Bible Commentary - Nehemiah 11

In this chapter, Nehemiah lists the various leaders and clans of Israelites dwelling in Jerusalem.

In verses 1-2 we see a peculiar little story.  We discover that first, the people are casting lots to bring one tenth of their population into Jerusalem.  Second, they “bless” the men who volunteer to move (rather than be compelled).  This shows two things.  First, it shows that the people collectively see some reason why they need to move more people into the capital.  Second, it shows that the people do not themselves want to move to the capital.  However, the people’s motivation is not clear for either point.

Why would the people want to move more of their population into the city?  I can only really offer speculation on this point, so that is exactly what I will do.  I guess that they wanted to do this for the reason given in the first part of v. 1: “the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem”.  That is, the nation needed more people in the city to serve the leaders and defend the city.  If there is ever a situation when the leaders need to conscript some force, they could just go out and grab a bunch of people from the city and force them into some task or other.  The last concentration of manpower makes it easier and faster to do this.  We also know that the city was frequently threatened by their enemies, perhaps for exactly this reason.  Perhaps Judah’s enemies recognized that if they could destroy the city then the outlying rural areas would be easier targets since the Judeans there would be in smaller groups and easily overpowered by a larger enemy.

Why would the people be reluctant to move to Jerusalem?  I think my answer to the first question helps answer this one too: because the people don’t particularly want to live under threat of attack and under the compulsion of periodic conscriptions.  Additionally, other commentaries suggest that the Judeans are still largely agricultural in this time period, so they would have a harder time earning a living in a city where farmland is scarce and skilled jobs typically associated with city living take a lot of training and these careers can be hard to get into.

After this short story, the main part of the chapter begins with a fairly extensive census of the groups living in Jerusalem.  I won’t go through this in detail because as with elsewhere in Nehemiah, most of the people mentioned in this census are not referenced anywhere else in the bible.  The last twelve verses (25-36) list some of the outlying towns in Judah, which is not much different in overall tenor or topic from the census of Jerusalem, so I won’t discuss that in detail either.

So what can we learn from this chapter?  Overall, one thing that I notice from this chapter is the heavily religious character of Jerusalem.  It is twice referred to as the “holy city” (v. 1, 18).  If we believe Nehemiah’s numbers to be an exhaustive listing of all the residents in Jerusalem, it suggests that more than half the residents of Jerusalem are involved with religious service in some way or another.  I count ~1,300 men of Benjamin and Judah (v. 6-8) and around 1,600 men who are either temple servants, Levites or gatekeepers (v. 12-14, 18-19).  Jerusalem is the political capital of Judah, but it seems like its religious character as the home of the temple is even more important, at least from what we can see in this census.

I also think there is an interesting tension between the people’s desire to remain in the country and the national interest to bring more people into the city.  The bible rarely speaks about this directly, so it’s hard for me to add more detail when so little is known about Judean society in this time period.  All I will add here is that Judah remains a largely rural society during Nehemiah’s lifetime, even though Jerusalem plays a central role in both Nehemiah and Ezra’s stories.  Remember what brought Nehemiah to return to Judah: he heard that Jerusalem’s wall had not been rebuilt.  His principle concern was establishing Jerusalem as a political and military force in the region.

Repopulating the city is consistent with Nehemiah’s priorities, so from that point of view I think this chapter is just a continuation of Nehemiah’s overall focus on the health and wellbeing of Jerusalem.

In the next chapter, Nehemiah continues his census by listing the chief Levites, and then describes the dedication of the city wall.