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 9-10.

A few weeks after completing the Festival of Shelters the Returned Exiles gathered once more in an assembly.  This time they gathered to grieve over and confess the sins of themselves and their ancestors.  As part of this exercise they stood and listened to a reading of the entire Book of the Law which took three hours.  Then when the reading was completed they spent three more hours standing there confessing their sins and worshiping God.  The passage does not describe what that was like, but I have an image of what happened based on the prayer of confession which the Levitical leasers prayed.  I imagine that the leaders read out excerpts from Exodus through Chronicles of the sins which the people of Israel had committed, interspersed with songs and opportunities for the people to think over their own lives and how they had failed to obey God’s Laws just as their ancestors had failed.  As part of their confession they acknowledged that God had repeatedly given their ancestors opportunities, which they and their ancestors had squandered in their wickedness.

At the conclusion of this six hour service the leaders of the people presented a document which they had prepared to the people.  This document was a confession of faith which the leaders had all signed and which they called on the people to affirm.  This confession of faith highlighted areas where they believed that failure would lead to all of the other sins which they and their ancestors had committed.  Further they believed that following the practices laid out in the document would make them and their descendants more likely to obey all of God’s commands.  So, they did not just grieve over what they had done wrong.  They made a plan to do better and committed themselves to follow that plan.  To my mind the confession of faith had three key elements.  First, they agreed not to intermarry with those who did not subscribe to this confession of faith.  Second, while they would not prevent outsiders from doing business on the Sabbath, they would not do so themselves, not even with those outsiders.  Third, they committed themselves to an annual tax for the maintenance of the Temple and its priests.