The Torah is blunt: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:4). The verse has stood for a thousand years. Then one day a man named Yehuda, a self-declared Ammonite prophet, walked into the academy and asked the question nobody had asked out loud. May I marry a Jewish woman and join the people?
Rabban Gamliel, the head of the Sanhedrin, answered first. No. The Torah is clear. You are an Ammonite. The gate is closed.
Rabbi Joshua was not satisfied. Tell me, he said, are the nations still sitting in their original lands? Did not Sennacherib, king of Assyria, scramble the peoples of the earth like dice in a cup? It is written (Isaiah 10:13): I have removed the bounds of the peoples and robbed their treasures. The Ammonite sitting before us is not an Ammonite in any traceable sense. He is a man from a mixed world, and the verse cannot reach him.
Gamliel pushed back with another verse. Scripture also says (Jeremiah 49:6), Afterward I will bring again the captivity of the children of Ammon. They have already returned. The ban still applies.
Rabbi Joshua smiled. Scripture says the same of Israel and Judah (Jeremiah 30:3): I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah. And we have not yet returned. If Israel is still in exile, you cannot argue that Ammon has already come home.
The academy ruled with Rabbi Joshua. Yehuda the Ammonite prophet was permitted to enter the congregation. This Mishnah from Yadayim 4:4, preserved in Hebraic Literature (1901), is what it looks like when the rabbis read a verse in the light of history, and the gate they thought was shut turns out to have been open all along.