Nehemiah: Build That Wall!, Transcript

Nehemiah: Build That Wall! | Secular Bible Study (Episode 16) - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wryGviUHxt8

Transcript:

(00:00) Welcome to Mindshift. I'm Brandon. Today's episode is the 16th of our Secular Bible Study Series, in which we look at Nehemiah. We are almost exactly one quarter of the way through the entire Protestant Canon. I'm excited to talk about Nehemiah today; it's an interesting little book. In fact, when I think back to my time at Bible college, one of the very first assignments I had was reading a book called "Becoming Nehemiah" and writing a pretty lengthy paper on it. I may have even done an exegetical study; I can't quite remember. There were so many, and it was a long time ago. But let's get right into it today. Let's start with point one: book overview. A lot happens in this pretty small little book, and it's going to be the third wave. We talked in Ezra about the first wave of Zerubbabel coming back to rebuild the Temple, and then 50-60 years later, we had Ezra coming back to reinstate the law. He was the Torah expert, and now this third wave is Nehemiah coming with a bunch of workers to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. So Nehemiah is hanging out; he works for Artaxerxes. He is the cupbearer, which, if you don't know, is the position where one would drink the wine or taste the food before the ruler does, just to make sure it wasn't poisoned. He hears news that the wall has still not been built, that it's in shambles, and this is unacceptable to Nehemiah. So he has this huge prayer; it's one of the highlights of the book, and he's asking God for wisdom and also for allowance to go and rebuild the walls and favor for when he has to ask Artaxerxes to let him go. The interesting thing about this is that God absolutely condones the rebuilding of the wall, but in Zechariah—and I should note that we have Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah, and Haggai as the four books of the post-exile stories—we get some really weird contradictions between those four, and we can cover some of that more in point seven. But one thing to note right off the bat is that in Zechariah, the prophecy is that the city of Jerusalem would not need walls because God's spirit would be protecting it, and it would be the people's faith that kept it safe. So this is very strange to me. So he gets permission from Artaxerxes to go back, and he gets an entire kind of almost little army to go with him—people that are going to keep him safe as well as a ton of builders. So this is the third wave from exile. Now, there are people living in the diaspora or the diaspora, and those are people that are still not necessarily in exile, but they didn't go straight home to Jerusalem; they're just living among the Gentiles. And we'll see Paul go and even reach out to these people in the book of Acts, I believe. So it's interesting; we kind of have people still in captivity, if you will, though it's a little different once the Persians took over Babylon. But this slow and steady force back to Jerusalem is the main point of all of these books. So he gets back, he starts building the wall, and he's met with a ton of resistance, very similar to when Ezra went back and saw that the people had intermarried, and when Zerubbabel went back and was working on the temple, but all the young folk did not get it, and it was not living up to its own hype, etc. By the way, we're going to see in Haggai just how pathetic the new temple is compared to Solomon's Temple, but I need to stop jumping ahead in so many different books here. So the resistance comes from the people that have already been living in this land. Again, you have a couple of generations back in Israel at this time; they don't like the wall. So Nehemiah is literally building it with his armed forces here to ensure that he is safe and that the wall does not get destroyed. It's just not going well, and he can't believe it. He is just really astounded at the weakness of these people. So he gets an idea, and he and his old buddy Ezra decide to get together and host a seven-day event, like a Woodstock for the Torah. They get all the people together; you have your feast, some of which are still celebrated today, and they preach the Torah for seven days straight. Can you imagine that? I mean, it takes a day—not even, it takes an afternoon—to read the first five books of the Bible. And aside from all the bloody warfare and all of the rape and all of the slavery and the Exodus and the creation account, most of it's pretty darn boring. People are wandering around, people are making mistakes, there's genealogies, there's a list of this, there's how you build the Tabernacle, how you construct the Ark of the Covenant. I mean, what do you teach on for seven days straight? And I'm not exactly sure what Nehemiah's role was in it because who knows the Torah better than Ezra? But I digress. Let's get back to it here. They have their ceremony, and at first, it seems like everything's going to be good. You know, they're reminding the people we've got to get back on the temple, we've got to get these walls done, and we have to obey God's commands here. And it doesn't take long before none of those things happen, and this is where Nehemiah goes on a rampage. He takes it upon himself to go and walk through the city and check up on everybody, and sure enough, he finds the people slacking off on the temple. He finds people working on the Sabbath; they've now opened up markets all around the walls he's building, and generally, he just finds people not obeying the commands, which was the whole point. We needed a revival; we needed a renewal of heart here. We had to get back on track, and it seemed like the people were pretty geeked up about it until real life came. And I think that this is interesting, right? Because we look at people like Ezra and Nehemiah as these spiritual warriors for God, trying to get the people back on track. Maybe the people didn't like Ezra's ideas about morality because they just lost all their wives and children—see the episode on Ezra if you don't know what I'm talking about—and they don't want to be fundamentalists. They don't want to be so serious; they don't want to live according to the law. Maybe they're making up their own personal relationships with Jesus. It strikes me as so funny because Christians will read this and be like, "Come on, Israelites, what are these guys doing? Why can they not get their act together generation after generation after generation? Regardless of ruler, king, judge, prophet, etc., they can never do what's right in the eyes of the Lord, and they always get punished. We just got back from exile; why can't they do this?" I would put it to you that if Jesus came back or some other prophet, someone like an Ezra or Nehemiah, and was like, "Guys, we need to talk about this. We can't keep messing up like this. Look at all these harms around you. Everything is going bad because you guys will not follow the Lord. You will not do as Jesus called you to do. You will not go and preach the good news to all the nations. You have not taken up your cross. You have not left your family. You're storing up treasures for yourself. Get it together, guys." And the Christians would be like, "What are you talking about? I'm doing fine." And so sometimes I wonder if that wasn't the exact same case back in the day with the Israelites, again assuming any of these stories are actually true. But again, Nehemiah is pissed, and we'll talk about that again in problematic passages in point seven. And he cries out to the Lord, and he says, "I tried," and the book ends just like Ezra, with these anticlimactic, very sad, very strange endings that we're not used to. Usually, the books before this had some main theme and message, some parallelism, and they would end on an up note. So that's the book of Nehemiah. What is the point here? Well, we'll get into that with main themes a little bit, but generally speaking, I think it's an ushering of, "Hey, God has a plan here. You people keep getting in the way. How is this covenant going to get fulfilled? When are we going to get our Messianic King? Look how no one is good enough yet, right?" This is kind of the Christian spin, and I'm getting ahead of myself here, of, "Well, see, everything in the Old Testament had to point forward to Jesus. Look at our need for a savior. Look at how broken and sinful we are. Look at how we can never get it right." But we'll get back into all of this later on. Let's move straight into point two: authorship and date. This is really simple. This is pretty much the same time as Ezra. A few years have passed, and now we are getting the joining of Nehemiah. In terms of date, in terms of authorship, a lot of people or the Jewish tradition will accredit this to Nehemiah. Again, like I said with Ezra, who really knows? The book is written in kind of a first-person, Nehemiah's point-of-view style, but that doesn't necessarily mean he wrote it. People can write like that for him. There are just too many other better scholarly options of redaction, of partial authorship, of multiple authors based on the Hebrew words being used here and the different kinds of strands that you can follow throughout the book, as well as some of the other intimate knowledge of other things that are going on. It really looks like this was written after the fact, and it was compiled, passed down, edited, etc. Regardless, we are seeing that this is the time they're pretty much compiling their Bible. This is the post-exile period. We need to get a law again; we need to really focus on what has happened in our past, the people we're going to become. And so you get these kinds of books, and you probably also, during this period, if not when you were still in captivity right before you got out of exile, would have been writing down books like even Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, all of them. So I think that's pretty interesting. Let's move on to point three: historical context and accuracy. There is a lot of historical context in this book. I mean, we have everything from the fact that Nehemiah was described as a cupbearer, which we know is a common practice for the Persian kings. We know that there were these royal decrees, like we get from Cyrus and Artaxerxes and even Darius in Ezra. We talked about the Cyrus Cylinder, so these things are still going on. But we do get some new archaeological evidence. We do see some rebuilding of walls efforts that are Persian in nature going on in Jerusalem that would look like some kind of big fortification project that happened at some point around this time for Jerusalem. So we're getting away from a little bit more of the theology of things and into some just historical accountings here. And that makes sense when you consider that now we have kind of a third party that's playing witness to all of this, right? With the Persian rulers, things kind of have to line up a little more than when you could just make stuff up about Genesis and Exodus, etc. We don't have even a whole lot of God in this book other than some of the communication with Nehemiah during his prayer, and that always opens these books up to be a little bit more accurate and reliable. So kind of a thumbs up so far in historical accuracy for this book. Moving into point four, let's talk about the literary analysis. Not a whole lot to cover here. This is still a historical narrative. We have a linear time frame. We have a co-alliance with what's happening in Ezra, although these two books were initially one book. We're the ones who decided to cut it all up. This is one of the first books where we're getting a lot of first-person perspective, so that's kind of cool. Why? I don't necessarily know, but we hear a lot about Nehemiah's direct thoughts and feelings and prayers and discouragement, etc. It's very personal in this aspect. And then again, we have official documents, right? We have these decrees from Artaxerxes. We have this list of all the people who went with Nehemiah to build the wall, and so that's interesting and also lends some credence, again, going back to the historical accuracy. But that's really about it for point four. Moving into point five, let's talk about the main theme. One of the main themes you're always going to hear from the book of Nehemiah is leadership. Nehemiah is a leader; he is visionary; he is ready to execute. He will go and negotiate with the Persian rulers; he will get the job done, even in the face of opposition, even taking it upon himself to walk through the city and figure out where the problems are, get himself even involved with what's going on in the temple reconstruction. Nehemiah is a go-getter. Any devotion you read about Nehemiah will definitely include leadership. A subset theme of that would just be perseverance. Since things don't go well and don't get finished, that's definitely another thread that we can pull out of the sweater of this book here. Religious observance might be a third one. Again, the focus on this book of getting back to basics, of learning the law, of going back through these Torah readings and teachings. We're doubling down that the only way this is going to work as a people group, at least from the eyes of the leadership, is with following God's commands. God is separate here for the most part. Again, in Ezra, we see that this presence isn't really with the temple right now. His people have been in exile for decades now and are just starting to come back. We have to start observing the law again, or we are going to make the mistakes of our fathers. Lastly, I guess you could draw out some kind of theme of renewal or restoration with the idea, at least, of the goal, the intent of rebuilding the temple and rebuilding the walls. The interesting thing here, the reason we see a lot of people not attending to their duties, especially with the temple rebuilding, is because these people are still trying to make houses for themselves. Like the focus—I even mentioned this in Ezra—it's such a strong focus of let's get the temple done, but these people don't have a community back together yet. They don't have places to live. These people are working for themselves to keep themselves alive and fed against these religious rulers that are like, "Build that wall, build that temple." So on some hand, I also don't blame these people for being like, "Hey, there's not going to be a temple for me to worship at if I'm dead first. Let me take care of basics." But I digress. That's point five. Let's move into point six: reception and influence. I'm finding myself having a harder and harder time talking about reception and influence. It was easy with books like Genesis and Exodus, but really, it's just a trickling down of the themes that we've covered here. So Nehemiah is pointed to in both the Jewish and Christian traditions for, again, leadership, for grouping unlike people together, right? You have the exiled people that have been back for a while, you have the new groups of exile, you have people that have intermarried, you have some people still back in the diaspora, you have some people still back in Babylon or the Persian territory, and many of these people end up kind of mixing together around this time with the group that Nehemiah has brought from exile to build the wall versus the people that are still back here, as well as some of the people on the outside who want to have their say because, after all, they are still part of the Israelite nation. They are still the Jewish people. And so again, Nehemiah being able to group these people together, get a common mission, at least at first, and get going is something that even modern-day churches will try to talk about. "Oh, we have differences, we have these different sects, but it shouldn't stop us from the goal here." And again, a big goal is the protection of God's people and the ability to worship God. That's the wall and the temple. So a lot of themes that trickle down, again, even the idea of the wall, Nehemiah's wall, like this huge project against all odds, against all opposition, is something that we have seen trickle down into art and literature, culture, etc. So not a whole lot to say there. Kind of end it with that. Let's move right into everyone's favorite point seven: contradictions, errors, problematic passages, etc. Starting with contradictions, I think we'll kind of just do a more quick overview here. We have issues with chronological discrepancies. An idea of this might be that right away in Nehemiah 1:1, we see that he is a cupbearer for Artaxerxes I. This might not line up with what scholars believe would have been the case. Again, we talked about this in Ezra, but it might have been closer to Artaxerxes II or III. This could throw off a lot of dating and issues for the timeline that we see through both Ezra and Nehemiah. We get to some population number discrepancies between Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra says how many people he brought with him. Nehemiah is not far to follow after, and in Nehemiah 7:66, we get a count for these people, and it doesn't seem like that would line up properly. The length of time it took to rebuild the wall to the degree that it was rebuilt—I mean, this is again its own scholarly issue. Were the walls of this time really rebuilt? Were they rebuilt in terms of, "Hey, there's a wall now, but it's not like it was before"? We have comparison differences with the size, and also the speed comes into play. In Nehemiah, it says it took just 52 days. That's in Nehemiah 6:15. That's an awfully short time frame, especially with opposition, to look at these walls really getting built. Like always, we have genealogy issues. Nehemiah gives us a lot of lists of names, and they simply do not line up with the other ones that we get from this same canon period. There are some contradictions with where did the opposition come from against the wall. Was it the people that were already living in Israel at the time that were of Israelite blood, or was it the Samaritans and the Ammonites, which are also listed in the book? We have a lot of confusion again about exactly who's getting in the way of this building process. A big one is the description of the city layout. We get a lot of descriptions here, and I didn't want to cover it in the biblical accuracy because I think it's up for debate a little bit, but from the historical and archaeological evidence that we have in terms of like the city gate and its location central to the city, etc., it's not what we find from the sites. So, I mean, who knows? So let's move on to problematic passages now. A lot of the passages I kind of earmarked that I wanted to cover in retrospect are just things that even Ezra and Nehemiah were not okay with. You know, we see an exchanging of interest in loans, and we're not supposed to do that. We see people working on the Sabbath; we're not supposed to do that. So it's part of the story, I understand that, but again, I think it's worth pointing out just how quickly these people are willing to disobey God. But it does get called out, so it's not like they were blessed for it or anything. One we can get into is Nehemiah 5:9. So I said, "The thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of the Lord our God to prevent the taunts of the nations of our enemies?" Now, this is not surprising if you know your Christian doctrine, and indeed many Christians love this idea that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. So Nehemiah is walking around chastising people, and he's like, "Where's your fear? Fear God so that you can protect us from our enemies." And I think that this shows us everything we could need to know. This is how the Israelites had to view God. When they worship him, they're not worshiping him out of adoration. When they obey him, they're not obeying him out of love. It's so amazing because all the descriptors, even in the Old Testament, this isn't like New Testament stuff with Jesus here, or that God is loving, God is slow to anger, God is caring and providential, etc. And it's like, no, even the reminders from some of these top spiritual leaders are, "Where's your fear?" They are living under a very severe, all-powerful tyrant that has and can strike at any time for the littlest of offenses here. We see inconsistencies with God's character because we definitely have people working on the Sabbath, like tons of them, but back in whatever book it was, maybe Leviticus, that one dude went and bundled sticks on the Sabbath, and God strikes him dead. There's no consistency. It's not an objective morality; it is God's feelings of the day. Let's go to the next one, Nehemiah 13:25. "And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair, and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, 'You shall not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves.'" So we have the intermarriage thing popping up again, and not only is Nehemiah physically abusing these people, beating them—remember, this is a man whose actions are blessed by God. We never get any, "Oh, he lost his temper here," like Moses when he hit the rock. We have a man doing God's will, beating people. Should we take these lessons? Should pastors go and beat you when you intermarry or for working on the Sabbath or for not working on the temple fast enough? Because that's what Nehemiah is doing. But the worst part of this, I think, is the forced oaths. I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to make oaths. I'm pretty sure that the Bible said, "Let your yes be yes, your no be no. Do not make any oaths or vows before God." Can you force someone to make a promise? Is it still considered a promise? I mean, this is forced at penalty of beating, and who knows what else will happen. Beats him first and says, "Hey, make your oath or else." This is coercion, and actually, the punishment for breaking an oath to God is very terrible. So Nehemiah is setting these people up for a huge failure here. Is this the man of God whose leadership we want to follow? That's why I think it's really funny. All of these devotions, all of these books about Nehemiah and leadership, try these out. See how far you get. Make them swear to you or some higher power to get what you want. Remind them of the fear of the Lord, or else. I don't know if these are great leadership tactics. I'm pretty sure they're not. And actually, now that I think about it, the rest of the problematic passages are coming from chapter 13, so you can just go and read this because I don't want to read you 12, 13, 14 verses here describing Nehemiah's tactics. He is confronting the nobles; he is confronting the priests; he is reassigning jobs; he is beating people; he is threatening people; he is scaring people. He's doing everything we just got done talking about. I think it would be a bit redundant, so let us end there for Nehemiah. Next, we have Esther. I'm excited to get into Esther. Esther has a lot of important theological themes for us. It's also a strange book in the lack of God that we have in Esther, so we'll get to that next Thursday. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know what you like or don't like about this book or any other interesting facts or context about Nehemiah. And until then, keep thinking. I wanted to personally thank my top-tier Iconoclast patrons, Sean Skaggs and Jason Rollins, and my Atheist Advocate patron, Jared Nichols, for their incredible generosity. Also, a big shout-out to my Secular Scholar patrons, of which we have some new ones. All other patrons are listed in the description of each video. 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