This year I've been reading through the Bible and the Catechism, and I was looking forward to Ezra. It was a long slog through Chronicles, but I knew that better things lay ahead: the ruler who is unaccountably moved by promptings from on high! the hope of restoration! the first-person perspective of someone who earnestly desired to serve God!
Have you read Ezra recently? I did not remember that Ezra's weeping over the apostasy of the nation is stirred up specifically by intermarriage. I certainly did not remember that the solution to this problem is for the men to send their foreign wives and children packing. Imagine me standing at my kitchen counter reading the tenth chapter of Ezra, rubbing the page between my fingers because SURELY there's something else before Nehemiah starts. Right? Isn't there??
Perhaps this remedy is not quite as unfeeling as it seemed to my late-night self. Maybe there was some sort of settlement available for the wives and children who were being sent away? Or safe conduct back to the places they had come from? The USCCB notes suggest that Ezra's marriage reform didn't get much traction. It's still troubling me.
It is maybe a little weird that I slogged through all of the earlier Old Testament shenanigans -- child sacrifice, among other things -- only to be pulled up short by divorce. I guess it's Ezra's zeal that's getting me down here. What became of those women and their children, I wonder?
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