Getting Biblical in Daily Life
Interfaith Marriages
Ezra and Nehemiah are both strongly opposed to interfaith marriages. They expel the foreign wives and half-foreign children of the Israelites, remembering how King Solomon's wives corrupted him and dragged him into idolatry. However, this is at odds with the vision of books like Jonah and Ruth, where Gentiles are welcomed into the fold if they want to be part of the community and follow Mosaic law.
This kind of cultural purification is found in many radical religious cultures. As recently as 2014, a Sudanese woman was sentenced to death for marrying a non-Muslim. People all over the world, including Muslim countries, protested and the sentence was rescinded. Religious groups in many faiths strongly condemn intermarriage or even friendship with people outside the group because they don't want to risk having their members influenced by the values and practices of other faiths or cultures.
The idea's the same as in Ezra and Nehemiah—it's a way to make sure that people don't get "polluted" by dissenting views. But it was more than that in ancient times. The very survival of the newly reconstituted Jewish nation was at stake. Is that the case today? Though interfaith marriages are now very common today in most religious groups, the intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews (Orthodox being the very devout) in the U.S. is a whopping 71%. Some people think that's still a threat to the survival of the contemporary Jewish community. Jews who intermarry are much less likely to raise their children in the Jewish faith. On the other hand, people of other faiths married to Jews have been found to have a more positive opinion about Judaism (source). So, was Ezra right in what he did? Was he saving the nation or making it unnecessarily isolated from its neighbors and missing an opportunity to spread the word about Judaism?
Living as a Religious Minority
In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews are still living under foreign rule. They're no longer in exile, but their new leaders are Persian kings. They still have to deal with the suspicions of the people living around them, who accuse them of being rebellious and war-like. At the same time that they're refuting these claims, they need to try to retain their own identity and not totally adopt the practices of everyone around them. That's what supposedly got them exiled in the first place.
Religious minorities wrestle with these same issues today. For example, many Sikh men are obligated to carry/wear a ceremonial sword at all times, including in situations where many people might object or not understand. There have been important court cases on this very issue. And lots of people are probably familiar with debates surrounding the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women, or the attitude of Christian Scientists toward inoculations or of Jehovah's Witnesses toward blood transfusions or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The larger community often has difficulty accommodating these religious obligations, and these minorities are often accused of being anti-American (or anti-French or British or whatever).
The issues get really serious when you consider that some countries' solutions are to isolate or eradicate the religious minorities: practitioners of the Baha'i Faith in Iran, Christians in Syria and Egypt, Muslims in Burma, adherents of any and all religions in North Korea, the mass slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust in Europe.
So you can understand how tricky it is for the Jews in Ezra and Nehemiah to negotiate a peace with the greater society around them without simultaneously compromising their values in order to be accepted.
Territorial Claims and Turf Wars
Issues don't get any hotter than this. Reading the Hebrew Scriptures, it's clear that there's one consistent story line: God promised the Holy Land to Abraham in Genesis, and the rest of the books are all about getting there, leaving there, or returning there. The Bible states that God gave the Israelites permission to displace the people living in the region and claim Judah and Israel as their (literally) God-given homeland forever. Ezra and Nehemiah come into the picture in the "return to" phase of the story—the end of the Biblical story and meant to be the final and permanent return.
Plenty of people believe this to be true. Plenty don't, and the history of the Middle East has been one of almost constant conflict since antiquity, as every nation in the region has claimed the rights to the land. The current turmoil in the Middle East is just the latest chapter in a long and painful story with competing narratives and plenty of suffering and misunderstanding to go around.
Non-religious understandings of the story require more study of ancient history and archaeology and geography and politics and economics than Shmoop, tireless and diligent as we are, is prepared to wade into at this point. If ancient history turns you on, though, plenty of it exists in the written record, and it's really interesting to compare the biblical stories with the versions of the events recorded by the imperial powers and historians of the time.