Nehemiah’s Last Reforms

In context

Jerusalem has a wall but few people, so lots are cast to bring one in ten to live there, and the people bless those who offer to go (Nehemiah 11:1–2). At the wall’s dedication two great choirs walk along the top of it in opposite directions and meet at God’s house, “and the women and the children also rejoiced, so that the joy of Jerusalem was heard even far away” (12:27–43).

When Nehemiah comes back from a journey to the king, made in Artaxerxes’ thirty-second year, he finds that the priest Eliashib has given Tobiah, an Ammonite and an old enemy of the wall, a room in God’s house, and he throws Tobiah’s things out (13:4–9). The Levites, unpaid, have gone back to their fields; Nehemiah asks, “Why is God’s house forsaken?” and sets them in their place (13:10–13).

He has Jerusalem’s gates shut on the Sabbath to stop the trading, and he contends with men who have married women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab, whose children cannot speak the Jews’ language, pointing to Solomon; it is a hard reading in places (13:15–27). The book ends with his prayer, “Remember me, my God, for good” (13:31).