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Person Old Testament

Jonathan

Jonathan, along with Jahzeiah and Meshullam, opposed Ezra's demand to put away foreign wives. Mentioned once in Scripture, at Ezra 10:15.

Why it matters. Opposed divorcing foreigners, with Jahzeiah and Meshullam

Primary passages
Last reviewed
2026-08-30 by the FaithGraph team

About Jonathan

In the time of Ezra, a Jonathan is mentioned as one of the men who opposed Ezra's demand that Jewish men put away their foreign wives (Ezr.10.15). After the return from Babylonian exile, some Jewish men had married non-Jewish women, which Ezra saw as a violation of God's law. Ezra called for the people to separate themselves from the peoples around them and from their foreign wives (Ezr.10.11). However, Jonathan, along with Jahzeiah and Meshullam, took a stand against this. The text states that only these three men opposed Ezra in this matter, suggesting it was an unpopular minority position.

Description from STEPBible TIPNR (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0, lightly reformatted. This is background reference material, not Scripture and not a FaithGraph editorial claim.

Connections

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Family

Family links from STEPBible TIPNR (CC BY 4.0). Where the dataset marks an identification as uncertain, the mark is kept. Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus; see the Lineage page, which never merges them.

Parents
Asahel

Appears in Scripture

Named in 1 verse across 1 book. Occurrence data from STEPBible TIPNR (CC BY 4.0); references only, no translation text.

Record type: Person. FaithGraph explanations on this page are editorial and are not Scripture.