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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
A bastard; so the word is commonly rendered, and so it notes a person base-born, or born in fornication or adultery, or by incestuous or any prohibited mixtures of man and woman.
Object.
1. This law seems harsh, and too severe for the innocent bastard.
Answ. 1. It was only an exclusion from government, which was a tolerable burden.
2. It was a necessary caution to prevent and brand the sin of uncleanness, to which the Jews were more than ordinarily prone.
Object. 2. Pharez and Jephthah were both bastards, yet advanced to great honour and authority.
Answ. God gives laws to us, and not to himself; and, therefore he might, when he saw fit, confer what favour or power he pleased upon any such person, as he did to these. But some add, that the Hebrew word mamzer signifies not every bastard, but a bastard born of any strange woman, as the word may seem to intimate, and as such persons generally seem to have been, because of that special provision, that there should be no whore of the daughters of Israel, as it is here below, Deu_23:17.
To his tenth generation; or, his tenth generation, as it is in the Hebrew, and so in the following verses.