Nehemiah 7

The Wall Completed (Cont’d)

1-4 After completion of the wall, Nehemiah gives charge of Jerusalem to his brother Hanani and Hananiah, commander of the citadel. They are to appoint gatekeepers, who are to close and bar the gates at night, for the city is large, but inhabitants are few.

Lists of the Returned Exiles

5 “My God put it into my mind” to assemble nobles and officials and include their names in a book of genealogy he found. An almost-identical list is found in Ezra 2:1-70. In 8:1-14, Ezra lists the heads of families who came back with him.

6-7a They came out of Babylonian captivity with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, and others. Heritage and ancestry were very important in maintaining Jewish identity. A recent reading of Luke 3, the ancestry of Christ, led me back to Zerubbabel, one of those who led exiles back. If he hadn’t come back to Judah, how could the prophesies of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem come to pass? How could we have identified Christ’s lineage in the midst and mess of the intermarrying that would have taken place over the centuries in Babylon? Maybe that’s why, in Ezekiel’s prophesies of the return to Israel, he also includes Messianic prophecies.

7b-38 The Israelite people, counted by family heads

39-42 The priests, descendants of Jedaiah, Immer, Pashhur and Harim

43-45 The Levites, singers, and gatekeepers

46-60 The temple servants and descendants of Solomon’s servants

61-65 List of those who cannot prove their ancestral houses of descent. This includes priests, who are pronounced unclean until a priest with Urim and Thummin comes (first mentioned in Exodus 28:30 as part of Aaron’s “judgment breastplate” by which decisions were made).

66-69 Numbers totaled, plus livestock.

70-72 Acknowledgment of the contributions of heads of ancestral houses, governors and the rest of the people

73 “So the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, some of the people, the temple servants, and all Israel settled in their towns.” The rest of the verse, “When the seventh month came—the people of Israel being settled in their towns—…” is included in the NRSV with the next chapter. Other versions add it as a stand-alone sentence here.