But beyond questions of chronology, Ezra presents other engaging features. In terms of form, a variety of texts present themselves: letters, first-person memoirs, third-person narratives, and lists. The author or editor chose not to smooth the transitions from one form to another, and leave the book as an explicit anthology.
The most obvious narrative to be assembled from the texts is the struggle to rebuild Jerusalem, its Temple, and its walls. The fall of Babylon, in 539 B.C., to the armies of the Persian king Cyrus, paved the way for the release of the Jews, who had been held captive by the Babylonians. Freed by Cyrus, they return to Judea and begin the reconstruction.
This process is dominated by frustration. Initially, Cyrus gives permission and even encouragement to the project, but his successors and their subordinates continuously create obstacles to the construction. The frustrating form of the text - the unevenness between forms, the exasperating riddles of sequence - is perhaps meant to capture the frustrations of the Jews as they encounter one complication after another.
The theme of confusion permeates the theme of obstructionism. The enemies of the rebuilding project confuse the spiritual and the worldly. The fear, real or feigned, that the Jews will not pay taxes to the Persians, and the intimation that Jerusalem would lead some form of rebellion - a plausible notion in the wake of Babylonian revolts against the Persian administration of Xerxes around 521 B.C. - reveal that the enemies of the Jews are thinking on a strictly worldly plane, and fail to understand the larger spiritual issues which motivate the Jews.
Ironically, the Jews themselves are at that moment in their history at which they begin to loosen their grasp on the desire for a worldly kingdom. To be sure, the zealot tendency will remain strong, and four centuries later, many will confuse Jesus with a worldly king. But emerging from the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews have also begun to explore the more spiritual understanding of their inherited promises. While there will remain a significant focus on the establishment of a geo-political kingdom, it no longer has hegemony over the parallel spiritual focus.
Irony is located in the fact that, just as the Jews are increasing their scope to include a vision beyond the physical and political, their enemies, still strictly limited to the physical and political, accuse them of plotting in exactly this worldly mode.
The sudden release with which these barriers are removed and progress enabled manifests a divine intervention, like the Exodus from Egypt or Cyrus's initial impetus for the reconstruction.
The closing segment's concern with intermarriage again emphasizes the transition of the Jews from a primarily geo-political focus to a more spiritual focus, and again leaves them open to misunderstanding. Those not attuned to the sacred concerns of the Jews will be easily misled into accusing them of chauvinism and racism. Nothing could seem more crassly bigoted than Ezra's dismay at intermarriage.
This misunderstanding pivots on the word 'foreign' or 'strange' in the text. Ezra is not dealing here with matters of race or language. What is 'foreign' about the forbidden spouses is their 'abominations' or 'detestable practices' - their adherence to the polytheistic practices of neighboring cultures. Human sacrifice was still not only practiced by the nations located around Judaea, but practiced frequently. These pagan worship ceremonies also include ritual orgies. Ezra marks these things as foreign, i.e., a foreign way of thinking.
The larger text and context of the Tanakh reveal that God freely countenances marriages between individuals of different cultures, languages, citizenships, and races. Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite, who was foreign in the sense of language, culture, citizenship, and race - but who was not foreign in the spiritual sense, inasmuch as her family worshipped the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, the one true God.
To be sure, more questions are raised than are answered by Zipporah - enigmatic passages in the text mention a Cushite woman who might be Zipporah, or who might be a second wife to Moses - but the precedent is set.
Ezra's injunction against marrying those who engaged in the polytheistic practices of the pagan nations was not an example of cultural elitism, national chauvinism, xenophobia, or nativism. Ezra understood that the practices of human sacrifice and ritual orgies were what made these people foreign, and were practices which would grow and spread if permitted. A civilization which would maintain any respect for human life, and which would attribute any dignity to human life, could not survive if it permitted these practices.
A rather modern message emerges from Ezra: if a society is both to maintain civil liberty and to maintain a sense of dignity and respect for human life, then - while it freely allows intermarriage in the cultural, linguistic, and racial senses - it cannot allow practices like human sacrifice and ritual orgies, which undermine any sense of dignity or respect concerning humans, and undermine any sense of civil freedom. Marriage is one way in which these pagan practices propagate them: to allow marriage to a practicing polytheist is to encourage the spread of these practices.
The text of the Tanakh sees no problem with marriage across boundaries of citizenship. Marriage which would be a tool for the degradation of human life, however, must be stopped.
Thus the book of Ezra, documenting the Jews at the time when their awareness of, and focus on, spiritual matters was keener than at previous times in the narrative of the Tanakh's mega-text, fittingly ends with a passage concerning marriage. Having embraced a more spiritual perspective, the Jews could countenance marriages across lines of language, citizenship, race, and culture; but they could not permit marriage which would serve as an instrument for the degradation of human life.
