I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 9-10.

This passage has always bothered me.  A casual reading suggests that the sin of which many of the Returned Exiles were guilty was marrying wives from outside of their group.  Further, the solution goes against one of my most deeply held beliefs: that marriage should always be for life.  However, the problem was NOT that some of the Returned Exiles had married women from among the locals.  The problem was that they were following the detestable practices of the local people.  They were taking part in the idolatrous worship practices of the pagans living in the land.  Rather than have these women convert to Judaism* and give up their pagan religions before marrying them, the Jewish men were trying to have it both ways; they continued to practice Judaism but also joined their wives in their pagan religion. 

*This is the first point in the Bible I am comfortable with using the term Judaism to refer to the religion of the Old Testament.  This is not because I think the practice or beliefs changed.  Rather it is at this point that the people who practiced this religion began identifying themselves as Jews and their religion as Judaism(although that last part might not be for another few centuries).

So, an assembly of all of those whose claim to property was based on being one of the Returned Exiles were summoned to an assembly in Jerusalem or risk forfeiting their property.  That sounds like a fairly severe penalty for not making a trip which might cause someone significant hardship.  However, they included a clause which stated that the forfeiture would only happen if the elders and leaders so decided.  Then when they got together to discuss what should be done about the problem of men of the assembly practicing idolatry because of their pagan wives.  They decided that all members of the assembly married to a pagan wife should divorce her and separate themselves from the people who practiced pagan rituals.  This sounds harsh, men must divorce their wives if those wives were not Jewish (that is, not one of those who returned from Exile.  However, this is where it gets interesting.  They decided that each man who had married a pagan wife should come before the elders at a scheduled time.  This suggests to me that it was not just a matter of divorce your wife or else.  I think the point of the meeting with the elders was to allow the man to argue that his formerly pagan wife had abandoned her pagan practices and converted to Judaism.

I would guess that some of these women continued, and encouraged their husbands to join them, in pagan practices because they did not understand the conflict between Judaism and their pagan practices.  When that conflict was made clear to them, many of those would have been willing to give up their pagan practices.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 6-8.

I am unsure why the letter sent to King Darius requesting that the Persian records be searched for Cyrus the Great’s edict was sent.  On the one hand, the overall passage suggests that the sender believed that the copy of the edict presented by the Jews was a forgery.  On the other hand, their reaction to King Darius’ reply to their letter suggest they may have been genuinely seeking clarification.  In either case, the reply from King Darius was unequivocal: the Jewish efforts to rebuild the Temple were not only to not be interfered with, they were to be supported to the full capability of the local government.  As a result, work moved forward on restoring the Temple and it was rapidly rebuilt.

Once they completed rebuilding and rededicating the Temple, the Returned Exiles conducted a Passover feast at the appropriate time.  Here we learn that despite having rejected the call to take part in the rebuilding effort from the locals, the Returned Exiles welcomed those who wished to do so to join them in worshiping God.  The key part of that welcome, one which we can learn from today, was that those who wished to join them needed to abandon the pagan practices which had been added on to the worship of God and follow the Law of Moses as practiced by the Returned Exiles.  I do not put that statement, “as practiced by the Returned Exiles”, in there to imply that the practice was not consistent with the Law of Moses.  Rather I include it to note that they did not hold the people of the land to a higher standard than they did themselves.  The fact that the Returned Exiles welcomed those locals who were willing to follow their practices supports the idea that the offered help to rebuild the Temple had been offered either in bad faith or as an effort to alter the worship practices described in the Law of Moses.

With Chapter 7 we begin the account of Ezra, after whom this book is named.  It is my belief that the material from here to the end of the book were based on a record written by Ezra himself with editorial content from the scribes who combined Ezra’s record with the material earlier in the book.  The letter from King Artaxerxes commissioning Ezra contains some interesting thoughts.  It mandates that Ezra be given gold and materials for use in the Temple.  These items were to be used to petition God to look favorably on Artaxerxes and to bless him.  While Artaxerxes did not express the position of a Believer that God is the Creator and Supreme over all, he did acknowledge that God had authority and power and requested that God be petitioned on his behalf.  We should do for our government officials what Artaxerxes requested of Ezra, whether they so request or not.  

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from Ezra was about handling money and valuables dedicated to the Lord.  When Ezra realized how much wealth was being sent with his group to Jerusalem his first concern was security.  However, he was embarrassed to ask the king for soldiers to accompany them because he had been bragging about how God protected those who served Him.  We learn from this passage that until this moment, Ezra believed, but he did not have faith.  However, rather than admit to the king that he did not have the faith to rely on God, he chose to rely on God.  It is a lesson we can all learn from.  Sometimes we need to step out in faith that we don’t quite have.  He trapped himself into depending on God.  One must be careful about doing this, because we can easily find ourselves trying to trap God into doing our will.  We can trap ourselves into doing God’s will, but we cannot trap God into doing ours.  I will also note that Ezra did not do this on purpose.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 3-5.

As soon as the Returned Exiles got themselves settled into their new homes, they rebuilt the altar and began offering sacrifices upon it.  The following spring the Returned Exiles began rebuilding the Temple.   When they completed the foundation of the Temple the people who had been living in the land during the Exile claimed a stake in the rebuilding of the Temple.  The local people claimed to have worshiped God since they were settled in the land by the Assyrians.  I have always read this passage and thought that the Returned Exiles should not have so bluntly rejected the offer of assistance.   However, today it struck me, if the locals had been worshiping God and offering Him sacrifices for all of these years, why didn’t they rebuild the Temple before this?  Further, as soon as their help was rejected the locals began working to disrupt the building project.  In fact, after Cyrus died, the locals reached out to the King of Persia and slandered the Returned Exiles by implying that they had begun restoring Jerusalem behind the back of the Persian authorities. 

Reading between the lines here we learn an important lesson about working with non-believers to carry out God’s will.  The locals offered to help the Returned Exiles, but considering the ways in which they immediately began working against the project when their help was rejected we see that their offer was not sincere.  Perhaps they wanted to be involved so as to have a say in how worship was carried out in the new Temple.  Or perhaps they were planning to frustrate the plans from the inside.  The key factor here is that the locals did not share the priorities of the Returned Exiles.  When non-believers offer to partner with believers to accomplish some goal, we must be very careful about accepting their aid because they do not share our desire to do God’s will.  Their reasons for seeking goals which they may have in common with us will be different from ours and they will attempt to redirect our efforts to further their other goals.

As I mentioned the local government officials not associated with the Returned Exiles had sent a letter to the King of Persia and received a reply ordering a halt to rebuilding the city of Jerusalem.  Initially, this also caused the Returned Exiles to cease work on the Temple.  However, after Darius took the throne, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah inspired the people to resume work on the Temple.  I find this interesting.  When the local government officials received orders from the King of Persia to halt the rebuilding, they intervened with sufficient force to stop the work.  However, when the rebuilding resumed, the local government officials refrained from using force to stop work.  The passage does not tell us what had changed besides who was King of Persia.  I suspect that a significant factor was that Darius was a king more in the mold of Cyrus, while the two kings who reigned in between ruled more with an iron-fist (incidentally, both of their reigns were relatively short).  If all parties were aware of this change in attitude at the top, the Returned Exiles would have been more willing to stand up for themselves and the local officials less willing to initiate a violent confrontation.  Under the intermediary kings, both parties would have been aware that imperial forces were likely to back up such a show of force.  Under Darius, the Returned Exiles would have had reason to believe they would get a chance to argue their side before imperial forces acted.  Additionally, it appears that someone among the Returned Exiles produced a copy of Cyrus’ decree authorizing their return.  It appears that the local officials suspected the copy was a forgery and hoped to use that as leverage on their side over the Returned Exiles

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 1-2.

The first thing I want to note about the Book of Ezra is something which I learned earlier this year (perhaps I had read or heard this earlier, but, if so, I did not remember it).  The books of Ezra and Nehemiah had been one book in the Hebrew Bible.  They become separate books as a result of the fact that in the 2nd Century BC there were two separate, differing translations of the book into Greek.  I don’t want to spend more time on that today, but the way in which they became separated fascinates me.

Chapter One is consistent with the inscriptions which were discovered on what is known as the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay cylinder inscribed with a declaration from Cyrus declaring his support for the repatriation of peoples the Babylonians had taken into exile.  It also calls for the restoration of the temples of numerous gods throughout the territory which had been the Babylonian Empire and the return to those temples of the sacred objects which had been taken to Babylon.  While neither the Jews nor Jerusalem were mentioned on the Cyrus Cylinder, the inscription on the Cyrus Cylinder is consistent with what we find recorded here.  In fact, the Cyrus Cylinder makes a similar statement about Cyrus’ relationship to the chief god of the Babylonians as this passage says that he proclaimed about his relationship with God.  What is written in this passage is consistent with everything we know about the Persian Empire and how it dealt with the peoples under its control.  The Cyrus Cylinder was discovered at a time when many doubted that any of the events recorded in the Old Testament had actually happened.

The second chapter is a list of those who returned as part of Cyrus’ repatriation.  The important part about this was that they brought documents with them.  These documents included genealogies.  Those who could trace their ancestry to the genealogies of priests and Levites which they brought back were allowed to serve as such.  Those who could not were provisionally prevented from doing so.  However, those who returned acknowledged that their records were incomplete and allowed for asking God to guide them on whether these people should be allowed to serve.  At the time of the writing of this passage they had yet to restore the method if inquiry described in the Law of Moses, but they made a record of the people who thought they were descended from priests or Levites for whom confirmation could not be found.