Today, I am reading and commenting on  Nehemiah 1-3.

The first thing I want to point out is that the state of Jerusalem which Nehemiah’s brother described to him was not because of the Babylonians sacking Jerusalem back in Jeremiah’s time when they took the Jews into Exile.  No, the wall of Jerusalem had been broken down and the gates burned after the returned Exiles had initially rebuilt them.*  So, when Nehemiah confessed the sins of “we, the Israelites,” he was not talking about the sins which led to the Israelites being exiled in the first place, at least, not primarily.  Rather, Nehemiah was referring to the sins which he and his fellow descendants of Jacob had committed since Cyrus issued an edict allowing them to return to Jerusalem and ordering them to rebuild the temple.  Which brings me to something which occurred to me for the first time today: when Nehemiah went before Artaxerxes and requested permission to go to Jerusalem to rebuild the wall and gates, rebuilding the wall was not his primary agenda.  Rather, rebuilding the wall and gates of Jerusalem was a means to calling the Jews living in Jerusalem and Judah to return to being faithful to God.  And, as I write that I realized it tells us something about the way that God works.  Both Ezra and Nehemiah were called by God to go to Jerusalem and lead the people to more faithfully follow Him.  They were each called within a few years of each other and they were called independently of each other.  Yet, they worked together to bring the Jewish people to faithfully serve God.

*I make this point because for many years I just assumed that when this passage says that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down and the gates burned that it referred to them still being unrepaired from when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, when they had been rebuilt and destroyed yet again.  Additionally, many of the commentaries on Nehemiah hold the position that the wall and the gates remained destroyed from the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.  I think they are mistaken.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.