And when I heard this thing, I tore my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down appalled.
All Commentaries on Ezra 9:3 Go To Ezra 9
Bede
AD 735
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 Levites 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 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. Nor should one be surprised how it is the people of Israel along with the priests and Levites who are said to have committed this crime, when the earlier return consisted more of people from Judah and Benjamin than from the ten tribes who were called Israel. “For it should be known that when Israel [i.e., the ten tribes] was led into captivity, the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin were without distinction also called by the former name ‘Israel.’ ” In this verse, therefore, “the people of Israel” should not be interpreted as referring to the ten tribes (as opposed to Judah and Benjamin) but in a general way as referring to the people of God (as opposed to the people of the surrounding lands), who polluted the dignity of their heavenly name by associating with people of the lands. For the same prophet Malachi, whom the Hebrews declare to be none other than Ezra, also mentions this transgression in the book of his prophecy as follows: “Judah has sinned, and a detestable thing has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah has desecrated the holiness of the Lord whom he loved and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off the man who has done this, both the teacher and the disciple, from the tents of Jacob, even though he brings a gift to the Lord of Hosts.” When he says “Judah” here, he clearly means that the people of the first return had been defiled by this crime. But by adding, “May the Lord cut off the man who has done this, both the teacher and the disciple, from the tents of Jacob,” he showed by the words master and disciple that both the rulers and the people were polluted by this sin and that both, if they will not reform, must be rooted out from the fellowship of the holy. And when he added, “even though he brings a gift to the Lord of Hosts,” he warns that those who do not shrink from submitting themselves to the devil by sinning offer victims to the Lord in vain. In this episode we should admire the faith and excellent resolution of the people who were freed from captivity, who refer to themselves as “the holy seed” but the other nations in distinction to their own as “the people of the lands,” so that they might openly imply that they themselves, although born from the earth, nevertheless have their dwelling not on earth but in heaven insofar as they, more than other nations, believed in the God of heaven and hoped to obtain heavenly blessings from him. Thus they rightly grieve that their holiness had been polluted by the detestable actions of the Gentiles, and, what is worse, they acknowledge that even the leaders by whom they ought to have been corrected were the first to have gone astray. And it should be carefully noted and used as an example of good works that while some leaders sinned and caused the common people who were entrusted to them to sin, other leaders who were of more wholesome view for their part do their best to correct those sins; but because they cannot do this themselves they refer the matter to their pontifex [i.e., their archbishop] through whose authority so grave, so manifold and so longlasting a sin can be expiated. No one can doubt, in fact, that the foreign wives figuratively stand for the heresies and superstitious sects of philosophers, which, when they are recklessly admitted into the church, often greatly contaminate the holy seed of catholic truth and pure action with their errors.
