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.
Read Chapter 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 th...
Then Jeshua and his sons and his brethren, Kadmiel and his sons, and the sons of Judah, as one man came and took charge of the workmen in the temple of the Lord, along with the descendents of Henadad, with their sons and their brethren, the Levites. In this passage he means by Jeshua not the high priest son of Jozadak but one of the Lévites concerning whom it was said earlier that they were appointed from twenty years and above to hasten forward the work of the Lord. Of these there were Kadmiel and the sons of Henadad, who are likewise said to have taken charge of the work enjoined upon them with their sons and brethren. In fact, in the catalogue of the people of Israel above, they are the first of the Lévites to be mentioned by name after the priests: the Lévites, the sons of Jeshua and of Kadmiel, the sons of Hodaviah, seventy-four. It is thus implicit in these two passages that they were the leaders and patriarchs of the Lévites of that time. The descendants of Judah are justly put ...
Coat, (tunicam) or inner garment. (Haydock)
Mourning. Hebrew, "astonished. "(Syriac) (Montanus) (Calmet) (Protestants)
Septuagint, "alone. "3 Esdras, "pensive and in grief. "(Haydock)
Arabic, "not uttering a word. "See Job i. 20., and ii. 8. This was the ordinary posture of people in sorrow, Isaias iii. 26. (Calmet)
