NOTES for Ezd2 4:22
In creating the human being, God determined two possible forms of human nature: male and female. This was how it was intended from the beginning, and from the beginning it was also determined that the relations between man and woman, between husband and wife, could be described with the words "and the two shall become one flesh." This is the ideal; such was the human being before the fall. With the fall everything changed and was distorted. After the fall the woman was told that her relations with her husband would henceforth be relations of rule and subordination: "your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
Of course, family relations in this case can be regarded as a model. In the family they are built in the same way as in fallen society as a whole. On the one hand, people cannot do without one another; on the other, they cannot live normally with one another and cannot interact without bringing into this interaction relations of rule and subordination.
The issue is not functional differences, not the role a person plays and not the functions he has to perform in order to solve a given task or achieve an intended goal, but differences that are sometimes called differences of status. It is a situation in which purely functional moments begin to be absolutized, in the end bringing relations to the form characterized by the well-known saying: "you are the boss, I am a fool; I am the boss, you are a fool."
Something similar happened in the family as well: in the fallen world, the man's headship, from being headship of responsibility, quickly began to turn into headship of domination. Such relations, of course, distort the spiritual life of husband and wife separately and of both of them together as a family. Meanwhile, both in Yahwism and in Judaism, the family was always, among other things, and for God first of all, a spiritual community, which was the foundation both of the larger Yahwist community and of the Synagogue and of all the religious brotherhoods that existed within it.
It is not surprising that Ezra opposes the distortion of spiritual relations within the family. He understands: when a man ceases to be the true head of the family, he asserts his power over the woman as a master asserts it over a slave. But in that case the wife has the right to demand maintenance, and a very luxurious one, in exchange for this power. And she demands it, closing the vicious circle. A circle that, on the contrary, ought to be broken: God does not need it, and it is incompatible with the life of His Kingdom.