NEHEMIAH 13

This chapter describes a low point in the spiritual life of the early returnees to Jerusalem from Persian captivity. It occurred when Nehemiah had left to live there for a 12-year period. When he did return to Jerusalem in 433 BC to check up on the returnees, he found the truth of the old saying “When the cat's away, the mice will play.” He immediately noticed a number of abuses taking place and wasted no time trying to correct them. These included the following behaviors unacceptable to God:

Nehemiah 13:1-3 As a sort of prelude to this section, the people were read the Pentateuch including the passage in which they were told in no uncertain terms that they were to separate themselves from the Ammonites and Moabites.

Nehemiah 13:4-9 The priest Eliashib had turned over a large chamber in the temple designated for storage of food and drink to be used in the offerings to his buddy Tobiah for his personal use.

This move was wrong for two major reasons. In the first place, the fact that this store room was practically empty indicated that the Jews had been horribly negligent in bringing in the required tithes and offerings to the temple.

Secondly, there is a good chance that this Tobiah was the personage mentioned earlier in the Book of Nehemiah. If so, then as J.S. Wright says, “In Ne. 11. 10 he is called “the servant, the Ammonite'. He may have been a freed slave who rose to a position of influence in Ammon, perhaps even governor of the province. He was probably the ancestor of the Tobiads who governed Ammon for generations after his time, as attested in the 3^rd-century-BC Zeno papyri...If Ez. iv. 7-23 is dated shortly before the coming of Nehemiah Tobiah may well be identified with Tabeel of Ezr. iv. 7.”

In any case, it was totally inappropriate for Eliashib to hand over temple property for an Ammonite's exclusive use. I remember that at one church I attended for years, membership had dropped so low that we no longer had as much need for the large annex we had built. So the leaders of the church cast around to see if we could rent it out to help support our own congregation financially. There were several organizations interested in utilizing our facility during the times we weren't, but the wise decision was that any such organization, especially a religious group, should have goals consistent with our own.

Nehemiah 13:10-14 The Levites who served in the temple had not received the portion of the offerings due to them and so were forced to take on additional work in the field to feed themselves and their families.

It is of interest that three times in this chapter Nehemiah asks God to remember him for his good deeds. As Allen explains, “Nehemiah, in a series of prayers that punctuate his memoirs, requested that his work might stand as a memorial to his service for God and his fellow Jews. Evidently he had enemies who gave him no credit for his dedicated labors and sought to undo them. So he committed to God both his own works (Neh 5:19; 13:14, 22, 31) and the opposition he had encountered (6:14; 13:29).”

But one commentator notes that “Nehemiah,who was not too modest to remind God of his own integrity, comments favorably on those whom he trusted to handle substantial quantities of goods and money (Neh 13:13).”

Perhaps the lesson to us here is that we have no need to either blow our own horn or to personally punish our enemies, but to turn both wholly over to God to deal with.

Numbers 13:15-22 All the rules forbidding work on the Sabbath had been ignored.

We should certainly be reminded here of the later actions of Jesus in casting out the money changers in the temple and others who had turned the Court of the Gentiles into a noisy marketplace where it was impossible to worship.

Short summarizes Nehemiah's measures to combat these abuses: “Nehemiah rebuked them. He ordered also that the main city gates should be kept closed from the evening when the sabbath began till the following evening, and as to certain smaller gates beside them which we have to assume remained open, Nehemiah appointed some of his servants to stand near them so as to ensure that no burden was brought into the city on the sabbath. There were certain merchants, however, who tried to break Nehemiah's blockade by setting up their stalls outside Jerusalem; but Nehemiah discovered them and threatened them with arrest; so they decided not to try this again.”

Various churches today have attempted to apply this principle as well as that of Jesus casting out the money-changers. I know that all of the congregations I have attended were quite adamant against such practices as holding Bingo games at church or similar fund-raising techniques often practiced by other denominations. But on the other hand, most of them saw nothing at all wrong with letting a guest speaker set up a booth on the way out of the church building where he could sell his books and other literature to those exiting the service.

Numbers 13:23-29 The strictures against Jews intermarrying with pagan women were similarly ignored, even by those in influential positions. As Dearman says, “Moabite wives were a contributing factor to the problem of synchretism [i.e., combining several incompatible religious systems together] in and around postexilic Jerusalem (Ezra 9:15; Neh. 13:23).”

These verses act as a sort of conclusion to the chapter in that they return to the strictures against associating with foreign nations (especially Ammon and Moab) that began the chapter in verses 1-3.

As a sad point in their history, Nehemiah points as an object lesson to the fact that even wise King Solomon was led astray by the foreign women he had married. If even he could not stand up to such pagan influences, how much more would the rank-and-file Israelites be unable to combat the pagan influences of their non-Israelite wives!

“Nehemiah, a layman, was able to cooperate with his contemporary Ezra, the scribe and priest, in spite of the fact that these two leaders were of entirely different temperaments. As one example, in reaction to the problem of mixed marriages, Ezra plucked out his own hair (Ezra 9:3), whereas Nehemiah plucked out the hair of the offenders (Neh 13:25)!”

The take-home lesson for us here is that it takes all sorts of personalities to make up a well-rounded congregation. This is in stark contrast to one church I attended where for a while the common buzzword was “likemindedness.” By that, those who spouted out this doctrine meant that no individual opinions should differ in any way with the official and unofficial beliefs and practices of that congregation. That not only included absolute adherence to all twenty or more specific doctrinal statements of the church, but also such unwritten but understood things such as one's preferred political party. Because of that attitude, I am afraid that I fell afoul of the elders more than once and was only allowed to continue teaching there after arguments advanced in my favor by two of the associate pastors, who were much more enlightened and theologically sound than anyone on the elder board, almost all of whom were chosen on the basic of their supposed business acumen.

In verse 29, Nehemiah has a completely different kind of remembering in mind when he asks God to remember the deeds of those who had “defiled the priesthood, the covenant of the priests and the Levites.”

Numbers 13:30-31 As a coda to Numbers 13, Nehemiah draws up a series of regulations for both the priests and Levites in order to clearly define their duties.

As Eskenazi explains, “The purification of the priesthood and Temple administration was the most difficult and consequential task because of the status of the opposing priests. Therefore, Nehemiah presents restoring order and sanctity to the worship system as the crown of his achievement.”

Yamauchi aptly summarizes Nehemiah's life: “His motive throughout his career was to please and serve his divine Sovereign. His only reward would be God's approbation. He was in many ways a model leader.”