Ezra — Chapter 10

Now when Esdras was praying thus, and beseeching, and weeping, and lying before the temple of God, there was gathered to him of Israel an exceeding great assembly of men, and women, and children, and the people wept with much weeping. Lapide: Ezra is explicitly a type of Christ — as Christ confessed and wept for sins not His own, taking the person and the sin of the people upon Himself, so Ezra here prostrates himself before the Temple as unworthy to enter, praying with groaning and tears for the people's transgression, not his own.

Shecaniah son of Jehiel says: \"We have transgressed against our God and have taken strange wives from the people of the land; and now if there be repentance in Israel concerning this, let us make a covenant with the Lord our God.\" Lapide: \"repentance\" presupposes hope of obtaining pardon; he who has no such hope does not repent but despairs, as Judas did. Therefore, true penance includes hope of forgiveness.

Let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and such as are born of them, according to the will of the Lord. Lapide: the children born of these marriages were not to be simply abandoned outright, but were to be sent to colleges and pedagogical institutions specially established, there to be educated in the true fear of God and in good morals, by wise and prudent men (citing Cajetan).

Ezra arose and made the chief priests, Levites, and all Israel swear that they would do according to this word — that is, that they would put away their foreign wives absolutely and entirely. Lapide notes this was a great and serious resolution: to put away wives to whom they had been bound for many years and whom they loved as their own flesh, and to send away their children who were as second selves and their hope of posterity. They preferred to please God rather than wives and children.

The people of Juda and Benjamin gathered at Jerusalem on the twentieth day of the ninth month (Kislev = November–December). Lapide: \"sitting in the street of the house of God, trembling because of the sin and the rain\" — they trembled inwardly from the sting of conscience (having taken foreign wives against God's law) and outwardly from the cold rains of the season.

And now give glory to the Lord God of your fathers, and do his pleasure, and separate yourselves from the people of the land, and from your strange wives. Lapide: \"give glory\" = confess your sin. This confession glorifies God in four ways: (1) it testifies that God is just and they are sinners; (2) it subjects them to God and His law; (3) it removes the danger of idolatry; (4) it separates the faithful and holy from contact with the unfaithful and unclean.

All these had taken strange wives, and there were among them women that had borne children. Lapide notes that the list names even priests among those who had taken foreign wives — a sign of the great corruption of morals of that time, such that the contagion had even penetrated the sacerdotal order. He cites Isaias 24:2: \"As with the people, so with the priest.\"