NOTES for Ezr 9:1-15
In our time, when marriages between people of different nations are commonplace, it is difficult not only to evaluate correctly but even simply to understand the reasons for Ezra’s grief. After all, Jews had already married foreign women more than once; why be troubled?
The trouble, however, is not that Ezra’s contemporaries married foreign women, but that amid a weakening of faith they married pagan women. Purity of blood is not at risk; that is not and cannot be the issue, since everyone who accepts the one God becomes part of the people of Israel. What is at risk is the purity of devotion to the Lord: the one people destined to bear faithfulness to the living God may be drawn toward foreign gods entering religiously mixed families, and this had already happened in Solomon’s time. It ended badly. Ezra has learned from bitter experience and does not want the apostasy of those days to spread through the whole people.
Generations will pass, and the saving news of the one God will reach the descendants of those neighboring peoples with whom Ezra intends to sever kinship. But for this to happen, the ardor of hearts faithful to the Lord, preserved by Ezra’s severity, had to remain alive among the Jewish people.