²³ Also in those days I saw the Judeans who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. ²⁴ Half of their children spoke the dialect of Ashdod or the language of other peoples and were not able to understand how to speak Judean. ²⁵ So I accused them and cursed them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair. Then I made them take an oath by God: “May God punish us if we give our daughters to their sons or if we take some of their daughters for our sons or for ourselves.”

²⁶ I said, “Wasn’t it because of these foreign wives that King Solomon of Israel sinned, although there was no king like him among the many nations? He was loved by his God, and God placed him as king over all Israel. Yet foreign wives made even him sin. ²⁷ Should we listen to you and be led to do all this great evil, so that we end up being unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women?”

²⁸ One of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib, the high priest, was the son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite. So I chased him away from me.

²⁹ Remember them, my God, because of their defiling of the priesthood and because of the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.