The Bible underneath it
The Chosen and Everyone Else
No treaty, no mercy, no intermarriage, not even the tenth generation. Then Ruth broke the rule and became royalty.
The point in one sentence
The Torah’s treatment of outsiders runs from exclusion to extermination in God’s own voice, the New Testament pivots toward inclusion, and the honest reading has to hold both facts without letting either erase the other.
The laws of the border
The seven nations. Deuteronomy 7: "thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them." Deuteronomy 20 writes the two tiers into the rules of war: a distant city that answers peace becomes "tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee"; the nearby nations get "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth."
The assembly ban. Deuteronomy 23:3: "An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever." Then the book of Ruth makes a Moabite the great-grandmother of David, the ancestor of the entire royal line and, through it, of Jesus.
The purge of the wives. After the exile, Ezra 10 records a covenant "to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them," and the book closes on the list of men who did it. Nehemiah 13:25, in the reformer’s own proud first person: "I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair." Even conservative commentators decline to defend the beatings; note that fairly.
The exchange with the Canaanite woman. Matthew 15: Jesus first ignores her, says "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and answers her plea with "It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs." He then heals her daughter and praises her faith as great. The readings, that he was testing her, that the Greek diminutive softens "dogs," are genuinely argued and genuinely uncertain. Quote the whole exchange or none of it.
Either the ban meant less than it says, or the Bible’s greatest king was barred from his own assembly.
Deuteronomy 23:3 excludes Moabites to the tenth generation, for ever. The book of Ruth makes a Moabite the great-grandmother of David, and through him, of Jesus.
What is true on the other side
The believing answer is trajectory: Acts 10 ("God is no respecter of persons") and Galatians 3:28 ("there is neither Jew nor Greek") really do move where the Torah did not, and the conquest commands are tied by the text to Canaanite practices, not ancestry. All of it is real. The remainder is the same one as everywhere else on this site: a moral trajectory that improves over centuries is what moral learning looks like. The question was whether the earliest layer, extermination orders included, came from a perfect being, and "it got better later" is not an answer to that question. It is an admission.
Genesis 9 curses Canaan, names no skin color, and says nothing about Africa. The racial reading was built centuries later to justify slavery, and it is the same misreading LDS leaders used for the priesthood ban. The racism in that verse belongs to its interpreters, and saying so is both true and more damning: see the Race and the Priesthood page.
Why this should make you question
Strip the theology and describe the content plainly: a tribal deity who assigns land by ancestry, bans exogamy, grades foreigners by distance, and orders the annihilation of the peoples next door is indistinguishable from the national gods of every neighboring kingdom, whose texts said the same things about their own enemies. The Bible’s later, better voices are the strongest evidence that its people outgrew that god. The claim that he never changed is the one the record will not support.