When I heard this thing, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled the hair out of my head and of my beard, and sat down confounded.
World English Bible
This verse is examined in more than one Scripture Analysis section. Each lens is shown on its own terms, in the section's own words; GEBible reaches no verdict of its own.
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When I heard this thing, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled the hair out of my head and of my beard, and sat down confounded.
World English Bible
Questions where the Bible appears to say two different things, with the passages on each side set together.
Deuteronomy 23:3 bars Moabites from the assembly of Yahweh to the tenth generation, and Ezra 9-10 commands the forced divorce of foreign wives including Moabites. The book of Ruth celebrates the marriage of Boaz to the Moabite Ruth as the source of the Davidic line.
Critical scholarship: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction.
The proposed answers and sources for each reading are on the question page.
Each section sets the viewpoints side by side; you weigh the evidence. Here, "critical scholarship" means academic study, not a value judgment. How this is built →
Within each section, grouped by shared field or question type — not a cross-section comparison.
This citation refers to this GEBible page — the verse and the analysis gathered here. To cite the underlying scholarship, cite those sources directly.
"Ezra 9:3 — Scripture Analysis" GEBible, https://gebible.app/analysis/verse/ezra/9/3?version=WEB (retrieved 26 August 2026).