Ezra 9:3

When I heard that, I became very angry, with the result that I tore my clothes and tore some hair from my head and from my beard. Then I sat down, very shocked/dismayed. The Israelis knew that God had warned us that he would punish us if we disobeyed what he had said to us about marrying women who are not Israelis.

Translation for Translators

In The King James Version

And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonied.

In Context

2Specifically, some Israeli men have married women who are not Israelis, and they have allowed their sons to do the same thing. So we, God’s sacred people, have become ◄contaminated/polluted in God’s sight►. And some of our leaders and officials have been the first/worst ones to do this.”

4So many of the Israelis trembled/were afraid when they heard that some of those who had returned from Babylonia had sinned by disobeying the God of us Israelis like that. They came and sat with me until it was time to offer the evening sacrifices of grain.

Read all of Ezra 9

Cross References

Leviticus 21:5You priests must not shave your heads or shave the edges of your beards or cut your bodies to show that you are mourning for someone who has died.

2 Kings 18:37Then Eliakim the palace administrator and Shebna the court secretary and Joah the royal historian went back to Hezekiah with their clothes torn because they were extremely distressed, and they told him what the official from Assyria had said.

Nehemiah 13:25So I rebuked those men, and I asked God to curse them, and I beat them and pulled out some of their hair. Then I forced them to solemnly promise, knowing that God [MTY] was listening, that they would never again marry foreigners, and never allow their children to marry foreigners.

Job 2:12When they saw Job from a distance, they almost did not recognize him. They wailed loudly, they tore their robes, and they threw dust over their heads to show how sorry they were because of what had happened to Job.

Psalms 143:4So I am very discouraged; I am very dismayed/worried.

Jeremiah 7:29So, tell them to cut off their hair to show that they are mourning; tell them to go up into the hills and sing a sad funeral song, because I have completely rejected [DOU] this generation of people who have made me angry.”

Matthew Henry on Ezra 9:2-5

Ezra's Reformation. ( b. c. 456.) 1 Now when these things were done, the princes came to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. 2 For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the… Read the whole commentary →

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