study last week—I had an unexpected, but good visit with my sister,
nephew, and mother last week. The last time I saw them on my home
turf was back in 1997 and so I knew I better take advantage of this,
because it was probably going to be 2010 before I actually get them here
again! So, thanks to Sharon for doing that.
Well, for those of you who are not history buffs, and who had to suffer
through the details of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms, and their rise
and fall, there is good news—it gets a little less historical, and a little bit
more of what people expect from Scripture, books that deal a lot more
explicitly with God, rather than details of when and where certain rulers
ruled in ancient Israel—and what kind of messes they usually got into. It
will especially get like that next week, a lot more God talk, but this week,
we need to wrap a little bit of the history of the people, because Sharon
left them in the grasp of the Babylonians, one of the great empires of the
ancient world, and the cream of the crop of Israel, at least of the
Northern Kingdom, was carted off to city of Babylon. The strategy of the
Babylonians seemed to be that you if you held your enemies close, really
close, they are alot less of a threat to you, than if you left them in the
place you conquered then in—which kind of makes sense—it’s just
easier to keep an eye on them. So, the Babylonians did this thing and
the elite of the Jewish society is exiled to Babylon, in two waves, the first
being in 597 and the second wave of exiles going to Bablonon in 586 or
587. The problem, of course, is that empires rise and fall—and the
Babylonian Empire fell to an even greater Empire, the Persian Empire in
539, and so the Jews are now held captive by the Persians rather than
the Babylonians.
Babylonian Captivity Or Exile (597-539)
I want to spend a few minutes here in the captivity, or the Exile period,
because this is not minor event in the life of Israel. The period between
597-539 (or 537) is actually one of the most traumatic and defining
moments in the history of Israel—there is before and there is an after, to
this event. We know that a large group of the elite of Israel—artists, the
educated, the wealthy—were taken, and though the Bible sometimes
seem to imply that ALL of Israel was taken, the reality is that there
remained in Israel a large group of Jews, though they weren’t from this
elite class—they were usually the poorest of the poor, the underclass of
what was left of the nation of Judah, or the Southern Kingdom of Israel.
As you probably remember from last week, the Northern Kingdom had
been essentially wiped out. To be uprooted and taken to another
country, to be re-settled in another land, not quite knowing how to get
around, probably struggling with the language and culture—it was an
incredibly painful experience for many in this group of exiled Jews. In
Psalm 137:1, the psalmist cried, “By the waters of Bablyon, there we sat
down and wept, when we remembered Zion,” when we remembered
Jerusalem. It was an amazingly traumatic event for many, and Israel
would never be the same, but we also know that some of prophets
encouraged the people to see it as a time of refinement and that God
would bring the people back to the land of their birth, to the land of
Israel. In fact, Jeremiah actually encourages the first wave of exiles to
settle down, acquire property, marry, live life, and eventually God will
bring them back to their homeland. So, on one hand, it was a horrible,
horrible experience, and on the other hand, life went on, obviously, and
we have some evidence that some Jews actually did OK financially and
materially in their Captivity in Babylon. So much of the stuff from the Old
Testament that we will be exploring later actually comes from this period,
or at least struggles with the questions that this time away from the land
meant.
Good News! The Persians Kick Babylonian Butt in 539 BCE
Well, the good news for the people exiled in Babylon is that empires rise
and fall—and the Babylonian Empire fell to an even greater Empire, the
Persian Empire in 539, and so the Jews are now held captive by the
Persians rather than the Babylonians. But this actually good news,
because the Persians don’t have the same strategy as the Babylonians
about keeping their conquered so close and so there room for some
movement of some sort. In last few verses of 2 Chronicles, we hear that
within the first year of King Cyrus conquest of Babylon, the King sends
out an edict, a command that essentially frees the Jews in Bablyon to go
back to Jerusalem and Israel and re-build the city—they get to go back
home. That is where our first book that we’re going to be studying
tonight actually begins—actually, that is where two books actually begin.
Most scholars believe that Ezra and Nehemiah are written by the same
person and a lot of scholars actually believe that this Ezra-Nehemiah
writer actually was writing a postscript to the 1 & 2 Chronicles, the books
Sharon talked about last week. The language and style of all of these
books are remarkably similar. So, I’m going to be treating Ezra and
Nehemiah as one book tonight, because it tells the story of what
happened after King Cyrus let the Jews go back home—and it was lots of
drama, lots of starts and stops, and a revival of some sort as well. You
know, it’s the story of a homecoming, and the reason why I think it is
such a fascinating set of books is because it rings true to what really
happens when people try to go home again, the good and the bad, the
desire for it be the same, and finding out that its not the same—its that
moment when you go back home, and you realize the place has changed
and you have changed—and it will never be the same again
Ezra/Nehemiah—Summing Up The Homecoming In 15, Maybe 20
Minutes
But before we get there, let’s look at the story of what happened when
the Jews of Bablyon come back home. First, in Ezra 1-2, the command is
given by Cyrus that the Jews can go back home, and a small group of
folks go back home to Jerusalem, though it doesn’t like they did much
when they got there. In chapter3 we’re told that another, second, group
of Jews arrive in Jerusalem, and they seem to be a lot more productive—
they immediately get to working on rebuilding the temple, building the
center of their city and the center of their lives. But its interesting—the
folks who had lived in Jerusalem, and then had been taken captive to
Babylon, they suddenly realize that the dimensions of this rebuilt temple
will be a lot smaller than the one that Solomon had built and that been
destroyed by the Babylonians. Despite some grief about this, about
knowing the temple they could afford to build wouldn’t be the same
temple that was standing there before, Solomon’s grand temple, they still
kept building. Life wasn’t it was before, but that didn’t mean you stopped
building what you know need to build for life to even come close to being
normal.
But the problem is that by chapter 4, the folks who’ve been living in that
general area, people called the Samaritans start trying to sabotage the
rebuilding project because they had felt insulted when the Jews refused
their help—I guess the Jews felt that this was something they needed to
do, as an act of faith towards their God. So, these Samaritans, as they
are called, though they are actually different type of people than the
Samaritans we hear of in Jesus’ day, these folks basically warn the local
Persian governor that if he lets the Jews build their temple, their going to
do what they’ve always done, which is to rebel, and this time probably
rebel against the Persians. Well, this stops it for awhile, but some
prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, folks we’ll meet later in their writings at
the end of the Old Testament, these guys encourage them to finish it, to
finish the job, and the people again start the rebuilding process.
Another roadblock is thrown about who gave them permission to start
doing this, but they eventually get the building permit to do it, so they’re
back to building. And then Ezra, who is living in Babylon and some of
another group of Exiles shows up in Jerusalem in 458, something like 70
or so years after the original decree that King Cyrus, and is told by the
current King of Persia to help teach the people of Israel there own laws
and rituals, and so he does—and what happens is that effectively from
that point on, Israel forever ceases being a nation run by a King, as they
were before, and now they essentially get ruled by priest or priest kings—
long story about that, but as a kind of priest figure myself, I think we that’
s great idea—rule of the preachers! OK, maybe not! But basically, the
nation goes back to being a theocracy, a place where people believe
that God is ultimately in control, though there is always a longing that
remains for Israel’s glory days under Solomon and David.
So, under this new direct rule by God, Ezra in chapters 9 and 10
confronts with them one of the biggest sins that the people have done,
specifically the men, and that is that some men have married women who
were not Jews.
We have sinned against our God and have married foreign women from
the peoples of the land. Yet now there is hope for Israel concerning this
thing. Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to eject all
these women and those born to them, according to the counsel of my
lord and those who tremble at the commandments of God. Ezra 10:2-3
Basically, he’s arguing that they’ve got to divorce our wives and throw
out all the children we fathered with these foreign, non-Jewish women.
Of course, in the Jewish mindset, to marry outside the faith and people is
to marry outside the covenant of God’s chosen people—and it is to
contaminate yourself with their presence, and it is possibly be
compromised by their possible allegiance to other gods, gods they may
brought in from their home religion. So, they do it, which is just stunning
really, because the scary thing is that in the ancient world, divorce
women and their children would have to go it alone—they would be
probably be disgraced and not be able to go back home to their parent’s
home, and they would probably wouldn’t be marriage material. So, this is
one of those uncomfortable moments when the story seems so alien—
how could you ever do that, even if you had believed you had a mistake
by marrying outside your clan? How could you desert them? So, Ezra
sees again that what he comes home to is not what people expected to
find—the homecoming has causalities and its these women and children
who pay a heavy price for what Ezra sees as the unfaithfulness of the
people.
But onto Nehemiah, which is just simply a continuation of Ezra, of course,
but this time Nehemiah, a new character arrives on the scene is sent by
another Persian king to check out the conditions of the walls around the
city of Jerusalem. Now, walls would have been incredibly important for
the fairly new but old residents of Jerusalem, because they would have
provided for protection for the city, but they would also added prestige to
the people—to have fortified walls was a sign and symbol of a true
recovery. And it had been almost a hundred years since the first group
of exiles arrived back in Jerusalem, and they still weren’t up, these walls
around Jerusalem. They build a small temple, but nothing was protecting
it and nothing was protecting the people who lived in city, though they
were still being ruled by the Persian Empire. So, Nehemiah shows up
and gets the people to start rebuilding the wall, but there is again
opposition from the non-Jewish neighbors because they’re probably
afraid that the Jews building the wall of the cities will make them
powerbrokers of some sort. So the sniping continues, but they get it built
in only 52 days! (6:15) And the next thing that needed to happen after
getting that wall up was to renew and re-energize the people’s
commitment to God, so they read aloud the Torah, or the religious Law
of Israel, in chapter 8 and for a lot of folks, it was the first time they had
ever had ever it read aloud—it was incredible for so many of them, to
hear the law that God had given Moses hundreds of years earlier—they
literally wept when they heard it for the first time—finally, they saw what it
was that made them so distincitive amongst the peoples of the world, and
it was this unusual set of laws and ordinances they had tried to follow,
but had so often failed to do so. In chapter 9 of Nehemiah, there is a
wonderful speech that Ezra gives, and basically it outlines why it has to
come to this, that even though they have been unfaithful, God has
remained faithful, and brought them home, though God has brought
them back as slaves to the King of Persia.
Nehemiah 9:29-37
Now, the rest of Nehemiah is about putting together the new social and
religious structure they’ve been allowed to put together under the
greater Persian rule, and it’s a good thing, things are humming along
fine, but something is different. Actually, one of the things that is
different is that the people have to be re-trained in many ways, to be
religious again, to pay attention to their spiritual lives. One of the
reasons we know that this was the case, is actually from the other book
we’re going to briefly look at tonight, the book of Esther. Most of us
know the story of Esther, I suspect, of how she saved the people of Israel
during the time Israel was being ruled by the Persians. Basically, a
series of events put the people in danger, and Esther, with the help of
Mordecai, her uncle, they thwart the evil plans of Haman, the first clear
anti-Semite. The thing about this is book is that it was written during
around the latter part of the time we are talking about or maybe a little
later, but it shows you how far the Jewish culture had gotten away from
its religious roots. Basically, the book of Esther had a very difficult time
getting into the canon, or the list of sacred books, because of some very
interesting things. First, God is never mentioned in the book—in fact,
God never seems to play any role in the book at all. And this caused
Jewish religious leaders a little concern—we’re about to accept this book
as sacred, though it never once mentions God. Secondly, there is no
reference at all Mordecai or Esther being very religious people either—
there is no record of them praying or keeping Sabbath. It just seems to
be a story of great heroism, minus God and religion. So, this causes
some concern as well. But actually, I would say that this “Godless” book
of the Bible shows you how much the people of Israel had really
abandoned their religious roots—even in the stories where one could
argue for the hand of God somewhere, its left out, for some reason.
This incredible story about Esther doesn’t mention God because a lot of
the people of Israel at the time of Nehemiah and Ezra were not all that
interested in God, and Ezra and Nehemiah’s jobs were to get people
focused back on God. But this is hard work, obviously, and the truth of
the matter, is that they had varying degree of success—they came back
home, and put together a much smaller version of the original temple,
and they got the walls rebuilt again, and they did get the people focused
back on God. And yet, we also know that home wasn’t the way they left
it—and it would never be that way again. After this period of relative
success, Israel never did really gain much autonomy; they were always
under the rule of someone, and the few years they had as free people
were quickly ended, ended again by yet another world empire stomping
on them. It never really got much better than this, than the time of Ezra
and Nehemiah, and so we’re left with the fact that the home they tried to
come back to, didn’t exist anymore. They came back to Jerusalem,
hoping to rebuild it to its glory days, during Solomon’s reign, but
everything seemed to be a shadow of the past, no matter how many new
walls or miniature temples you put up. The great Jerusalem of their
dreams—remained in their dreams and never became a reality again.
Historically, its interesting what happens here, and its something that I
think we can take from this—slowly but surely, the Jews slowly learn that
home is where you are, not where you want to be. For centuries after
this, they constantly try to get it back, to get what they thought would be
the good-old-days, but it never worked, and even when a third temple
was built for the Jews by the Romans and their collaborators, Herod’s
family, the one we hear Jesus going to in the Gospels, that third temple
is then destroyed by those Romans about 40 years after his death and
resurrection. And after that, the people of Israel begin letting go of the
idea of trying to re-create home, of making Jerusalem the home of their
dreams, of the glorious past. Judaism becomes a religion that you can
practice where you are, where you live, rather than a religion that must
ultimately practiced in Jerusalem, in the temple. The rise of what
scholars call synagogue Judaism arises in the first century, and it forever
changes Judaism—the city of Jerusalem and the temple it once held
fades away, to some degree, though it always remains an ideal symbol
for dreams and goals of the Jewish people.
It sounds kinda odd to bring that up, but I wanted to remind us that one
of the many things we can get from the larger picture that these 2 or 3
books is that our nostalgia for the past can be very distracting and very
harmful for our future. I know that I do that a lot—I tend to idealize the
past, whether it’s the places that I miss living in a lot, and I especially
miss Atlanta, to be honest, and I have often said I would love to live there
again, but I do realize that Atlanta has changed since I’ve been there,
and I’ve changed since I lived there, and that it would never be the same
again. The people of Israel had a hard, hard time letting it go, letting the
good old days go, and it cost them so much time and effort. In many
ways, it cost them a chance to be different in the ways they could be
faithful to God. For hundreds of years, they kept trying to home again,
to go back to Jerusalem and the Temple they collectively remembered as
being great and glorious, but it ended up almost destroying them.
Finally, somewhere in the first century, they began to be faithful in
radically different ways, a different way of being a Jew came about, and
because God is good and patience with them and with us, they started
worshipping God differently, and they focused on where they were at,
not where they wanted to be—they finally looked around and found that
they were home, under whatever empire they were under, or whatever
city or state they were populating. This is a long, long way of saying that
one of the great lessons of this piece of Scripture and the later history of
Israel is that we are asked by God to be home in the present, to make
our lives in the here and now, and that may mean finding new and
different of being faithful to God, just like the Jews of the first century
later had to do, or maybe it means loving people for who they are at this
moment, not the way they used to be; or maybe being OK with loving the
place we live at right now, not the place we used to live. Now, Atlanta is
no Jerusalem, I admit, but letting go of my idealizations of my time there,
the good old days, helped me to get on with loving the places I’ve lived in
since then, some more than others, I admit. Pining after the past,
yearning for what used to be, can get you into a lot of trouble, even
when you’re doing your best to put it all back together again the best
way you can, like the people of Israel did during Ezra and Nehemiah, and
it always tend to pale in comparison to what used to be, as those men
understood who cried when they saw how small the second temple was
going to be in relationship to the first temple of Solomon’s time. The
good news is that God is never the God of ONLY the past, God is
certainly the God of the future, but perhaps most importantly, God is the
God of the present, the God who can take whatever we are going
through, whatever new and difficult thing we are experiencing and who
makes it into something great and life-giving. The present, this very
moment is where God is working, right here, right now. Instead of
wanting to recreate the past, our job is watch God take care of the
present, of this moment, so that we can have a future.
