A word of UNCERTAIN meaning for a person barred from the assembly of Israel, printed as a Hebrew word in this translation because every English rendering of it decides something the text does not. Read out from a consonantal search that also matches mimmizrach, from the east, the noun stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 23:3, where a mamzer and his line to the tenth generation may not enter the assembly of Jehovah, and Zechariah 9:6 (not yet on these pages), where one will sit in Ashdod after the pride of the Philistines is cut off — a verse about foreignness rather than parentage. ⚠ The traditional Jewish definition, reported here and not adopted, is narrow: the child of a union the law itself punishes with death or cutting-off, incest or adultery, and not a child born outside marriage at all. The Greek Old Testament read ek pornēs, born of a prostitute; the Latin kept the Hebrew word and added the Greek as a gloss, and the Douay follows it, 'A mamzer, that is to say, one born of a prostitute' — the one witness on the shelf that lets a reader see there is a word under the translation. ⚠ 'Bastard' (KJV, ASV, Geneva) imports an English legal category of illegitimacy the Hebrew may not have; 'born of a forbidden marriage' (NIV) is nearest the rabbinic sense and still a decision. → first discussed at Deut 23:3