By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

Whenever God is silent in the Bible, know that He has already said something worthwhile.

Hello! Welcome back to The Reasoner’s Corner. I know that it can be a bit jarring for some who read the previous post and who now have this one to look forward to. But I am still in that mode of thinking to dispel certain narratives based upon Holy Writ that I believe are erroneous. And it just seems thematically appropriate to point this out concerning Nehemiah (and Ezra, but more on that later).

I do hope for this post to be a bit less involved than the one immediately before it. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

Where Nehemiah Was Correct

First off, let me start with where Nehemiah was correct. This is not a post that is going to entirely disrupt the narrative of the story of Nehemiah. It is very clear from Biblical prophecy in the Book of Daniel that Jerusalem would be rebuilt with “plaza/streets and a moat, but in times of trouble.” That does not explicitly mention “walls,” but the defenses are implied with the mention of a moat. Interestingly, Nehemiah also does not ever explicitly mention building a moat. But given the standard for city-wall building back then, we can safely assume that one was built.

Nehemiah was correct in being zealous to see the city of Jerusalem become livable (unwalled cities were a no-no, even in the peaceful domains of the Persian Empire) and restored to some semblance of glory as the capital of ethnonymic Judea. Nehemiah was also appointed as the governor of Judea, and so had a professional duty to pursue the social welfare of his people (see Nehemiah 2 and Nehemiah 5). Nehemiah was correct in building the wall and seeing that the towns of the province became inhabited, secure, and well-defended.

Nehemiah was correct when he encouraged his workers to strap on their own swords and weaponry (personal self-defense by deadly weapon being one of the fundamentals in securing human rights in any society by example). He commanded this while they did work on the walls. This was when Sanballat, the governor of the rival Persian province of Samaria, and, as I and some scholars believe, a (fellow) Israelite, who saw the prosperity of the adjacent Persian province of Judea as a nuisance and threat to his own Samaritan people’s ethnoreligious claims for Yahweh. Sanballat assembled a motley crew comprised of Tobiah the Ammonite (a descendant of Lot and hence a fellow Abrahamite), some Arabs (Arabs being a very ancient name for “mixed” people of various groups not necessarily culturally or ethnically related to one another), and Ammonites.

Nehemiah also was correct when he had the Law read aloud to the assembled congregation. Keep in mind that the actual reason for the edict of return for the Israelites, who came to be known thenceforth by the province they were given by the Shahanshah (Persian Emperor) himself, Judea = Judeans = Jews, reads thusly and can be found in two different forms in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23, Ezra 1:1-4:

1 In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing:
2 “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. 3 Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the LORD, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem. 4 And let each survivor, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.”
-Ezra 1:1-4 (ESV), which is the passage for the fuller version of the edict

How Cyrus the Great, the king of kings or “Shahanshah,” explicitly mentions the religiosity of the returnees as “may his God be with him” and how Yahweh (here written as “the LORD”) is the patron deity to whom Cyrus continually refers.

Note that Nehemiah builds the wall after returning with the third wave of Israelite returnees only after the first company of exiles had completed the temple building almost a century beforehand and after Ezra the priest had led a second wave of Israelites to resettle Judea over a decade before Nehemiah’s arrival (compare with this nifty timeline, as I really don’t have the time or space to reconstruct the events here on my own). Keep in mind, in case you didn’t know, that Ezra actually shows up in his own work in chapter 7. Ezra does a lot of history-telling before detailing his own hand in the work of restoration.

But the main point here, to return to it, is to note that the decree by Cyrus was for all of the worshippers of Yahweh to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and to worship Him. That was the main impetus and it fit within the cosmology of Zoroastrianism, which Cyrus was an avid Zoroastrian.

Historian’s Note: Cyrus saw himself as the ultimate gardener of mankind as the king of Persia (or Medo-Persia), and saw that the cosmos worked best when other peoples were free to serve their own gods. In this way, Cyrus pleased his own god, Ahura Mazda (or Ohrmazd), and created the order and harmony in the world that led to Ahura Mazda triumphing over Angra Maiyu (or Ahriman). Since Cyrus physically descended from the Er people (or the Aryans…from whom Iran is currently named), and since he was descended from the kings of Persia, it was his responsibility to guide humanity towards unity and peace. Since multiple other lesser deities to Ahura Mazda served in his efforts (a common idea among the ancients was that lesser deities ruled over specific peoples), Cyrus had no problem giving homage to Yahweh and to His people at His Temple in Jerusalem, the capital and representative city of Judea (Judea so-called since the last kingdom of the Israelites conquered by Babylon had been called “Judah”). You can read more on this by way of the Cyrus Cylinder here.

Nehemiah was correct in his zeal to enforce strict religious adherence to the Law of Yahweh so that they would please Him and experience His favor.

But…this assumes that everyone returning to build the Temple to Yahweh was a Yahweh worshipper…

Is there any evidence of this?

Well, now we get to the core section of this post:

Where Good Intentions Became Bad Interpretations and Actions

So then, the returnees of Jerusalem who came back would have been aware that the entirety of their cultural project hinged upon a culturally religious agenda to Yahweh, understood by Zoroastrian custom, in line with much of the broader customs of the Ancient Near East, to have had particular jurisdiction in Judea and in Jerusalem where His house once stood. They would have been obliged to have been Yahweh worshippers.

We see evidence of this with the first generation that completed the temple being rebuilt, with much consternation. We see in Ezra 6:16-22 that the Israelites, the priests, Levites, and all the other exiles worshipped Yahweh and celebrated the Passover on the 14th day of the first month (Nisan/Abib) in celebration.

There’s the first sign: the first wave of returnees worshipped Yahweh after their endeavors for building Him a temple were finished.

What of the second wave of returnees from Ezra?

We see in Ezra 7 that Ezra the priest was sent explicitly to teach the people about the works and customs of the Law of Moses. But, as anyone can tell you, sometimes after a severe lapse of devotion…especially when that lapse was caused by the entire nation not being faithful to the works and customs of the Law of Moses and the priesthood itself being corrupt to the point of being banished from the land by Yahweh…it isn’t exactly a guarantee that the priest sent to teach the people would himself know how best to follow the Law.

When Ezra first got to Jerusalem, he was approached by several officials coming to him after three days to inform him that several of the 1) Israelites, 2) priests, and 3) Levites had married foreign wives and, here’s the kicker, “not separated from them with their abominations.” Now, that is a very serious thing. This means, if we were to follow the Law of Moses, the world. For anyone who knows the Torah knows that God actually was never concerned with the genetics of the Israelites, but rather with their adherence to the rights and customs.

Here is a location of the original law as given by God through Moses to the Ancient Israelites:

Deuteronomy 7:1–5
A Chosen People
[1] “When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, [2] and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. [3] You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, [4] for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. [5] But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire. (ESV)

It is very clear by verse 4 that God was concerned solely with the form of worship, and not by intermarriage. I have already covered the instance of when God during King David’s reign first ordained the First Temple to be built and how God chose the location at a time when He was judging Israel harshly (literally killing many of them) and yet showed favor to a lone Jebusite man in the middle of Jerusalem and his household (Araunah/Ornan) and stood in the air above his threshing floor without harming him at all (I posted them here and here on the same day).

But to solidify this, let me go shotgun style from the Torah itself:

• Esau, a grandson of Abraham, in the Abrahamic covenant, and twin brother of Israel, chose two Hittite wives whose customs and behaviors were loathe to his parents (it is mentioned twice, pretty bad stuff). He later chose a wife from his relative Ishmael, his father Isaac’s older brother and an adherent to the Abrahamic covenant, presumably after Ishmael had died and his firstborn Nebaioth took control of the household, to please his parents. Interestingly, none of the children from Esau’s wife Mahalath (also known as Basemath) of Ishmael is noted to have given rise to descendants who were enemies to Israel, and Mahalath’s lone son, Reuel, is the only son of Esau who has God’s name “El” in his own name.
• Judah married a Canaanite daughter of a Canaanite man named Shua (her name is given as Bath-shua in a later text, which literally means “Shua’s daughter,” but variants in the Jewish Greek text and in the Syriac, both presumably based upon older Hebrew variants, in Genesis 38 say that her name was actually “Shua”). And presumably Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law by whom he had twin sons, was likely a Canaanite as well.
• Simeon married a Canaanite wife by whom he had his son Shaul (Saul).
• Joseph rather famously did not marry a Canaanite, but an Egyptian woman, making all of his children also Egyptian. It matters greatly because Joseph, through his son Ephraim, was given the firstborn birthright to rule his father’s household. A Hebrew/Egyptian son was the one who led the house of Israel when Jacob and Joseph both died.
• Moses, the deliverer and the lawgiver of the very commandment of God not to intermarry with the people who practiced strange customs, the very ethic that already predated him in the days of Isaac and Rebekah, never married another Israelite woman himself. He married, instead, a daughter of Midian, Zipporah, with Midian being a son of Abraham and younger brother of Moses’s ancestor Isaac. Moses then married a Cushite (Ethiopian/Sudanic) woman…which led to perhaps the sharpest rebuke that God gave to anyone in the Bible who suggested that it was genetic purity of ethnicity that God was after. (Fun fact, Zipporah’s dad was Jethro/Reuel, a man who was himself a priest, and therefore likely a firstborn son, of God). Notably, none of Moses’s wives were included in the prohibited people groups who had evil customs in Canaan. I include his wives to show that Moses, who stood before the face of God and spoke to Him as a friend would a man, clearly knew that God was not safeguarding Ancient Hebrew or Ancient Israelite genetics with His law.
• Caleb, an adoptee into Judah, was not an ethnic Israelite at all, but his father was Jephunneh the Kenizzite. This is because a great mixture of people went up with Israel out of Egypt, and Israel was always open to adopting foreigners into her customs and people who adhered to the same, as evidenced by the covenant of Abraham their ancestor, the father of many sons.
  
  Oh…that also gets me to that final point…
  
• the crowd that first heard Moses speak these prohibitions included all kinds of people found in Egypt, which, at that time was the possibility of any of the peoples inhabiting the Mediterranean (from Europe, Africa, and Asia, to deeper reaches of all three continents). Egypt was the superpower of the world at that time, and had extensive commerce that stretched across the known world. These people joined the physical descendants of Israel at Sinai/Horeb and became the core of what the nation of Israel was henceforth.

Okay, so the people had “abominations” that God told the Israelites to avoid, if we trust their report. I do not see a reason for why not. Now, does God ever command men to abandon their families when they marry wrongfully? Is that the pattern that we see?

Did Esau do that? Did Israel, even as his wives also worshipped different gods right under his nose (until he did a quick clean of his household’s act for fear of God)? Did God allow those who indulged (disobediently, mind you) in polygyny to maintain the marital claim over their wives if they did not take equal and adequate care of them? Is there any pattern of abandoning your duties to provide for your wife and children to serve God in the whole of the Hebrew Bible?

Does even Paul allow for Christian men to simply divorce and abandon their disbelieving wives when the husband becomes a Christian, or even if their wife apostatizes (and vice-versa for Christian wives)? Does Paul esteem those who refuse to provide for their own families?

The answer to all of these questions: No.

Not only did God never mandate a man of the covenant to abandon his family, but God holds the love spouses owe to one another as sacred. He explicitly opened the womb of Leah time and again and closed the womb of Rachel because Israel did not love Leah as much as he loved Rachel. And so it was counted as “hatred.” God did this to show the favor to Leah that she lacked from her own husband. This when even both women resorted to…interesting superstitions…to become pregnant…and then later to using slave labor (literally). And this was within a disobediently polygamous situation!

So…what did Ezra teach the Israelites to do when he found out that they took foreign wives who had evil practices against the laws of God?
Funny thing: he didn’t actually teach them to do anything. Instead, a man named Shecaniah, not a priest, was the one who said to make the Israelites swear oaths to put away their wives. And that is what Ezra then made the people do. For this reason I focus upon Nehemiah being wrong, since Ezra proved to be too passive to be a decision-maker, among his own wave of settlers and in the time of Nehemiah’s (Ezra and Nehemiah overlapped).

Now, nothing against the idolatrous Israelite husbands. Nope. They were Scot-free. Why? The text tells you, and the shift in Ancient Israelite ideology that would come to define them through the days of Jesus, to their utter error, and sadly, to today. It is an error that even some Christians have joined in, which I have endeavored to point out again and again in my post about the term “Gentile” and in my post about the attacks last year on Iran by the United States and Israel.

Ezra 9:1–2
Ezra Prays About Intermarriage
[1] After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. [2] For they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands. And in this faithlessness the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost.” (ESV)

It’s a shame that this became the seed for what would come to be a clear divide in the epoch of the people of Israel. Suddenly, with the zeal (however it waned) to obey the commandments of God came the idea of Ancient Israelite ethnicity as inherently more “pure” than the people around them.

We see this with Ezra and Nehemiah both with a nebulous group called “the people of the land.” We know from 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 39 that not all of the Israelites nor all of the Judahites were taken into captivity. The poorer folks of the land were left to fend for themselves. And they survived. But they themselves were at times swept up with the rest of the crowd, perhaps at times due to the threat of them losing their riches and status granted by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon generations before. Sure, many of the “people of the land” were not Israelites. But…very good chance that several of them actually were.

To their credit, we are told in Ezra 10:15 that Jonathan son of Asahel and Jahzeiah the son of Tikvah disapproved of this action. We are not given specifics for their motivations. They could have been motivated falsely. But they opposed the abandonment of the families.

And, interestingly, God is silent.

That is usually a sign for the reader to intuit for themselves whether the action was in line with what God desired.

Where Nehemiah Was Wrong

Now for the end. What of the third wave of returnees with Nehemiah? We know for a fact that many of them were priests, descendants of Temple workers, and descendants of David (the core importance for both books, as this traces the unbroken line of David for the Messiah via Zerubbabel, the first Persian governor of Judea, and another man named Hattush). We know that a dismissal of foreign wives is given for him as well. But here we see two things.

1. The dismissal occurs after the walls of Jerusalem have been built on the 25th day of the 6th month (Elul).
2. The dismissal occurs after the returnees who worshipped Yahweh and mourned when the Law was read, and this time explained to them by various groups (not just the Levites), had already proven their religious allegiances to Yahweh and to Israel’s covenant to Him. The first reading occurred on the 1st day of the 7th month (Tishrei).
3. The dismissal was even, presumably, when the people and their foreign wives in tow had separated themselves as “Israelites” from all foreigners (on the 24th day of Tishrei).

Yep. The seed that Ezra sowed with his group had already sprouted some aberrant stems and branches within the Ancient Israelite community.

You can see the escalation.

Eventually, as the people continued to assemble themselves in the plaza of the newly restored city of Jerusalem, all worshippers of Yahweh (unlike the corrupted group that Ezra had found in the area) and, to this point at least, all wholesome families and complete families, there came a day (possibly the very same 24th day of Tishrei) when a certain portion of the Law was read:

Nehemiah 13:1–3
Nehemiah’s Final Reforms
[1] On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, [2] for they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them—yet our God turned the curse into a blessing. [3] As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. (ESV)

The word for “foreign” there is the word “ereb” whence we get the word “Arab,” which means “mixed” people. Suddenly, in the latter half of that fateful day, families who were just growing to celebrate together as “Israel” were split apart.

Horrible misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the Law of God and the identity of Israel.

Now, some may read the source text, which is Deuteronomy 23, as barring anyone from Ammon (a son of Lot and therefore an Abrahamite) or Moab (another son of Lot and therefore an Abrahamite) from ever joining in ceremony with Israel nor in joining her people. But Deuteronomy 23 is about diplomacy. And that makes sense for the reasons given for why Israel was barred from receiving these people, along with eunuchs, into their qahal. A qahal was not always merely the assembled people, but actually the governing body politic of the nation. In fact, in the Jewish Greek translation qahal is translated as ekklesia, the governing body. This text really, I propose, ought to be read as not receiving diplomats from Moab and Ammon for any alliances. The reason given for the “why” now makes a lot more sense.

(It also just makes sense to not allow eunuchs as foreign diplomats. What buy-in do they actually have in adequately representing the future welfare and intentions of their nation compared to ambassadors who have family and children back home? Food for thought.)

But note, not everyone assembled there before Nehemiah and Ezra in the plaza of Jerusalem was said to be descended from Ammon and Moab. No. This cleansing of Israel went from religious adherence to full-on ethnic cleansing—even ethnic cleansing from fellow Abrahamites. Jesus would later have to confront this same spirit in many ways in His own day. And He would face it head-on every time.

Consulting the timeline once again and reading along from Nehemiah 13:6, we see that Nehemiah then spent some years away from Judea only to return to inspect what his provincial sowing had wrought.

When Nehemiah returned, he found that the people had become lax again in following the Torah. They openly violated the Sabbath by allowing Tyrians to sell to them on the Sabbath from within the city of Jerusalem itself. The priests had living quarters and lavish arrangements in the Temple courts set aside for worship services. Donation portions meant for the Levites were not actually given to the Levites so that they had to work for themselves and could not perform worship services in the Temple (a good metaphor for the subpar living payments that, sadly, some Christian organizations today do for their workers). Things were not as bad as described from the descendants of the first wave of settlers that Ezra and his group came upon. But things were sliding that way.

But then, we read that some of the Israelites had married other foreigners, specifically (this time) women from Ashdod (no longer the Philistine city that it was, but still full of foreign influence), Moab, and Ammon. A priest had even married into Sanballat’s family (which, though certainly jarring, makes a little sense given Sanballat’s family’s position and possible Aaronic lineage…if you clicked on that hyperlink from earlier). Their children did not all speak the dialect of Hebrew that Nehemiah did. (By the way: Persia and her provinces still had a lingua franca: Aramaic.) Note: there is nothing about them actually behaving idolatrously. In fact, even with the buying and selling on Sabbath, not a word about serving other gods.

Nehemiah ends his book pleading to be justified by God. And God, once again, is…

…silent.

Nehemiah (and Ezra) messed up, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time that we came to realize the error in what was done. Their zeal for preserving the “holy seed” drifted from strict and faithful religious observance to outward ethnic and even cultural homogeneity beyond the bounds of the covenant. Funny. We in the Church in various parts drift towards that same error today.

What is interesting, and I leave you with this, is that it seems that some writers from around that period actually realized this. So they penned a book to remind Israel just what sort of national identity they used to have. And to some scholars, myself included…

…that book is the Book of Ruth…

…which gives the genealogy of David, the ancestor of the prophesied Messiah…

…the Blessed Messiah Who is the entire point of this whole shebang to begin with.