ENFORCED DIVORCE (EZRA 10:2-3)

Enforced Divorce (Ezra 10:2-3)

This is one of the cruelest passages in the Bible since it apparently portrays God approving of mass enforced divorce among the Jews with wives and their children being forcibly sent away from their husbands and fathers. So we need to go into the matter in a little more detail than what is just on the surface.

The necessary background to understanding these two verses includes a description of the situation as it existed when this second group of Jews was allowed to return to their homeland under the leadership of Ezra. It was found that some of the people who had either never been deported or had returned earlier under Zerubbabel had intermarried with foreign women of the land. And that even included some of the priesthood. Ezra reacts in horror when he learns of this.

But unlike the way I had remembered the story, it wasn't actually Ezra who came up with the solution to the problem. Instead, that suggestion came from one Shecaniah. He felt that those pagan wives and their children should be “sent away,” and Ezra concurs. And this brings up the first area of controversy in the story – the identity of Shecaniah. Witness the competing pronouncements below:

    “It seems that Shecaniah would himself be involved in the disruption of family life which would result, for his father, Jehiel the son of Elam (v. 2) being one of the guilty men (v. 26) would be required to separate himself from his wife and their children, including himself.” (Short)

    “Their spokesman, Shecaniah, does not appear in the list of offenders.” (Cundall)

    Shecaniah “is not listed as one of the guilty.” (Myers)

    It is extraordinary that the spokesman should be Shecaniah ben Jehiel...since Jehiel...was among those who had married foreign wives (10:26); Shecaniah himself in this case would have been advocating his own excommunication, so we can only suppose that his father was another Jehiel of that family (it is a fairly common Israelite name).”

In summary, we have no way of knowing one way or another whether Shecaniah would have been affected by this ruling.

The next point to settle is in regard to Ezra's legal precedent in the biblical teachings (see v. 3) for dissolving such marriages. Again, there are various opinions concerning this matter:

    Such intermarriage was forbidden in Exodus 34:11-16 and Deuteronomy 7:1-5 since it would lead to idolatry in the land. (Kaiser)

    However, Milgrom points out that Exodus and Deuteronomy did not prohibit all intermarriage, only those with specific groups in Canaan.

    Short notes that Malachi 2:11 also criticizes such marriages. But arguing against that fact is also Malachi 2:16 in which God is said to hate divorce.

    Kaiser suggests that Ezra perhaps found a justification for divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 since it allowed a severing of marriage bonds in the case of “something unseemly or shameful.” Thus, he asks, “What could bring greater shame than the breaking of the covenant relationship and the ultimate judgment on all the people?”

    The “law” in v. 3 referred to Ezra's earlier proclamation recorded in Nehemiah 8 “since there is no prohibition against marrying foreigners in the Pentateuchal legislation, although there are strong hints elsewhere about its undesirabiliy.” (Myers)

    “Foreign women were married contrary to the law of God. The marriages were illegal from the outset. The sending away of the women is to guard the exiles against the continuation of an illegal act. With their foreign wives they lived in sin. It is thus clear from v. 4 that there is a strong legal background against what Shecaniah has formulated his proposal.” (Fensham)

So in summary, we really don't know what the biblical injunction was that Ezra used for justification in this case or whether he simply extrapolated it from general principles found in earlier teachings.

Assuming that Ezra was not just following some earlier pronouncement by God, what could have been his general motivation for taking such a severe step? Concerning this point, a number of proposal have been made, but one main reason seems to stand out in most scholars' minds:

    Boda mentions that some trace concern over intermarriage to prevent apostasy, others to preservation of ethnic purity, and still others to a concern that Jewish land might fall into foreign hands, and still others that it was a misguided attempt to purify society by scapegoating certain people. Boda himself feels that religious concerns were uppermost in mind.

    “For Ezra, the postexilic community is religious in character: a cultic community focused on the temple and Torah and concerned with purity / contamination from outsiders.” (Bedford)

    “The increased rigidity of cultural boundaries in the construction of social identity in Ezra-Nehemiah is likely to have been the result of a serious threat of cultural assimilation and political oppression.” (Knauth)

    “The little community was in grave danger of being adsorbed in the syncretism of its stronger and more powerful neighbors.” (Myers)

    “To keep the religion of the Lord pure was the one and only aim of Ezra and the returned exiles.” (Fensham)

    “He [Ezra] realized that not only were these mixed marriages acts of disobedience to God's law, but that it was because of such acts of disobedience in former times that the Jews had been exiled to Babylon.” (Short)

But now we come to the biggest problem most people today have with this whole story – the harshness of the action taken. However, there are some moderating facts that we need to take into account.

Kaiser puts the extent of the problem into perspective somewhat by calculating that only about 0.4% of the population was affected by this ruling.

The rest of Ezra 10 explains that it took all of three months for a group of democratically elected men to carefully examine each of the individual cases involved before taking any action.

The new ruling did not apply to marriages in which the wives had adopted the Jewish religion. In that regard, we can look to the examples of Ruth, Rahab, and Moses' Cushite wife for precedents.

Kaiser and others note that the verb “put away” is not the normal Hebrew word for “divorce.” Thus, we have no way of knowing whether the women and their children were provided for in some manner or other.

Eskenazi notes that the all-important verse Ezra 10:44 in the Hebrew simply reads, “Some had wives with whom they had sons” rather than “All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children.” He concludes that the latter understanding comes from the much later book I Esdras (9:36). “Ezra 10:44 thus does not say that the women and children were expelled. The fate of these families is not recorded in the Hebrew text.”

Despite the above moderating considerations, “this counsel which Shecaniah gave to Ezra might seem cruel and heartless; but it was felt to be essential if the Jewish faith was to survive.” (Short)

And Cundall elaborates on this theme: “The unhappiness caused by these broken homes must be set not only against the initial transgression involved in contracting of the marriages, but also against the ultimate blessing to the whole world that could only come through a purified community. The offence had to be dealt with sternly, and sentiment was not allowed to influence the profound principles involved.”

In closing, I should point out that none of the above should be used for a Christian today as justification for divorcing a spouse who is an unbeliever. Although it may not have been wise to contract such an unequal yoking to begin with, remember Paul's teaching in I Corinthians 7:12-16 that “the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.”