Bible Commentary - Nehemiah 8

In this chapter, Ezra recites the law to all the people and they celebrate the festival of Booths, which in Hebrew is called Sukkot.

Yes, that’s right, Ezra.  You might have thought we were in the book of Nehemiah, and indeed we are, but here is Ezra again.  Not only do we bring out Ezra, but what does Ezra read?  The book of the law of Moses.  In my opinion, there are only two possibilities for what this might be.  It’s either the Pentateuch in its entirety (Genesis through Deuteronomy), or it is the book of Deuteronomy alone.  I think both are viable interpretations, and especially since Nehemiah specifies that it’s the “Law of Moses”, I am inclined to think it might be Deuteronomy alone.  Either way, there are a couple points I want to talk about.  First is the cultural act of recitation of the scriptures, second is the challenges that ancient people faced in understanding and interpreting their scriptures, and third is how this chapter relates to our own attempts to understand the exact same ancient book.

Beginning with the first point, books are rare and expensive in this time period, much more so than many modern readers may understand.  Modern readers may look back upon the past and think that because we have a “large” number of ancient books available to us (such as the bible itself), that books were equally plentiful in the past.  To such readers, I would reply as follows: suppose every book you wanted to own, you had to copy by hand.  That is, in order to own a bible, you must first take somebody else’s bible and copy the entire thing down with pen and paper, and then you can keep the copy that you wrote out.  In this kind of a world, how many books would you own?  Would you transcribe your own copy of Harry Potter?  Would you write down a copy of the Lord of the Rings?  How many books would you really own?  Whatever answer you come up with, now apply that to a culture that is significantly more poor, agrarian, and where you are probably illiterate because the only school you ever had is your mom.

 it is likely that each community would have only a handful of copies of the Torah, perhaps even just one.  Many people in this time period are also illiterate, which is one important reason why they have professional scribes like Ezra.  As was true for so many hundreds of years, the people received the Torah the way it was originally intended, which was through oral recitation.  Most scholars believe that the Torah was originally transmitted orally for some time before it was ever written down at all.  This chapter leaves no doubt that the Law has now been written down, but even then it is clearly not prevalent as a written text and it is not available to the population the way the bible is available today.  For the vast majority of people, gathering to hear the Law read aloud was the only method and time they would ever receive it, for all of the reasons mentioned above.

In verse 5, it says that the people stood to hear the Law.  Could you imagine standing for four or five hours (from early morning until midday, v. 3) listening to a man read from a book?  Surprising as it sounds, the book of Deuteronomy is substantially archaic in both language and content by the time of Nehemiah.  My readers may not have considered how long of a time has passed since Deuteronomy was composed.  At the latest, it was written during the reign of Hezekiah, and at the earliest many hundreds of years before even then.  In verses 7-8 we learn that the priests have to both explain and translate the text for the people to understand it.  That’s because first of all, many passages in Deuteronomy are just as hard for ancient Jews to understand as they are to modern readers.  They may have some cultural context that we don’t, but at a very basic level they are just people, the same as us, and there is no magic power that they possessed to understand the bible which went away before modern times.  Things that confuse us in Deuteronomy would very likely confuse ancient Jews as well.

Secondly, they have to translate the text because the common Jewish language changed from the time of Deuteronomy to the time of Nehemiah.  This is another shift most modern readers would not think about or notice, but at some point during the exile, the people of Judah stopped speaking Hebrew and started speaking Aramaic as the common language of society.  Obviously there were still some people who spoke Hebrew, and that’s how the priests could cotninue to maintain their religious traditions, but over time Hebrew became more and more a language of religion and not a language of communication.

By the time we get to the New Testament, Hebrew ceased to be the language of religion as well and the entire New Testament text was spoken in Aramaic and written in Greek.  There are oblique references to Hebrew in the New Testament, but its usage in the text was essentially nonexistent.  It’s an interesting quirk of history that Hebrew reemerged as a spoken language in modern day Israel, because for a very long time the common spoken languages in the Mideast were either Aramaic, Arabic, Persian or other variants.  Even among the Jews it was not a commonly spoken until sometime in the 19th century when a deliberate effort was made to restore it (for both cultural and political reasons).  That is a topic for another day.

I see this as a reminder that while we may perceive the bible as a single book where somebody sat down and just wrote the whole thing over a long weekend, the bible is actually many books written over a long time.  There is certainly a common purpose that runs through the biblical text, but at the same time it should more properly be understood as a historical progression of thought and events.  In a broad sense, the bible is a history of God’s promises and interactions with his people spanning over perhaps 1,200 years.  Remarkably, people living in later parts of the biblical period are now reading earlier parts of the bible and we get to see them struggle through the challenges of language and interpretation that we face in nearly the exact same way.

Verses 9-12 are interesting because we see the people respond to the Law with grief.  Similar to the prayer of Nehemiah in chapter 1, the people realize with a sudden clarity what is the depth of their sin before the LORD.  Nehemiah and the priests respond by saying that understanding itself should be a source of joy.  Yes, the people and their ancestors have sinned, but understanding the Law is the first step towards obeying it, and the people should rejoice that they have begun to understand and obey.

In verse 14, we see the attitude of the people.  I can just imagine the people reading through the Law being like, “wow we can’t mix fibers of different kinds?  I’ll have to go buy a new shirt!”  It’s like this big exploration process as they discover what is in the Law.  So anyway, they read about this festival in the Law and the instantaneous reaction is that they must go and celebrate it right away.  I find their enthusiasm for obeying the Law to be almost naive in its innocence, which is endearing to me.  As a people, the Jews are learning about the Law for the first time in their lives and immediately obeying it in all of its eccentric details.

I think there is an important connection between the priests’ assurances in v. 11 and the people’s eagerness to obey in v. 16-17.  Machiavelli says that it is better to be feared than loved.  That is not how God operates, because Machiavelli was only seeking obedience: God wants devotion.  The people could have responded to the Law with fear, having seen the extent of their sin and God’s threatened punishment, and that fear might have caused them to celebrate the festival.  But Nehemiah and the priests comfort the people and encourage them to have joy in their discoveries, and like Nehemiah says in verse 12, that joy is what gives them strength to endure, strength to pursue God and strength to overcome the many challenges their society faces.

In the next chapter, the people observe a day of fasting and repentance.