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?
What became of women dismissed by their husbands and children disowned by their fathers? Nothing good, I imagine.
I know you don't talk politics here, but I wonder if the fact that talk about immigration and refugees is so much in the public eye right now explains why this particular bit caught you on this read through.
Posted by: Jennifer | July 25, 2016 at 05:49 AM
What became of them, indeed? I kind of remember a few sermons or articles that might of used this as an example of why it's important to marry a Christian, but I know I had never considered this story as having real live people before. Sigh.
Posted by: Calee | July 25, 2016 at 09:55 AM