Blinded by self-righteousness
God sees even when we don't
As our reading through the Hebrew Bible reached Ezra-Nehemiah again, I found myself thinking of a post I wrote a couple of years ago wrestling with the themes of these books.
Where so many readers have seen a story of faithfulness against the odds and a renewal of the temple worship after the exile, these stories carry difficult layers for me.
Almost two years after my first wrestling match with the xenophobia and cruelty of the Jerusalem leaders, especially in Ezra, I find it even more relevant today than when I first wrote it. So I would like to share an updated version of that post in light of the relentless assault on immigrants today as well as the buzz about the 250th anniversary of the United States.
In the book of Ezra we meet a group of people who have been displaced and have suffered much loss, but then are given the opportunity to return to their homeland and rebuild. It sounds like an inspiring story when you recap it that way. In some ways it is an inspiring story. However, the priest’s lament about polluted land, impurity, and critiquing intermarriage between the people of Judah and the people of the lands (Ezra 9:11-12) sounds especially disturbing given today’s political environment and rhetoric from the highest levels of power about “immigrants poisoning the blood of our country.”
While I recognize that the leaders in the story had an understandable concern about idolatry and the disregard of Israel’s law, the hyper-focus on marriages with foreigners as the core problem leaves me with questions. Given the common biblical theme of people choosing their own wisdom over God’s, could this be a case of a man doing what is right in his own eyes while actually acting unrighteously?
Comparing Ezra to the rest of Scripture
I greatly appreciated this article from Old Testament scholar Carmen Imes on this topic as she breaks down the events in Ezra-Nehemiah in contrast to the theme throughout the Hebrew Bible of welcoming and loving the stranger. She also explains how the leaders in this story went beyond the actual commands of the law in regard to marriages with non-Israelites and reviews multiple stories where God’s plan was furthered by some of these “mixed” marriages (most notably the marriage of Boaz to Moabite Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David). She also contrasts the attitudes of Ezra and Nehemiah with a contemporary prophet, Malachi. While Malachi also lamented the marriage of Israelite men to women who “serve foreign gods,” he prescribed for the men to be removed from the “tents of Jacob,” rather than punishing the foreign wives and their children for the men’s failure (Malachi 2:11-12).
In the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, the editors insert a note seeking to explain this action by Ezra, noting, “Though the actions of Ezra and Nehemiah may strike some readers as harsh, the measures taken were more than racial or cultural; they were felt necessary to preserve the spiritual heritage of Israel.”1
This defense rings hollow to me. While I can understand this in defense of the prohibition to get married in the first place, how does the divorce mandate line up with the full witness of Scripture? When else in Scripture does God command someone to divorce a spouse because they don’t share the same faith—or for any reason, for that matter?
In fact when Jesus was asked if a man could divorce his wife “for any cause,” he flatly tells the inquirers that God’s will was never for divorce, but that an allowance was given due to human failure (Matt. 19:1-10). He upholds the sanctity of marriage with divorce as an exception, not something to be taken lightly.2
It seems that in Jesus’ view, marriage should be honored and protected. Men should not mistreat their wives by casting them out in a society where their lives would be marked by difficulty and poverty due to the stigma of their divorced status. With this insight into the character and heart of God, it seems incongruent for there to be a command for a mass divorce. In fact, neither Ezra or Nehemiah mention that God or a prophet from God told them to do so. Instead, it seems that Ezra and the other leaders were acting on their own wisdom rather than God’s. They put their own spin on the law to make it fit what they were already predisposed to believe.3
It is also interesting to see the similarity in the story of Ezra’s divorce mandate plan alongside King Ahasuerus’s queen banishing plan in the book of Esther. When Ezra lamented the mixed marriages, another man (not identified as a prophet or as speaking a word from God) piped up with the idea for the mass divorce, which was readily accepted without any kind of discussion or debate (Ezra 10). Similarly, when King Ahasuerus was embarrassed by Vashti’s refusal to flaunt herself at his drunken party, another man nearby proposed that he should banish her immediately, and he also accepted this with no discussion or debate (Esther 1). Both of these pieces of advice, in a similar era of history in the biblical record, were rashly given, readily accepted, and then resulted in wives being cast out. This parallel reading of Ezra as a mirror of the (rather foolish and hasty) King Ahasuerus seems telling.
Another biblical story that has a theme of sending away a “wife” and child is in Genesis 16. After Abram impregnated Hagar, the foreign woman he and his wife enslaved, Sarai grew jealous and advocated for Abram to kick the pregnant Hagar out of their home. Abram complied and they sent Hagar away, but then something surprising happened. God showed up in the wilderness and spoke directly to Hagar. She named him “the God who sees me,” and he sent her back to Abram’s home with promises for her son’s future.
The God Who Sees
We don’t know what happened to the women and children who were sent away in Ezra 10 because the book ends abruptly after sharing the names of those who divorced their wives. We know that “all these married foreign women, and some of them had children by these women” (Ezra 10:44). We know that despite these drastic measures, just a few decades later Nehemiah was fighting this same battle — beating people up and pulling out their hair for marrying women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab in Nehemiah 13:23-27.4
It seems that banishing the foreign women didn’t save Israel from their issues after all.
While Ezra and Nehemiah clearly thought that they were doing the right thing by keeping out foreigners and preserving a “holy bloodline,” this wasn’t a universal belief among the faithful in Israel at the time. The prophet Isaiah spoke of Jerusalem as a light to all the nations (Isa. 42, Isa. 60) hundreds of years earlier. There are dozens of commands to welcome, aid, and even love the stranger throughout the law and prophets.
I don’t think that all of this means that Ezra and Nehemiah were evil people or that there is nothing to learn from reading these texts. I think that they saw their intentions as good, and in fact some of the actions that they took were good. Nehemiah’s reforms included restoring justice to those who had been cheated of their land, a return to honoring the Sabbath, and restoration of other holy feasts through the year. But his obsession with blood purity went beyond what the law asked him to do.
Better than Ezra
I see this story as a cautionary tale of legalism and xenophobia that we would do well to consider today.
Stories like this demonstrate why it is essential to read these ancient texts through the lens of God’s character and the overarching message of Scripture, rather than reading every narrative as an approval of the protagonists within it. Our theology matters.
This particular story ends in a bleak and confusing place, but I draw comfort from remembering God’s response when Abram did much the same. When Abram drove out Hagar to hide from his own sins, God saw Hagar and visited her in her grief.
We serve a God who sees those who are hurting, even when the people who claim to serve him are blinded by their own self-righteousness.
God saw when the ancient people of God messed up and tried to place the blame for their sins on those with less power.
God also sees today when world leaders scapegoat and dehumanize immigrants.
God sees when powerful men call their own flawed wisdom “God’s will” in order to hurt their neighbors. God sees when we are too busy to care.
I would urge us not to fall into the traps of nationalism, self-righteousness, and blaming “others” that we read about in Ezra-Nehemiah.
When we hear about America’s 250th anniversary with undertones of only certain ethnicities being “true Americans,” or when those who weren’t born here are treated as a threat to our freedom, I hope we will remember the failings of these men who thought they were righteous and noble in oppressing women and children. I hope we will not repeat their mistakes.
Let’s remember that we serve a God who desires compassion rather than sacrifice (Hosea 6:6, Matthew 9:13). We follow a Savior who sums up the whole law as love of God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37-38).
Let’s remember the conclusion to his famous parable of the good Samaritan, urging his followers to “go and do the same.”
“Not only were foreigners welcome, but they belonged. Ezra and Nehemiah’s selective reading of the Torah resulted in practices that did not reflect God’s vision for the Israelite community. In the name of biblical fidelity, they lost sight of biblical hospitality. The literary design of both books highlights the failure of each attempt at monoethnic reform.”
-Dr. Carmen Imes
NIV Cultural Studies Bible, page 775
See Jesus in the Divorce Debate video for a deeper look at this passage in Matthew.
A noteworthy example is in Nehemiah 13:1-3. They read in the Scripture about excluding Ammonites and Moabites specifically, but then they excluded ALL those of foreign descent. This is not faithfulness to the text; it is reinterpreting the text. It’s also noteworthy that when you read the presumed source material in Deuteronomy 23, it says that Ammonites and Moabites should be excluded “even to the tenth generation.” So that exclusion was time bound, not a command for all time.
The Jewish Study Bible dates Nehemiah’s return to Jerusalem as 24 years after Ezra’s return. (Pg 1690)