Addendum: Ezra

Hi, Everyone! Last time, I got us through the return of the Babylonian Captives to the Holy Land. Before I move on, though, I thought I might do a quick Addendum on Ezra, a priest and scribe who seems to have lived and been active in the 5th Century BCE. He shows up in the Bible in the books of Ezra (obviously) and Nehemiah.

Ezra himself is a fascinating, but (in the Bible) not particularly attractive character. He was a Babylonian Jew and intellectual who comes back to Judah with royal backing from the Persian emperor, maybe Artaxerxes I (465–424 BCE). He is sent specifically to restore Judaism in its pure and pristine (i.e. Babylonian) form.

"Ezra reading the Law for the people, by Gustave Doré.

About the image: This is “Ezra reading the Law for the people, by Gustave Doré. It is believed to be in the public domain. It may be seen on Wikimedia here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:109.Ezra_Reads_the_Law_to_the_People.jpg

He appears in Jerusalem and spends his time trying to stamp out any trace of polytheism or henotheism, or, indeed, any sort of foreign or unfamiliar religious practice. He centralizes the religion -- all worship is focused on the Temple. All local shrines and “high places” are declared illicit. Local religious practitioners--lay leaders, village elders, and priests who are not directly affiliated with the Temple -- were delegitimized. It was Ezra’s way or the highway.

And it got worse. Ezra was outraged to find that local people...the stay-behinds...had been marrying outside the faith. They’d been taking as wives “foreign women.” Horrified, he demanded that they divorce their wives and send them away...along with their children.(Ezra 10:10–11). Supposedly, they did it. Supposedly dozens (100s?) of men were contrite and abandoned their wives and children to unknown fates. (Ezra 10:18–44)

In a word, Whoa.

But...but...frankly, I don’t think this really happened. I’m guessing it was a later literary invention meant to extol cultural purity. I’m basing that on the fact that even generations later, the authorities were still b*tching about exogamy (marriage outside the group), which must have meant it was still going on. And other stories in the Bible actually rebuke Ezra & Co. by *glorifying* foreign wives -- viz., the book of Ruth, which was probably written (okay, for literalists, at least edited) about the same time as Ezra’s furious pronouncements against them foreign women. In it, of course, we learn that not only is Ruth a (gasp!) a Moabite, but that also she’s the great-grandmother of King David himself.

What I’m guessing is that Ezra himself may or may not have actually existed. (Historians aren’t sure.) But if he did exist, he wasn’t quite the moralizing bully that he is said to be in the book which carries his name. He may have been inflexible, and something of a religious bigot...but I’m guessing he didn’t come out and tell men to leave their wives and children. Even for a fanatic, that’s an extreme position to take, and one guaranteed to damage your own position.

And I’m not sure that the men did any such thing as divorcing their “alien” wives. Admittedly, men have proved repeatedly (alas) that they are capable of doing terrible things, even to their own mates and offspring. But a mass divorce of the sort envisioned in the Bible may be quite another matter. It would have had serious, lasting, and negative effects on society...and on the men themselves, who would be losing not only their wives (who were performing valuable economic services in the home) but also their heirs. That’s not something they would do lightly. Or, probably, at all. (1)

What I’m betting (once more dashing in where Angels, even St. Mike, would fear to tread) is that Ezra didn’t say or do what he was said to have said. Or, at least, not all of it. My guess is that subsequent priests and scribes were looking for a figurehead, someone to personify themselves and to justify their own claims of cultural and political supremacy. And there was Ezra, the perfect symbol for priestly and legal authority.(2)

What they wanted, in short, was a mythical Ezra who would show that they, themselves, should be in charge of the nation, and that Lesser People, the Little People, ought to obey their commands, no matter how outrageous, without a murmur. (3)

Anyway, that’s my guess. But, as before, it is just a guess, and you can accept or reject it as you see fit.

But one thing that *is* clear is that after the return of the Babylonian Captives, and for a long while afterwards...

Judah was a society under serious stress...with powerful groups battling it out for supremacy, and the lower and working classes not quite sure where they stood, and not quite happy about what was happening.

All of which, as we shall see, will impact Angels in general.

And Michael in particular.

Footnotes:

1. Or, if Ezra did call for such extreme measures, then I’m guessing he didn’t really expect to be obeyed. There are a lot of diktats in history that are issued in full knowledge that everyone will smile and nod and say yes, and then simply pay no attention to them.

2. And it is surely significant that later still, Ezra would be called a “New Moses,” and credited with re-introducing the whole of the books of the Torah, which (they said) had been burned or lost in the Babylonian Captivity, and were only recovered when Ezra reproduced them from memory. This is reported in the 2 Esdras, a.k.a., 4 Ezra, an apocryphal work attributed to Ezra himself.

3. The irony is that I suspect Ezra himself would be appalled by all this. While he was no egalitarian, his whole point was the primacy of God, not man.

Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker

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