Canter Bridge

It is perhaps not for us to judge Ezra’s decisions when his people’s survival was at stake.

To say this is immediately to risk the kind of biblicism that fails to reckon with narrative that is not fit for morality lessons or reduction to principles. A story like this exists because the events it describes actually happened in a people to whose clothing the smoke of extinction still clung. Such a people finds it impossible to regroup gently.

Their hope is that there is mercy in severity. If that mercy does not appear, they are worthy of disdain. Yet this does relieve us of the readerly duty to read sympathetically, even when this requires a hermeneutical discipline that is not native to us.

Ezra and the leaders of ‘the exilic community’ send away the foreign wives and children among them for the sake of not condemning the people that has so recently returned to Jerusalem and its surroundings to the same impurity with which the text credits the land.

Via the extensive first-person reportage of Ezra’s ‘memoir’, he underscores just how precarious his people’s survival—he insists on calling them ‘the exilic community’—remains in this old-new land. Exile, we are to understand, is the defining quality of this rabble. The people swing between rapturous hope of recovery, on the one hand, and the kind of pragmatic intermarriage that suggests hope had faded, on the other.

Ezra is nearly broken by reports that the quijotesque project of Return is about to fail on the basis of the economies of marriage and the sexual drive. His response is penitent prayer on behalf of the community.

When the people rally, the cost does not go down. Indeed, the narrative utilizes the first-person plural to suggest that the ‘we’ who are moved to action by Ezra’s public enactment of shame are themselves implicated by the foreign accents of their women. It would be too simple to imagine a sect of religious purists forcing divorce among the more open-minded households of the community.

As though to underscore the cross-textured nature of the matter, the guilds who take Ezra’s counsel have the names of their own heads of intermarried households enshrined in the document that now becomes the Scripture of those who read it more than two millennia hence.

There may be a hint of a merciful denouement in the establishment of a bureaucracy. Prophetic and priestly severity is often best mediated by men and women who count and record.

Yet for all our exertions towards hermeneutical sympathy, we deceive ourselves to imagine that the text can be twisted into a therapeutic exercise in values clarification. It is not that.

It is, instead, a record of one moment when Israel’s faith seemed to those who governed to demand the surgery of divorce. We squirm under the ethnic profiling of the matter. We scratch about for a bit of ecumenism.

None is to be found. Ezra faces the disappearance of the community and the waste of YHWH’s last offer of restoration.

Somewhat self-consciously, he asks us to believe he acted as any wise man would, though the book that bears his name ends by mentioning women and children who now found themselves thrust outside the very homes in which the cries of the former had given life to the vulnerable existence of the latter.

What mingling of conviction and self-doubt tortured Ezra’s soul as they shuffled past his window on their pitiful way to where they came from?