In today's language however, it is roughly equivalent to the English terms "snot-nosed brat", "little squirt", and "naughty school-girl" in a humorous context.

She began to date non-observant Jewish men, dipping a toe in here and there, until, like me, she realized that secular Jewish men who wanted to marry Jewish women wanted to marry Jewish women who would eat in non-kosher restaurants and go out before the sunset on Saturday nights after the Sabbath ended.

The Biblical position on exogamous marriage is somewhat ambiguous; that is, except in relation to intermarriage with a Canaanite, which the majority of the Israelite patriarchs are depicted as criticising.

The principle is essentially a general one, and the deuteronomic explanation doesn't clarify why it singles out the Canaanites in particular; one of the Talmudic writers took it to forbid all intermarriage with non-Jewish nations.

First and foremost, Hayes holds that the fear of profaning the seed of Israel was the underlying rationale for the ban in exogamous marriage, rather than the ritual impurity of Gentiles in general.

She also argues that the regulations on intermarriage in the times of Ezra were different from the restrictions on intermarriage according to the book of Deuteronomy.