish father and a heathen mother”, and nothing else. I have never heard anything so absurd.

If that were the case, where Yahweh tells the Philistines in Zechariah chapter 9 that “a bastard shall dwell in Ashdod”, then it would be evident that Yahweh was advocating race-mixing among Israelite men. That is basically blasphemous, to insist that Yahweh would advocate such a thing. But that is only the beginning of the problems with their definition.

However it is simply not the case. Let's read the whole definition. James Strong in his entry for the Hebrew word mamzer (Strong’s # 4464) says that the word is “from an unused root meaning to alienate; a mongrel, i.e. born of a Jewish father and a heathen mother...” and of course Strong evidently thought that the Israelites were Jews, and that Jews were Israelites, which is not true. But where he said “i.e.” he was only giving an example, since i.e. is short for the Latin phrase id est, which is literally “that is” and which is a phrase used in English to state something further which clarifies a previous statement. So the sentence “born of a Jewish father and a heathen mother” is not part of the definition of mamzer, but was instead included by Strong only as an explanation of what a bastard is, which is a mongrel. A mongrel is generally defined as “a dog of no definable type or breed”, or as “any other animal resulting from the crossing of different breeds or types”, or regarding people, as “a person of mixed descent.”

So the word bastard comes from a Hebrew verb which is not found in Scripture (for which reason Strong called it an "unused root") but which means to alienate. If we read the accounts of Jacob and Esau in Genesis, it is evident that Esau’s having taken foreign wives caused him to be alienated from his mother, and ultimately for that reason his mother made certain that Esau was alienated from his birthright. So Paul, writing in Hebrews many years later, called Esau a profane man and a fornicator. As Jude defines fornication, it is the pursuit of different flesh, and that is what Esau did.

A bastard is illegitimate, because the Law of God defines marriage as a union between a man and woman who are of the same bone and the same flesh, which is in the law in Genesis chapter 2. Kind after kind also being in the law, when a man takes a wife who is not of his flesh he is committing fornication, and if he has children within such a union, he is creating bastards. And the same law for the man also applies to a woman who would do such a thing. Anyone who tries to redefine the word bastard as anything other than a mixed-race individual is a liar and a double-minded man, a man with an agenda and no care for the truth.

[Ben88]

I remember as a young child I was the bastard in the false modern sense of the term in that I was born before my parents were married.