And whosoever remains in any place where he sojourns, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with animals, besides the freewill offering for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.
All Commentaries on Ezra 1:4 Go To Ezra 1
Bede
AD 735
But the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity were building a temple to the Lord God of Israel. And they approached Zerubbabel and the leading men of the fathers and said to them: 'Let us build with you, for we seek your God as you do: behold we have been sacrificing to him since the days of King Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here'. The story is well-known. By the enemies of Judah and Benjamin he means the Samaritans whom the king of the Assyrians, when the ten tribes had been captured, transported from various peoples of the Gentiles into their cities and lands; they later accepted God's law and observed it to a degree and yet continued to be slaves to the same idols as before. Therefore, because they despised the true worshippers of God, they promised to help them with their work so that, having been received into their fellowship, they might be able to cause them loss. Now it is readily obvious to anyone that such peoples figuratively stand for false brethren, that is, heretics and the bad catholics. They are the enemies of Judah, that is, of the 'confession' and 'praise' which the Church offers in this life to the Lord through right faith and works worthy of faith. They are also the enemies of Benjamin (that is, of the 'child of the right hand'), since they separate those who listen to them from the lot of faithful people who will receive blessing and an eternal kingdom at the right hand of the judge in the life to come. Therefore, such ones say to Zerubbabel and the leading men of the fathers, Let us build with you, for we seek your God as you do, when heretics pretend that the authority to preach is divided equally between themselves and catholics, claiming that they have and love one and the same purity with those of true faith and work in order that they might receive the power to teach and, in the midst of the good seed from which the Apostle Paul received the name spermologos (i.e. 'word-sower'), sow the weeds of hidden doctrine. Certain men at the council of Nicaea acted in just this manner: they subscribed to the true faith along with the catholic Fathers but not with a catholic mind in order that the more intimately they mixed themselves with the faithful, the easier it would be for them to make a place for receiving the Arian treachery. So too, at the Council of Palestine Pelagius denounced by utterance and writing but not in mind the heresy by which he most sharply impugned God's grace, lest he should himself be anathematized by catholic priests and lose his position as a teacher in the Church and, with it, the opportunity to sow his error.
