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

When reading today’s passage I have often been bothered by the fact that the writer emphasizes the sin of the people of having married foreign women.  After all, why would it be wrong to bring women into the family of faith?  As I have been writing off and on this spring, that is because that is not quite what the passage is telling us.  In order to understand what is going on here you have to start with what those who brought the problem to Ezra’s attention told him.  They told him that the people of Israel had not kept themselves separate from the detestable practices of the people around them.  One can easily misread what they said to think they were upset with the interaction with the people around them, but a careful reading of the entire passage shows there is more to it than that.  When the Returned Exiles gathered to address the issue, they agreed that those who had married “foreign women” needed to send those wives away, but they said it would take more than a day or two to accomplish this.  Why would it take more than a day or two to settle this if it was just a matter of all the men who had married a woman not of the group of Returned Exiles putting aside their wives?  To me, this says that they had to evaluate whether these wives had continued in the detestable practices of their people or had embraced the worship of God and all that entailed.

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