One Father, One God
10 Don’t we all have one father? Hasn’t one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers? 11 Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah has profaned the holiness of Yahweh which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. 12 Yahweh will cut off the man who does this, him who wakes and him who answers, out of the tents of Jacob and him who offers an offering to Yahweh of Armies.
The argument turns from priests to everyone, and it grounds an obligation between neighbors in the fact that they share a maker.
Don't we all have one father? Hasn't one God created us? The two questions are the premise, and the conclusion drawn from them is social: why then do we deal treacherously, each against his brother?
The word for treachery — used five times in this short book — is the language of a broken faith rather than a mere injury, and it will carry into the next paragraph about marriage. Here the specific charge is that Judah has profaned what God loves and married the daughter of a foreign god.
The phrase is chosen with care. It is not the foreign wife's nationality that is named but her god, which is what the law had actually warned about — the danger being that the household's worship would follow Deuteronomy 7:3–4. Nehemiah found and fought the same thing in the same period Nehemiah 13:23–27. What makes it treachery rather than merely disobedience is the first verse of the paragraph: people who share one father have obligations to each other, and this broke them.
settled What this mark means