Ezra's call for divorce

[charliedale]

Pastor Mike,

This one has been bothering me for a long time.

At the end of Ezra, it becomes clear that the Jews had been marrying those of other faiths in clear violation of God's Law. I have no question on that, but Ezra's solution has always bothered me.

In chapted 10, they put away all these foreign wives and the children they had with them. It seems quite harsh. I would assume it put those women and children in poverty. It also shocks my modern Christian sensibilities to abandon one's family that way. I much perfer Paul's guidelines to the Corinthians. Don't marry an unbeliever, but being married to an unbeliever isn't grounds for divorce.

Is there something I'm missing in Ezra's situation? How could this possibly be right?

[Mike Miller]

I can certainly see how this would rub against a New Testament understanding of marriage and divorce. Of course, we know that New Testament teachings on marriage and divorce are actually based on Old Testament teachings (see Matthew 19:3-6). Therefore, this command to get rid of their pagan wives seems to fly in the face of everything the Bible teaches about the sanctity and permanence of marriage.

Unfortunately, the clue to making any sense of this lies in the original language of Ezra, which is Hebrew. In Ezra 10, the word translated "married" is a word only used that way in Ezra 10 and Nehemiah 13. The word in question has as its root meaning "to sit" or "to dwell," and in the almost 1,100 other times it is used in the Old Testament, the meaning relates to sitting or dwelling. Moreover, the word translated "put away" is not the normal word for divorce. For both words, the verb form is one of causative action (Hiphil, for those of you who know Hebrew), which literally translates that certain men "caused the women to dwell" with them and then were commanded to "cause them to go away."

Therefore, it is most likely that these were not real marriages. Instead, the men in question (around 100 of them, as listed in Ezra 10:18-44) had taken these women into their homes (possibly by force), and Ezra commanded them to put them out of their homes. I think this would line up with Paul's teaching and the way we would handle people who are cohabiting. In other words, if a Christian is cohabiting with a non-Christian, we would not counsel them to marry, but to separate. Also, the women in Ezra's day probably would have gone back to their own families.