The proscription of intermarriage as a tactic for the maintenance of group boundaries is familiar from a great variety of socio-historical settings. The propagation of idealized religious identities is not, however, the sole social effect of the regulation of interreligious marriage common to the many legal traditions of the medieval Middle East. This paper’s aim is to examine how the discourses on intermarriage in medieval Christian and Muslim legal texts are also conditioned by concerns for the distribution of material resources and the maintenance of particular notions of gender hierarchy. The paper’s main body of source material is a corpus of legal texts written in Syriac and Arabic by Christian bishops in Iraq between the seventh and eleventh centuries CE. Arguing that medieval anxiety over interreligious marriage cannot be understood apart from the perceived threat to communal human and material resources that the phenomenon posed, the paper first examines the inheritance schemes of the Christian legal sources in relation to their rules on intermarriage. These sources show evidence of a concern on the part of religious elites that the dowries of women who married non-Christians and/or apostasized functioned to “drain property away” from Christian communities. This concern, in turn, fundamentally structured the manner in which bishops sought to regulate interreligious marriage. Parallel examples from Islamic law are adduced as points of comparison. The paper further explores how typical modes of female property ownership and property exchange upon marriage influenced the gendered norms for interreligious marriage so characteristic of medieval Middle Eastern legal traditions: males may marry “outside” of the community, but females may not. The regulation of intermarriage in these terms served not only to demarcate one religious community from another, but also to uphold widespread notions of an appropriately gendered social hierarchy. Finally, the paper turns to one of the few hagiographies from early medieval Iraq to consider household practices related to interreligious marriage that conflicted with the hierarchies upheld by legal norms. The Syriac and Arabic narratives of the martyrdom of Abd al-Masih illustrate situations in which mothers or children adhere to alternative or heterodox religious forms, despite the widely propagated norm that fathers' religious affiliations define the household. In literature of this sort, the precise social tensions that normative legal discourses on interreligious marriage seek to tamp down become evident.