And this is the number of them: thirty platters of gold, a thousand platters of silver, nine and twenty knives,
All Commentaries on Ezra 1:9 Go To Ezra 1
Bede
AD 735
After these things were accomplished, the leaders came to me and said, 'The people of Israel and the priests and Lévites have not kept themselves separate from the people of the lands and from their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters for themselves and for their sons, and have mingled the holy seed with the people of the lands. And the hand of the leaders and officials has been the first in this crossing of boundaries.' The crime of this transgression is also plainly described in the prophet Malachi and is denounced by prophetic authority. For when they had returned from captivity in Babylonia, not only the leaders and priests and Lévites but also the remaining people cast aside their wives who were of the Israelite race, who were exhausted and unable to work due to their poverty and the privations of too long a journey and the weakness of their sex, and so their bodies had become weak and unattractive; and they joined in marriage with foreigners either because they were flourishing in age, or were more beautiful because of the care they took of their bodies, or because they were the daughters of powerful and rich men. These Israelites, it should be understood, were not from among those who had come up with Ezra on that occasion but from those who had long since come up from captivity with Zerubbabel and Jeshua. For those who had come up with Ezra could not have come so rapidly to despise the teaching of such a great guide and leader that, having remained in their homeland for not even five months, they would have abandoned their own wives and accepted foreign ones; rather, those leaders must be understood to have been from the number of those who were anxious to condemn this crime by reporting to Ezra.
