Scripture Daily

Context No. 370 of 4322 · Ezra

Context · Reflection

Ezra 10:1-8: in context

1Now while Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and casting himself down before God’s house, there was gathered together to him out of Israel a very great assembly of men and women and children; for the people wept very bitterly. 2Shecaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam, answered Ezra, “We have trespassed against our God, and have married foreign women of the peoples of the land. Yet now there is hope for Israel concerning this thing. 3Now therefore let’s make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and those who are born of them, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God. Let it be done according to the law. 4Arise, for the matter belongs to you and we are with you. Be courageous, and do it.” 5Then Ezra arose, and made the chiefs of the priests, the Levites, and all Israel to swear that they would do according to this word. So they swore. 6Then Ezra rose up from before God’s house, and went into the room of Jehohanan the son of Eliashib. When he came there, he didn’t eat bread or drink water, for he mourned because of the trespass of the exiles. 7They made a proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all the children of the captivity, that they should gather themselves together to Jerusalem; 8and that whoever didn’t come within three days, according to the counsel of the princes and the elders, all his possessions should be forfeited, and he himself separated from the assembly of the captivity.

This is one of the harder episodes in the Bible to read, and it does not become easier by pretending otherwise. The community that had returned from exile was small and fragile, and Ezra discovers that many of the people, including priests and leaders, had married women from the surrounding pagan nations. To Ezra this was not a small thing. The exile itself had come, in his tradition's reading, largely because Israel had drifted into idolatry through exactly this kind of assimilation, and he feared that the tiny restored community would dissolve back into the nations and lose its faith entirely. So he prays and weeps and throws himself down before the temple, and a great weeping assembly gathers, and they resolve on a drastic remedy: to send away all the foreign wives and the children born to them.

We should be honest about the cost of that decision, because Scripture is. Real women and real children were dismissed, and the passage does not hide their existence. And we should be equally honest that the Bible does not speak with one voice here. The book of Ruth, about a foreign Moabite woman who becomes the great-grandmother of King David, is a deliberate counterweight, and much of Scripture insists on welcoming the foreigner. This episode records a community, in real fear for its survival and its faith, choosing to protect its holiness by a means that fell heavily on the most vulnerable people among them, the wives and children who had the least power in the whole affair.

That tension is worth sitting in rather than resolving too quickly. Zeal to protect something genuinely good, a community, a faith, a family's integrity, is not the same as protecting it rightly, and it can curdle into treating vulnerable people as the problem to be removed. Where have I, in real and even justified zeal for something good, been willing to wound the people with the least power, telling myself the cause required it?

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