ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses approaches to Ezra 9–10, which address the issue of intermarriage and the expulsion of women and children announced in the text. The foreign women, their ethnicities, bodies, and sexual and religious practices are usually the object of inquiry in these studies. Ezra 9–10, however, offers little information about the women and provides no explicit reason for their expulsion. This chapter argues that Ezra 9–10 is most fundamentally about men, men’s social roles, performances and relationships, including their relationship with Yhwh. The text presents readers with a world in which men act upon women, enter into alliances and dispute appropriate masculine performance. The chapter argues for shifting the focus of problematization and gendered analysis from the women to the men who inhabit this narrative world and the deity to whom they are beholden.
