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A Patriarchal Culture Exegesis Of Ezra 9 : 1-15

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Constructing the Identity of the Foreign Women in a Patriarchal Culture Exegesis of Ezra 9:1-15
Most readers pass over the mention of the foreign wives who the narrator suggests were practicing abominations as past enemies of the Israel. Most people assume that these women were strange and foreign just because Ezra and the narrator said so. In this exegesis paper I will ask three questions Why was there opposition to the strange and foreign women? Were they foreign women or were they Jewish women? Lastly what was the status of women’s roles and rights in Post exilic Israel? "Interpreters of Ezra 9:1-15 usually focus on obedience and turning the people back to God. However, I will argue that Ezra uses marriage to foreign women as a trope to explain how the returned exiles from Babylon are the true Israel and not the people in the land who weren 't taken captive."
Historical and Literary Contexts This perciope includes Ezra’s prayer and thought about interethnic marriage. Ezra and others had arrived from Babylon to find that many of the exiles had marry women who were foreign. Many of these exiles from Babylon who had returned were descendants of the people taken during the Babylonian captivity. Arthur Wolak expands on the statement above he says after the end of the Babylonian captivity and when a large of portion of the Jewish community were relocated to Jerusalem in the 5th century BCE, many years
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