An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 85: A Big, Beautiful Wall (Nehemiah 11-13)

Nehemiah 11-13
A Big, Beautiful Wall.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Nehemiah 11
“And the rulers of the people dwelt at Jerusalem: the rest of the people also cast lots, to bring one of ten to dwell in Jerusalem the holy city, and nine parts to dwell in other cities.”

The people draw lots to decide who gets to live where, although some volunteer to stay in Jerusalem and are praised for it. At times the text still refers to Judah as the land, implying that the kingdoms of Judah and Israel are still estranged, but it also refers to Judah the tribe, so slightly confusing.

Otherwise this is another Reverend Lovejoy special, listing who gets to live where, and sometimes who is the leader of each group and their lineage to a variable length.

Nehemiah 12
“Now these are the priests and the Levites that went up with Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua: Seraiah, Jeremiah, Ezra,”

This chapter begins with yet another roster of names, and largely continues in this vein although it does cover the blessings of the walls. Nehemiah divides the people into two groups who go in opposite directions around the walls of Jerusalem, singing and playing music. There’s some more notes on the singers, the children of Asaph, and how they have set up small villages around Jerusalem. It feels like we’ve been here before, but I think that was dedicating the temple, not the city walls.

Nehemiah 13
“And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves.”

Whilst Nehemiah is away, back at the court of Ataxerxes, Eliashib the priest conspires with Tobiah to keep the temple offerings for themselves. When Nehemiah returns he throws all of Tobiah’s belongings out and has the chamber purified. This seems to send him off on a path of zealotry. He stamps down on trading on the Sabbath, ordering the Levites to keep the gates closed and forcibly ejecting foreign merchants. He also does violence against those who have intermarried, especially with Ammonites and Moabites (having discovered specific laws against this in the book of Moses earlier). And that’s pretty much where the chapter, and the book, ends, on a rather cantankerous note. I mentioned before this rather uncomforatable “ethnic cleansing” aspect to some of the marriage purity laws, and here the writing even says “Thus cleansed I them from all strangers” (V30).

In the process of writing this blog I tried to keep away from too much background reading at the time, so as to make my own reactions and deductions as pure as possible, but since finishing the original read-through and composition I’ve come across more theories in Bible studies. One is that much of the Exodus story is compiled long after the fact, and I can see a good case for that here, wherein the Jews released by Cyrus compose their own origins myth in order to set them apart from other Canaanites peoples (akin to, say, Virgil’s Aenead linking the origins of Rome to Troy, or the resurgence in interest in the Kalavela by Gallen-Kalela and Sibelius in post-war Finland). That would also explain why elements of Babylonian mythology, notably the Flood of Gilgamesh, end up in Jewish mythology as well.  Note that in the last section, in Nehemiah 4 or 5, there is a public recital of basically Exodus and Leviticus – what if, rather than a reminder of what the people would already know, this is the first airing of the new mythical history of the Jews, used to back up the sense of racial separation also given throughout the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It’s something I’m going to research further.

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