The book of Ezra closes with a difficult story. In his distress over his discovery that the people of Israel were marrying foreign women (Ezra 9:3), Ezra offered one of the most moving lamentations in the Bible (9:5-15). “We have forsaken your commandments” (9:10); “you, our God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved” (9:13); “here we are before you in our guilt, though no one can face you because of this” (9:15).

It is an intense prayer of confession: it’s tempting to propose it as a model of contrition. Yet it is hard to do so, because it became the motivation for divorce. In the end, the people agreed that they must repudiate all these foreign wives, along with their children. Rather than arguing that divorce was unthinkable, the people of God insisted upon it (10:3, 44). In the end, 112 men are listed by name: they divorced their wives and sent them and their children away in the name of religious purity (10:18-44). What happened to these suddenly-cast-out women and children is not recorded.

Moses had warned against the danger of foreign marriages: “Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods (Deuteronomy 7:3). King Solomon had married foreign wives, and they “turned away his heart” to follow Astarte and Milcom, Chemosh and Molech (I Kings 11:1-8). And so many of the kings of Israel and Judah had done the same. So it is understandable that Ezra would be terribly upset about the situation: no sooner had the people of God gotten home from 70 years in exile than they started marrying women who worshiped foreign gods.

As people who know that we are sinners, we need to be in favor of prayers of confession, and in favor of purity. Yet is it so obvious that breaking apart marriages in the name of religion is the way to go? We commonly suppose that scripture teaches that the sanctity of the marriage bond must never be broken: but in this case, the scripture tells us of how the leaders insisted that divorce was necessary.

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Help us, Lord! We are not good at purity. We are not good at faithfulness. Change our hearts, we pray, so that we may live in steadfast loyalty, in covenant commitment, both to you and to one another, day by day and always.

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