If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
Please excuse the delay in publishing the notes for the end of Daniel and all of Ezra, with only brief comments, as I was on holiday for a week and only making short notes to be typed up later.
6 September . Ezra chapters 8-10
In the last couple of chapters of this book, the issue of intermarriage comes into focus. It was seen as such a terrible thing that it was acceptable for men to put away their wives and children when challenged, leaving them with little or no means of support. What is so bad about mixed marriage that it can justify this breaking apart of families? Most of us will know couples of different religions, or where only one is religious at all, who seem perfectly happy. But religious leaders are always worried that having a non-believing spouse will tempt people to fall away from practice of their own religion, cease to attend public worship, start seeing things from a secular or pagan perspective.
But note that it is only men who were seen as guilty’ here – presumably Jewish women also married gentile men, but did not come in for the same criticism. Perhaps it is that they were not permitted to initiate divorce proceedings, or perhaps because Jewish identity traditionally passes through the female line, it mattered less if the father of the household was not a circumcised Jew.
The book seems to end strangely with this issue of intermarriage, rather than with something to do with the Temple that has been the subject of most of the book. Maybe there was more, which has been lost.