Today’s reading: Ezra 4; 2 Timothy 2-3
I have always wondered if it was the right decision for the Jewish elders to refuse to let the other peoples help rebuild the temple.
On the one hand, Ezra 4 opens referring to those who wanted to help rebuild as “the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin,” which would seem to say that this was obviously the right choice to not allow them to help, but it’s worth asking why they were adversaries. This book is written after the fact, and these people certainly did become adversaries of the Jews, but it was largely because of this that they became adversaries. A lot of the hatred/racism that we read about in the gospels between the Jews and Samaritans traces back to this, that the Jews rejected these other people having a hand in the proper worship of Yahweh.
This is why I wonder if this was really the right thing to do in refusing them. It’s true that the Jews weren’t supposed to intermarry with the peoples of the surrounding nations or take on their customs, but from the beginning they were intended to be a light to the nations. God told Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him and his descendants. So here, you have non-Jewish people, displaced from their homes and forcibly resettled into the land of Israel, and they have willingly taken up the worship of Yahweh, the God of the land. Shouldn’t that be celebrated? For sure their worship was not fully correct, and they likely needed some instruction in how to properly worship Yahweh according to His own instructions, but that correction won’t be at all possible as enemies.
It seems to me like it would be something to celebrate that the surrounding peoples would want to come together to help rebuild the temple of Yahweh. This seems like a win in the plan of God to make His people a blessing to all the nations.
Maybe this was God moving in and through His people to reject this help because He knew it would be more problematic than good, or because it was actually a devious offer, but I’m not convinced it might not also have been the Jewish elders making a very human, and wrong, decision to exclude them because they weren’t ethnically Jewish, and therefore shouldn’t get to partake in Yahweh, ultimately creating centuries of hatred and racism against their neighbors.
I really don’t know if this was the right decision or not, but it always makes me wonder when I read this first refusal in Ezra 4.
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