Law of Moses — Nehemiah 8

Once the walls were finished, Nehemiah appointed a governor over the city and organized security. Given how the Persians had in recent memory come to break down the walls, the people were a little skittish about living there. The rubble was eventually cleared and there was plenty of room, but few homes inside the wall.

But there was one more task. Nehemiah pulled out the roll Ezra had made of Israelis who had returned to the land. He double checked and found some priests who were questionable, so they were suspended from their duties until someone could arise through whom the Lord would speak through Urim and Thummim. Meanwhile, he updated the registry of eligible citizens of Israel.

Thus, we come to our focal passage, which begins a week later, 27 September 444 BC by our reckoning. This would be the Feast of Trumpets. At this point there was a large public square in front of the Water Gate — this is the primary eastern gate just above the ancient opening on the hillside for the Gihon Spring. The citizens gathered in this open square for this festival and asked Ezra to read the Books of Moses.

Ezra stood on a raised wooden platform. The text was in the more primitive Hebrew language that was no longer spoken by Israelis. After a couple of generations in Babylon, they had absorbed the more urbanized dialect of Aramaic, a very similar language. It compares roughly to reading the Bible today in King’s English to a bunch of American high school students. Most of the words were familiar, but the grammar, usage of some words, and archaic phrases were incomprehensible. So dispersed in the crowd were men capable of rendering the ancient Hebrew into a more familiar Aramaic equivalent expression. It became common to keep the text in Hebrew and maintain trained translators on hand, a practice called targum.

It took Ezra about six hours working like this. You can be sure the people were quite stirred by the message, and many were weeping over the discovery of sins they never knew about. But the priests who already knew the Covenant well warned that this was not a day of weeping; that would come ten days later with the Day of Atonement. For now, they were obliged to celebrate with feasting.

So the next day the leadership came to reexamine the instructions for the Feast of Booths. It had been neglected since the time of Joshua, seldom ever celebrated in full by the whole nation. So the whole assembly of Returnees fully cooperated and spent the rest of the festival in reviewing the Covenant more thoroughly.

Under the administration of Nehemiah, and the spiritual leadership of Ezra, there was a great revival among the Returnees, as they examined the Law of Moses freshly.