Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [105]
BIBLICAL VOICES
After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the people of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.” When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled. Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles, gathered around me while I sat appalled until the evening sacrifice. (Ezra 9:1-4)
Mixed marriages: Kosher or not?
In Jewish history, law, and theology, Ezra is a character of great significance. Some Hebrew scholars rank him second only to Moses as a lawgiver and prophet. A Jewish official of the Persian government who was responsible for the administration of Jewish religious affairs, Ezra was sent to Jerusalem to stabilize the Jewish community there and reestablish the Law of Moses. He was accompanied by some seventeen hundred Babylonian Jews, including some Levites apparently not too eager to make the trip.
Upon returning to Jerusalem in 458 BCE, Ezra reestablished the Mosaic Laws and rituals. In Who Wrote the Bible?, Richard Elliot Friedman argues that Ezra was the biblical “R” author, or “Redactor,” who cut and pasted together the earlier J, E, P, and D strands into the Torah in much the form it now takes. Considered by some as the second founder (after Moses) of the Jewish nation, Ezra was responsible for the extensive codification of the Laws, including those governing Temple worship and the scriptural canon. He also contributed to the eventual replacement of priests by rabbis, or learned teachers.
But one of Ezra’s first decisions was none too popular and from a modern perspective, cruel. He decided that all Jewish men had to get rid of their foreign wives and their children. Over a period of a few months the men reluctantly agreed, and Ezra ends poignantly with the words, “All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children.”
The biblical account offers no clue as to what becomes of these banished families. There is some ambiguity that the men singled out in Ezra as having foreign wives comply with the law. While the NRSV Ezra concludes: “All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children,” the Jewish Publication Society version reads: “All these had married foreign women, among whom were some women who had borne children.” But the implication is that these women and their children were abandoned. Ezra apparently didn’t consider the possibility of conversion.
Seemingly overlooked are the many “foreign” women who were crucial heroines in Israelite history. Among these is Tamar (see Genesis), the Canaanite woman who tricked Judah but bears Perez, an ancestor of King David, and Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho. Many scholars have suggested that Ruth (see page 169), a story of a model foreign wife who converts, was specifically written to counter Ezra’s decree.
The issue of intermarriage is still a divisive and emotional question among contemporary Jews. One reason: the definition of who is a Jew. According to Jewish Law, a Jew is one who is born to a Jewish mother or is converted to Judaism. Although Reform Jews have regarded children of Jewish fathers as Jews since 1983, Orthodox and Conservative Jews do not share that view. Orthodox Jews also reject Reform and Conservative conversions to Judaism, the vast majority of such conversions. While this is an emotional issue that speaks to the very survival of Judaism in many places, it has an even greater impact in modern Israel, where the question