Ezra9chapter 9

The officials come to Ezra with a report he did not expect: the people, the priests, and the Levites have intermarried with the surrounding peoples, "and the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass." The leadership was leading it.

The concern was not ethnic. The list of peoples named is a list of religious traditions — the cults of the land that had pulled Israel apart for centuries and had, in the end, cost them the country. Malachi describes the same crisis as marrying "the daughter of a strange god."

Scale is what made it urgent. The whole province of Judah in this period was small — a district perhaps twenty-five miles across, with a population in the tens of thousands at most, surrounded by larger groups. A generation or two of intermarriage without conversion would have ended the community as a distinct people, and with it the line the promises ran through.

Ezra's reaction is physical and public: he tears his clothes and his robe, pulls hair from his head and beard, and sits stunned until the evening sacrifice. Then he kneels with his hands spread out and prays.

The prayer never says "they." It says "our iniquities are increased over our head," and "we are before thee in our trespasses." Ezra had been in the country four months and had nothing to do with it.

He also names what makes it worse: God had just given them "a nail in his holy place" — a peg, a foothold — a little reviving in their bondage. This was happening after the mercy, not before it.