Ezra 10:1-17

PUTTING AWAY THE STRANGE WIVES, Ezra 10:1-17.

To us, with our Christian sentiments and feelings respecting the inviolability of the marriage relation, this procedure of Ezra in enforcing the separation of these Jews from their wives seems exceedingly harsh and severe. Nor is it to be reconciled, or reconcilable, with our Lord’s profound teaching that the marriage relation is closer and more inviolable than any other human relation, and never to be sundered except in the case of fornication. Matthew 5:32; Matthew 19:4-9. But Ezra’s action must be viewed and explained from the Mosaic standpoint. His mission was to reconstruct the Jewish state on the basis of the law of Moses, and that law, as we have seen, expressly prohibited marriages with the heathen.

Exodus 34:12-16; Deuteronomy 7:3. It was also well known that marriages with the heathen, and the consequent adoption of heathen abominations, has been the main cause of all the woes of Israel. And now, in reconstructing the Jewish state, it would be fatal to the permanence of the same to allow the precedent of extensive intermarriages of this kind to stand unrebuked. Ezra could not but see that such a precedent, if established, would govern the life and conduct of his people for the generations that were to follow, and it was plainly irreconcilable with Mosaic law. It was better, therefore, to check the evil then, though it cost great sorrow and trouble, than to let it alone to ruin all the holy seed.