I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them.
When the construction of the wall was complete, Nehemiah organized a celebration to dedicate the new wall. He asked all of the Levites who had resettled in Judah to come to Jerusalem for this celebration. All of the priests and Levites ritually purified themselves and then did the same for the people, the gates and the wall. Nehemiah organized the Levites into two choirs. The two choirs went in opposite directions along the top of the wall singing and praising God, with the people of Jerusalem following along. When the two groups met up again they went together to the Temple to offer sacrifices and worship God. On this day they set up a system to ensure that the needs of those who tended the Temple (priests, gatekeepers, choir directors, etc) were met without them having to leave their posts at the Temple to provide for themselves.
Nehemiah recounts how he had gone back to the court of King Artaxerxes for a period of time (as he had originally agreed to do when he gained permission to travel to Jerusalem to rebuild the wall) and then returned to Jerusalem. When he got back to Jerusalem he discovered that the priest who had been put in charge of the storerooms in the Temple had given the use of one of them to Tobiah (Tobiah was one of the leaders of the neighboring peoples who had worked against the rebuilding of the wall). He also discovered that the Levites tending the Temple had not been given the portions of food that were prescribed for them and had returned to working in the fields to support themselves rather than conducting worship services at the Temple. Nehemiah confronted the leaders about this. He called the Levites back to work as worship leaders in the Temple and appointed new supervisors of the Temple storerooms in order to ensure that the Levites received an honest distribution of supplies.
Upon his return to Jerusalem, Nehemiah discovered that some of the Jews were working on the Sabbath and more were bringing merchandise into Jerusalem to sell on the Sabbath. In addition, he discovered that Gentile merchants were bringing goods in to sell as well. He confronted the Jewish leaders about allowing the Sabbath to be desecrated in this manner. Then Nehemiah ordered that the gates of Jerusalem be shut at sundown the day before the Sabbath (the technical beginning of the Sabbath) and to remain shut until the Sabbath was over. The first week or two after he did this he found merchants camped outside the walls selling goods. However, he warned them that if they did this again he would have them arrested and they stopped doing so.
Finally, Nehemiah discovered that some of the Jews were not only marrying women from the surrounding peoples, but were not even teaching their children from these marriages to speak the language of Judah. He forced the people to swear that they would not allow their children to intermarry with pagans.
It is a shame that the first verse of chapter 11 was included in today’s passage rather than in yesterday’s, since it is the conclusion about the argument that Paul was making in that passage. In yesterday’s passage Paul said that he did not do just what was best for him, but he tried to do what was best for others so that many may be saved. The first verse of chapter 11 follows that by telling us that we should imitate Paul as he imitates Christ. He is telling us that we should imitate his practice of doing what is best for others in order to lead them to salvation.
Then Paul starts discussing a new topic. This passage is the origin of the tradition that gentlemen do not wear a hat indoors and the tradition that men take off their hats during the singing of the national anthem. Paul tells us that men should not wear anything on their head when they pray or prophesy. On the other hand, he says that women should have something on their heads when they pray or prophesy. This is a passage that the Church in the U.S. has pretty much completely abandoned, simply because they do not like what it says. Those groups that do continue to preach this generally encourage women to wear old fashioned head coverings (there are exceptions but they are almost a minority). There is nothing wrong with women wearing the old fashioned head coverings, but if the Christians who teach this were to emphasize that any type of head covering would do, we might see a resurgence of women’s head coverings of various sorts. I knew a young woman who followed the teaching of wearing a head covering, but I do not think many people realized it (even among others who followed the teaching) because she always wore some kind of pretty head covering that completed the rest of her outfit.
There is another important teaching in this passage that often gets overlooked because of the controversy over the teaching on head covering. That is that women are not independent of men. This sounds very sexist especially in the context of Paul teaching that women should wear a head covering of some kind when they pray or prophecy. Except he follows that up immediately by saying that men are not independent of women. I think this is the most important part of this passage. This teaching that men and women are interdependent. Women need men and men need women. This is not a teaching about marriage or sexuality, Paul covers those elsewhere. This is about human nature. In large part I believe that Paul teaches women to wear head coverings as a way for the Church to bring out this interdependence and make people aware of it.
The psalmist calls on God to fight his enemies for him. The psalmist claims that he did them no wrong. That when they fell on hard times he prayed and fasted for them. He mourned for their troubles as if they were his own family. This is a model for us, we, also, should pray and fast for those who suffer as if they were our own family, even if they consider themselves our enemies. The one thing that is often overlooked in the Bible’s calls for us to care for the needy is that it assumes that we will first care for our families. You should be suspicious of someone who claims to be working for the poor if members of their own family are in need when they have the means to help them.
The first proverb tells us that the pursuit of pleasure is the road to poverty and seeking after wine and luxury will leave us without the resources to enjoy either. The second proverb tells us that the wicked will be punished in the place of the godly. I am not quite sure what that means, but I think a story about my childhood might shed some light. I was a “good boy”, I usually did what I was supposed to and rarely got into trouble. I rarely did things to get into trouble for. I had a good friend who often got into trouble. He frequently challenged authority. He wasn’t a “bad boy”, but he was close. Most of the time when we were together, I kept him out of trouble because he understood that I had a better grasp of what the limits of what we could get away with were. But every now and then, I would come up with a bad idea and he would be the one who thought better. On those occasions that we followed my course of action when it was a bad idea and we got caught, he always got blamed. Because so often he did things that got him in trouble and I so rarely did (and almost never when not with him) those in authority assumed that the bad idea was his and I just went along. He never really minded though, because for every time I got him into trouble there were two or three where I kept him out of trouble. The point of this is that because I had a reputation as being a “good boy” and he had a reputation as being a “bad boy” he got the blame in my place. That seems to me to be the point of this second proverb.