I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Nehemiah 11-13.

Earlier in the Book of Nehemiah, when the wall around Jerusalem was first completed, Nehemiah had noted that few people lived within the city and most of those who did were government officials.  At no point does it explicitly address this, but the implication was that there were not enough people in the city for it to be economically viable.  Today’s passage begins with the solution Nehemiah came up with to this problem.  He had the Returned Exiles living in villages outside of Jerusalem all draw lots for a few from each village to move to Jerusalem.  Those who remained in the villages provided support so that those who moved to Jerusalem could afford to do so.  This provides a model upon which much modern missionary work is supported.

The Book of Nehemiah ends with what appears to be a hard-line approach to Jews marrying non-Jews, or even to non-Jews joining and becoming part of the Jewish people.  When Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem and resumed his governorship over Judea, he expelled all of those of foreign descent from the assembly.  However, this took place after it was discovered that the priest put in charge of the Temple storerooms had made one of the larger storerooms available to Tobiah for storage.  Tobiah was one of the non-Jewish local officials who had opposed Nehemiah’s restoration of Jerusalem.  The storeroom turned over for Tobiah’s use had been intended as a storage room for offerings given for the support of priests and Levites working in the Temple.  As a result of its misappropriation many of the Levites had been forced to leave Temple service in order to support themselves.  In addition, in Nehemiah’s absence many of the leaders of the Jewish people had resumed doing business on the Sabbath, despite having signed the “confession of faith” where they stated they would not do so.  So, overall, this hard-line stance came in response to the fact that rather than demanding that those who wished to join with them in worshiping God abandon all of their pagan practices, the Jewish people had begun adopting some of those practices.  I want to note that it is likely that Tobiah wanted a room in the Temple to store his goods because by doing so he could bypass taxes on those goods.