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On the theme of proselytism, apparently the only negative note in all of Scripture is that sounded by Ezra-Nehemiah, which, until modern times, was combined into one book in the Hebrew Bible. Upon seizing control of the Babylonian empire, Cyrus decreed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon might return home to Judea. His successor, Artaxerxes Longimanus, commissioned Nehemiah as civil governor and Ezra as spiritual mentor to reconstruct the national and religious life in the Jewish homeland. On their arrival in Judea, they found a general decline and decay in religious observance. They were particularly distressed that certain of their coreligionists had "married women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab," and that "their children . . . could not speak in the Jewish language (Nehemiah 13 :23-24)."
Nehemiah cursed the Jewish husbands -and made them swear by God that they would not marry their daughter to the sons of foreigners, nor marry their sons to their daughters, nor marry foreigners themselves. Was this not the sin of Solomon? . . . There was no king like him . . . beloved by his God . . . Yet even he was led to sin by his foreign wives. (Nehemiah 13:25-26)
"Divorce yourselves from the people of the land," Ezra commended, "and from the foreign women" (Ezra 10:11).
Upon receiving this order, "the crowd wept bitterly." And, while Shechaniah ben Jehiel agreed with Ezra, saying,
We have broken faith with our God by marrying foreign women.... Come, let us make a compact with our God to put away all thee wives and their children. (Ezra 10:2-3)
Jonathan ben Asahel and Jaziah ben Tikva were opposed to this and they were supported by Meshullam and by Shabbethai the Levite. (Ezra 10:15)
It must be offered in extenuation of Ezra-Nehemiah's drastic measures that these were dictated by desperate circumstances; the survival of their people and its way of life were at stake.
Also worth noting are these items: Ezra-Nehemiah had nothing at all to say for or against converting these women and children to Judaism. The prophetic ideal of proselytism just does not seem to have entered their sharply focused minds.... The entire situation is unique. Nothing of the sort occurs elsewhere in the Bible nor, for that matter, in all subsequent Jewish history. The stand which Ezra-Nehemiah took against foreigners as such is contrary to that of their Biblical predecessors, and it did not go unchallenged by their literary successors.
Which brings us, albeit briefly, to the books of Job, Jonah, Esther and Ruth.
Job was a citizen of Uz. His philosophy, conduct and character are exemplary Jewish, as his vindication by God, to say nothing of the inclusion of this book in the Biblical canon, makes abundantly clear. Yet Job is not ethnically a Jew. Significantly, the Jewish author of this Hebrew masterpiece presents his great hero, a towering spiritual giant, as a non-Jew. What the author must have thought of Ezra-Nehemiah and their attitude toward their non-Jewish neighbors, can easily be guessed. It was just as well left unrecorded.
In that prophetic gem, the book of Jonah, God rebukes the title-figure for his Ezra-like chauvinism and his reluctance to help save the sinful pagan city of Ninevah, capital city of Babylon, "wherein are more than 120,000 persons who know not right from wrong, and also much cattle." Per contra, the heathen sailors show themselves exceedingly reluctant to jettison a worshiper of Israel's God. They strain every sinew to row Jonah to a haven of safety. When they have exhausted every humane possibility, are finally compelled to cast him into the sea, and behold the resultant calm, then "they 'feared' the Lord exceedingly, sacrificed and made vows to Him."
Jonah had been unwilling to convey God's message to the Ninevites because, among other consequences from his point of view undesirable, their repentance would reflect unfavorably on his often admonished but still unrepentant fellow Israelites. His worst fear was realized. The heathen Ninevites repent of their wickedness and, from the king on down to the last man in the kingdom,
call earnestly on God. Everyone must turn from his evil life. . . Who knows if God will not relent . . . and save us (Jonah 3:8-9)
They turn, God does relent and they are saved. In direct contrast with Ezra-Nehemiah, this wonderful story would have men believe two things about the heathen: They are endowed by their Creator with potentially high moral and religious fervor; and they are ready to turn to Him if given the chance, if only invited to do so.
The blood thirsty Persian king, Ahasuerus, having already executed his first wife, Vashti, is induced by his vizier, Haman, to order the massacre of all his Jewish subjects, His Jewish queen, Esther, points out that this will mean her own death, "If it please the king," she pleads, "let the decree be reversed," For gore-loving Ahasuerus, this will not suffice, First, Haman must hang, Then, instead of peaceably revoking the original order, the king commands the Jews to slay their attackers (Esther 8:10-14), To save their lives, "many pagans became Jews" (Esther 8:17),
What interests us here is the use, in Esther 8:17, of the Hebrew term mit'yahadim, "to become Jews," the only place in the Bible where this word occurs. Yet, in the author's time, it must have been a sufficiently well understood term indicative of the current day practice of Gentiles identifying with Israel. What is more important, he approved of the conversion to Judaism of heathen enemies. He evidently enjoyed thoroughly the idea of men who had sought to take the lives of Jews being transformed into men who sought to live their lives as Jews.
Some Biblical scholars believe that the book of Ruth was deliberately intended as a rebuttal to Ezra-Nehemiah, as a specific propaganda piece favoring conversion. Consider the names of its characters: Ruth—"the companion"; Naomi—"my sweet one"; Mahlon—"sickness"; Chilion—"wasting"; Boaz—"in him is strength"! It is nonetheless a charming narrative about a beautiful and loyal heroine, the Moabite girl who married the boy from Judea whose family had migrated to Moab because, ironically enough, here was a famine in Bethlehem, which means literally "the food house." Ruth's in-laws were apparently welcomed with kindness in the land of their traditional enemies, the Moabites, of whom it is written, in the book of Deuteronomy . . . No Moabite shall he admitted into the congregation of Me Lord; none of his descendants even to the tenth generation shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord . . . (Deuteronomy 23:4).
Ruth herself became so deeply attached to the Jewish faith and the Jewish way of life that, after her husband died, she insisted on accompanying her widowed mother-in-law back to Bethlehem. In exquisite and memorable words that are a model of fealty and have since become a widely used formula in the Jewish conversion ceremony for women, Ruth made her declaration and her vow
Entreat me not to leave you.... Wherever you go will I go; whet ever you stay will I stay; your people shall be my people and you God, my God. Wherever you die will I die and there will I be boned. May God destroy me and worse if aught but death part you and me. (Ruth 1:16-17)
Encouraged by Naomi's sage counsel and Boaz' affection and diligence, Ruth fulfills the ritual requirements for marriage to Boaz. In due course she bears him a son who becomes the father of Jessie, in turn, begets King David, from whose line, according to later tradition, the Messiah will come.
Whatever else the author of this story may have had in mind, he surely cherished the hope that there would be Jews who would concur in his belief that a woman of worth, even though of the specifically proscribed people of Moab, could nonetheless become a valiant Jew, a loving wife and mother in Israel, a progenitress of Judean kings. There were such Jews. Among them were those sages who considered this lovely little book worthy of inclusion in Holy Writ; and also those who ordained that the scroll of Ruth be read by all Jews everywhere at Pentecost when they recall the Giving of the Law at Sinai where, like Ruth pledging her fidelity to Judaism, "The people of Israel together with the ger" had covenanted with God, saying, "All that the Lord has spoken, we will do and obey."
Answer for yourself: What of the rest, the rank and file in ancient Israel, the plebeian populace? Did the ordinary citizen of Tekoah or Jerusalem, the man-on-the-street in Anathoth or Bethel, the average dweller at Ramah, Gilead or Galilee swallow whole the propaganda, intended or incidental, of the books of Ruth and Jonah? Did they really believe that Moabites and Ninevites were deservedly as cherished by God as were Israelites? Did they entirely agree with Amos that the Hebrew was in God's sight merely the equal of the Ethiopian, the Phoenician and the Syrian? With Isaiah, that Egypt was also His people and Assyria the work of His hands? With the psalmist that anyone with clean hands and a pure heart may ascend the hill of the Lord? How popular among the returning Jewish exiles was Ezekiel's scheme of counting proselytes as natives and assigning them land of their own in Judea? Or the priestly injunction that the ger must be to you as the native, and you are to love him as you love yourself? How enthusiastically did they take up their divinely appointed task of being "a light to the gentiles"? Or observe the ordinance that there be one and the same law for the native and the convert?
That there was, on the part of common men, some resistance even to the simplest of these requirements we may suspect from the curious circumstance that the elementary rule, "You must not injure or maltreat a ger" occurs no less than six times in the Law and very frequently in the Prophets. The commandment "There shall be one and the same law for homeborn and ger" also occurs six times. If these rules were generally observed in the performance rather than in the breach, what need for all this emphatic reiteration? Telltale also is the fact that, when the Torah commends the ger to the people's compassion, he is so often placed in the sad company of those traditional objects of pity and exemplifications of defenselessness, the poor, the widow and the orphan. What the plight of an ordinary, poor proselyte's widow or orphan must have been is not pleasant to consider.
But, then, xenophobia, the dislike of the unlike, was present in Abraham's day and has not died in ours. If the ancients found it difficult to love the proselyte as they loved themselves, moderns do not find it easy to love even their homeborn neighbor that much either—the native Negro, for example, or the Puerto Rican fellow citizen. The prophets' fellow countrymen were not all prophets or psalmists or even priests. And it was not only the dream of mission and the obligations of religious hospitality set forth by their spiritual guides that the commoners resisted. There were certainly other features of prophetic preaching which also failed of complete fulfillment among the general populace.
It was never easy to squeeze a grand ideal into a small soul. Little men found it passing hard to share their divine legacy with others. Their minds were not yet big enough to encompass the breadth or the depth of their spiritual treasures. They simply did not realize how very much there was to share. They did not fully comprehend how limitless is God's love. Nor did they understand that human love is no commodity or store of energy that is consumed with use, but rather a plant that deepens and grows stronger and ever more beautiful as it expands and reaches outward and upward.
The teachers of the religion of Israel kept repeating, in an endless variety of ways: There is hope for the salvation of the homeborn and there is equal hope for the salvation of the outlander! Prophet, priest and psalmist possessed a patient, tireless courage that made them remind Israel ever and again: You are all gerim before God.... He loves the alien.... Therefore, you, too, must love the Ger.... Let him be unto you as the homeborn and love him as you love yourselves . . . for many nations will join themselves to the Eternal and become His people.... He Who gathers Israel's exiles in says, "I will yet gather to them those who were gathered against them."
Doubtless there were in Bible times Jewish leaders whose limited philosophy and pattern of existence would have pleased Ezra. But we like to think, and have some reason to believe, that many in that far distant age were prouder of their prophets who taught that life is more nobly lived when it pleases God. After all, this is the people who produced these prophets and preserved their teachings.
The memoirs of Ezra-Nehemiah furnish one magnifying mirror to reflect the surface coarseness of some men in Biblical days. But a host of prophets, psalmists and priests provide an abundance of spiritual telescopes through which men may look out upon nobler goals and acceptance of the Non-Jew within the Israel of God was one of them.