Ezrachapter 10
44 verses · BSBEzra book hub →
Speaks with:Ezra 2×13Nehemiah 7×11Ezra 8×4Ezra 10×4Nehemiah 13×3Nehemiah 3×3
Summary
Chapter summary
While Ezra prayed and wept, casting himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly gathered and wept sore. Shecaniah speaks the turn: 'Yet now there is hope for Israel concerning this thing': let a covenant be made to put away the foreign wives, according to the law. Proclamation goes through Judah, and within three days all sit in the broad place trembling, in the ninth month, in the great rain. Chiefs are appointed to examine each case, tried from the first day of the tenth month to the first day of the first. The book ends without ceremony, on the bare roll of names of those who had married foreign women.
Context
History · Ezra — Ezra overview
- A. 1–8 Shecaniah: there is yet hope in Israel concerning this thing
- B. 9–17 Trembling in the rain, and a matter too great for one day
- C. 18–44 The names of the men who had taken foreign wives
The outline
A.Shecaniah: there is yet hope in Israel concerning this thingvv. 1 to 8
Read vv. 1 to 8 →B.Trembling in the rain, and a matter too great for one dayvv. 9 to 17
Read vv. 9 to 17 →C.The names of the men who had taken foreign wivesvv. 18 to 44
Read vv. 18 to 44 →
The world behind this chapter
Ezra 10The history
The whole community is summoned to Jerusalem on three days' notice, with property forfeiture for anyone who does not come. They sit in the street before the house of God, trembling — the text says — "for this matter, and for the great rain."
That detail is exact. The ninth month is roughly December, the heart of Jerusalem's rainy season, when cold rain comes in off the Mediterranean and the hill country turns miserable. A large crowd sitting in the open in that weather could not sit long, and they say so: the people are many and it is a time of much rain, and we are not able to stand outside.
So they propose a process instead of a mass decision — appointed rulers, each town's cases heard with its elders and judges, working through the winter. It took about three months.
The list at the end is short relative to the population: a little over a hundred men, including seventeen priests. Whatever else this was, it was not a purge of the whole community.
The chapter is genuinely painful, and honest readers have always felt it. Wives and children were sent away. The text records that it happened and does not soften it, and it also records one dissenting voice — some men stood against the plan.
Nehemiah, arriving thirteen years later, would face the same problem again and handle it differently, confronting individuals rather than running a province-wide review.
What it meant to them
For the returnees the question underneath the whole procedure was whether this small community was going to survive as the people of the covenant or dissolve into the landscape within a generation.
The book ends without a tidy resolution — just a list of names and a bare note about the children. It is a record of a community trying, at real cost and imperfectly, to keep its identity in a corner of an empire that had no reason to care whether it did.
Sources cited
- Alfred Edersheim, Bible History: Old Testament
- Edwin Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Ezra 10. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.