Isaiah 56:1-8 and the redefining of the restoration Judean community

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2000 by Clinton E. Hammock

Another reason for keeping the community ethnically pure might be found in the desire of the priests to exercise political control over the community. For the priests the reconstruction of the temple would bring God back to the land. This reconstruction also would give the priests control over the interpretation of law, put them in power, and allow them to dictate who could marry whom. As far as marriage to foreigners was concerned, the ban of Deuteronomy 23: 3-9 fell on only a few groups of foreigners (Ammonites and Moabites). It was not a total ban on all gentiles. Isaiah 56:1-8 emphasizes the absence of a total ban, but the priests emphasize the ban itself and generalize it to all non-Judeans. Those opposed to the inclusion of foreigners would have held that by allowing them to enter the temple, they would pollute the sacred temple grounds. These opponents would have held the view that such foreign and polluting (syncretistic) elements must be excluded from the temple so that God would restore his favor to the Judean community. This could happen only if the Judeans separated themselves from the outsiders (Achtemeier 1982: 18-19). It was upon these grounds, at least on the religious ideological level, that the exclusionists, led by Nehemiah and Ezra, based their attack on mixed marriages. For them purification was a legal privilege that only a Judean could enjoy. A mixed marriage, from this perspective, would pass on impurity to the Judean partner. Life under the Deuteronomistic law was a lifetime commitment, and only a Judean could make it (Smith: 178-80).

Here too we can discern the issues of land and children behind these viewpoints. None of the intermarriages that took place in the early restoration could have occurred if the priests were firmly in control. With this control the priests could establish religious rules to regulate the reproduction of Judean offspring to whom family property could be passed, or to keep the community ethnically pure so as not to weaken ethnic claims to communal territories. It is likely that Third Isaiah supported the rights of Judeans to intermarry (in the hope that the foreign spouse would become a convert and adhere to the practices of the community). Third Isaiah did not support the exclusivistic policies of Ezra and Nehemiah and their party, who attempted to solve the problem of idolatry and syncretism by way of divorce and expulsion (Rofe: 214).

These various positions are summarized on Table 3.

It is my contention that those whom Ezra shut out of the community with his marriage reform were not the converts of Figure 1, but the "people of the land" of the class of gentiles with whom some Judeans had intermarried. These gentiles were probably syncretistic worshipers of Judean descent, but they were eligible marriage partners early in the restoration. They were shut out because they did not fully convert and thus represented a contaminating influence to the socialization of children. If Hoglund is correct, they also represented a blurring of the ethnic boundaries of the community, and therefore threatened the economic integrity of the community. Ezra moved to have them expelled because the Judean community at this time had developed a level of self-sufficiency and a sufficiently large population base to be reproductively self-sustaining. The extra fertility of the gentile class (who did not become converts) of the "people of the land" was no longer necessary.