Daily Old Testament: Nehemiah 1-3 and My Own Article on "Friends and Scripture" (Part 8)

Nehemiah 1 – Written in the first person, Nehemiah is, at the time of the return, a cupbearer for the Persian king Artaxerxes. The account begins in the year 446 according to a note in my Jerusalem Bible. He is living in Susa when his brother Hanani comes with other men from Judah with news of the terrible condition of the people there. Susa is one of the oldest cities in the world, in the Zagros Mountain area [southeastern Iran today] and home of both Daniel and Nehemiah. The city wall of Jerusalem has broken down; the gates have been destroyed. Nehemiah is moved by his brother’s report. He weeps and mourns “for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven” (1:4).

He addresses God in prayer: “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, listen to my prayer! Look down and see me praying night and day for your people Israel. I confess that we have sinned against you. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned. We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, decrees, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses. Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you are unfaithful to me, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and obey my commands and live by them, then even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.’ The people you rescued by your great power and strong hand are your servants” (1:5-10).

Nehemiah 2 – Nehemiah is a cup-bearer to the king of Persia, Artaxerxes. One day he appears to serve the king, and his face is sad. The king takes notice and Nehemiah tells him his heart is sad because the city of his ancestors’ graves lies in ruins. The king asks him what he wants to do and Nehemiah tells him he wants to rebuild it (2:5). The king asks him how long he will be gone, and at Nehemiah’s request grants him letters permitting him to pass through the province west of the Euphrates River, letters to the king’s forest-keeper, allowing him to take lumber, etc. The governors of the province are not happy about all of this, but they can do nothing.

When Nehemiah gets to Jerusalem, he doesn’t announce right away what he is there to do, but surveys the Temple area, assessing the damage. Then he calls the people together, and encourages them to start building. The officials, Sanballat, Tobiah and Geshem the Arab, mock them and imply that they are planning rebellion. Nehemiah responds, “The God of heaven will help us succeed. We, his servants, will start rebuilding this wall. But you have no share, legal right, or historic claim in Jerusalem” (2:20).

Nehemiah 3 – Proceeding in a clockwise direction around the city, the writer tells which exact families made repairs to the walls. The priests work in the vicinity of the temple, starting at the Sheep Gate, then by the Tower of Hananel, the Fish Gate, the Old Gate, the Broad Wall. From there around to the Tower of the Ovens or Furnaces, the Valley Gate and a thousand cubits down to the Dung Gate. To the Fountain Gate and the wall of the Pool of Shelah (Siloam?) to the stairs leading to the City of David. From a point opposite the graves of David to the artificial pool (Upper Pool? A reservoir that drew off water of the Gihon at their source, once filled in by Hezekiah—2 Kings 20). The priests again work near their houses and up to the Water Gate on the east, past the Horse Gate to the East Gate and so on back to the Sheep Gate.

“Friends and Scripture”

Introduction: This article is one I wrote some years ago and it was eventually part of the book I wrote called Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism. My plan here is just to include a few paragraphs of the chapter each day.

Part 8

Fox’s major “openings” are experienced in the ministration of Moses.  Through these openings or revelations, he realizes he must move from the “fleshly” understanding he is accustomed to, to a more spiritual grasp of God’s work in his life.  It is the process of being weaned away from the “common belief of people” that characterizes the openings he has during this stage. The openings he experiences here lead him to rely less and less on those thought to be spiritually wise by worldly standards and more on the sense of what God seems to be saying within him.  He is beginning to see what the new covenant is all about--that “believers. . . needed no man to teach them, but as the anointing teacheth them. . .” (Fox’s Journal 7).

To me it is very interesting to compare Fox’s thinking here to what Augustine tried to get across in his Treatise on the Profit of Believing. If what you are “believing” is central – the existence and teaching and mission of Jesus, for example – then you must rely to some extent on the tradition and teaching of the Church that was started by the people who knew him, heard him, recorded what was taught about him, etc. Belief - trust - starts here.  Fox is saying that what is most essential about the faith was an inward connection with God, or a belief and trust in that inward - gut-like - connection. I go both ways on this one. I do think there is an epistemology of faith; we have to trust the messenger, but just repeating the message over and over is not enough; one must have the spiritual “light” God has implanted in all of us “open” the teaching and release its power in our lives.

 The culmination of this weaning process comes in his famous opening concerning Christ’s inward presence, which I quoted in connection with my discussion of the theology of early Friends’ vision . . . This is, of course, always the quote Friends use to describe what it is that Friends believe, that Jesus Christ dwells in the human heart and it is He who teaches and speaks to the condition of every person.  But in Fox’s account, what this opening reveals is simply the identity of the light that has been guiding him all along.  He is still only somewhere in the middle of the ministration of Moses when he has this opening and it will be years before he emerges from the desert in which his soul is journeying.  He has not yet even begun his passage through the law.

Daily Old Testament: Ezra 9-10 and My Own Article on "Friends and Scripture" (Part 7)

Ezra 9 – Ezra, continuing his first person account, which was begun in chapter 8, says that officials approached him to tell him that the people of the land have not held themselves separate from the pagan people—the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzies, Jebusties, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. They “have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons” (9:2). Ezra says, “When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantel, and pulled hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled” (9:3). Others tremble with him.

        

At the evening sacrifice, he kneels down, throwing his arms up to pray: “O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens. From the days of our ancestors to this day we have been deep in guilt, and for our iniquities, we, our kings, and our priests have been handed over to the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plundering, and to utter shame, as is now the case. But now for a brief moment favor has been shown by the Lord or God, who has left us a remnant, and given us a stake in his holy place, in order that he may brighten our eyes and grant us a little sustenance in our slavery. For we are slaves; yet our God has not forsaken us in our slavery, but has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to give us new life to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judea and Jerusalem” (9:6-8).

In return they have forsaken the Lord’s commandments. The land is polluted with the abominations these pagan people have engaged in. “O Lord, God of Israel, you are just, but we have escaped as a remnant, as is now the case. Here we are before you in our guilt, though no one can face you because of this” (9:15). The Jerusalem Bible note says intermarriage was not forbidden in ancient Israel, but Deuteronomy forbids it to combat idolatry—having witnessed the problems brought on by such marriages as Ahab’s. The threat of pollution and dissolution was great after the return because most of the returnees were men.

Ezra 10 – The people are moved by Ezra’s sermon. Shecaniah, one of the men addresses Ezra: “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the people of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. So now let us make a covenant with our God to send away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel for my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let is be done according to the law” (10:2-3). They all rise and swear to do this.

Ezra spends the night in continuing fasting, “mourning the faithlessness of the exiles” (10:6).

They make a proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all that they should assemble on penalty of losing all their property and being banned from the community. All the people of Judah and Benjamin gather in the open square, “trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain” (10:9). Ezra gets up and asks them to make confession, to separate themselves from the “people of the land and from the foreign wives.” They all agree, but they make a plan to pursue it over a period of time. A committee goes through all the men who were found to have foreign wives. The ones who were priests or Levites are listed; the others are also listed through to the end of the chapter. All the wives are sent away with their children.

“Friends and Scripture”

Introduction: This article is one I wrote some years ago and it was eventually part of the book I wrote called Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism. My plan here is just to include a few paragraphs of the chapter each day.

Part 7

The “ministration of Moses” is what the soul enters into next.  It is the time of crying out to God, of being led out of the “world” (i.e. Egypt, the flesh, bondage, death) and into a wilderness where we learn to discern what must be left behind and what must be clung to.  In this ministration, we also come to see our transgressions through what Fox calls “the pure law of God,” a law which he believed was written on the heart because Christ had brought that new covenant into being. This law is not to be done away with but clung to and obeyed; the time of trial and judgment under it must be endured. 

In Fox’s story, the ministration of Moses begins when he heads out to look for some wiser, more knowledgeable Christian who can help him discover why he is caught in the dilemma of not being able to possess what he professes. As he enters this ministration he is brought into a greater sense of clarity concerning the things God loves and the things He condemns. 

The earliest stages of this ministration might well have been called the ministration of Abraham, for it is really an Abraham-like break from the past that he must first pass through to enter the wilderness God has in mind for him. Like Abraham, Fox is called away from his “ancestral home,” called to “[leave] all the religions and worships and teachers [of the world] behind. . .and follow . . .the Lord” (Fox’s Letters 411). Fox clearly sees what he is leaving behind as the traditional (mistaken) ways his ancestors have practiced Christianity. 

Propelled by distress but also by faith in God’s promises, Fox roams the countryside looking for someone to help him. There is a great sense of the darkness that threatens him everywhere within and without.  He thirsts for the reality of God’s presence, but he also struggles with the thirst he has for human comforts and human answers -- just as the people of God thirsted as they wandered forty years in the desert.  Like them he too still believes that some human power might save him, but human beings disappoint every time.  The entire essence of the ministration of Moses is to bring the seeker “off the world” and off of the world’s wisdom and strength to rely wholly upon the Lord, to learn the law God has inscribed on the heart and to learn what can stand in His presence and what must be left behind.

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Leviticus [Intro-3] and Justin Martyr's First Apology 29-31

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Introduction to Leviticus:

Leviticus stands at the center of the five books Torah; and it all takes place at Sinai, so while there is much modern people find difficult about the book, we must admit that its place in Judaism must be central.  Schocken editors see Leviticus as the “Book of Separations, the book in which are set forth distinctions between a whole range of aspects of ancient Israelite experience and practice: holy and profane; ritual purity and pollution; permitted and forbidden in sexuality and diet; Israelites and others. . .This near-obsession with drawing lines. . .may in some sense reflect the position of Israel in the ancient Near East as a small, beleaguered newcomer in a region of hoary empires,. . .[or] It may also be an echo of the larger Bronze Age and Iron Age process of change from the former, well-nigh universal worship of the Mother Goddess, to the later patriarchal societies with which the Western world still deals through its three monotheistic religions and their cultural outgrowths” (499). The overarching concept is that of “order vs. disorder” “life and death.”

There is disagreement about when the “priestly” redaction of the Torah was done—it is widely thought that it may have occurred during or shortly after the Babylonian Exile (6^th-5^th c. BC).  Genesis 1 is part of it and it begins by God’s ordering the universe, by separating the “light” from the “darkness” the heavenly waters from the earthly ones and then by bringing all the “things” of the creation into an overall order; and it ends with the “separation” of the seventh day as holy to God.

“In the priestly view, the world is to be an echo of the divine order that is portrayed in the Creation story” (501). In Leviticus, “the human body become symbolic of the cosmos: its life/death boundary is marked and troublesome flows from it are carefully regulated.  The land of Israel becomes symbolic of the cosmos; too much evildoing pollutes it, to the point where it can do naught else but ‘vomit out’ its settlers (as it vomited out the previous one” (502).

I would simply add to this the observation I have found so interesting that when Quakers looked at the Old Testament story, they took its trajectory to be “archetypal” in many ways; Fox saw the Torah section as the “ministration of Moses.”  It was the purpose of Moses’ ministration to lead the faithful people through a moral wilderness where they learned to set aside the temptations of the world and to hear clearly “the voice of God” directing them in all things. Every believer goes through this ministration where we must learn to separate—to discern—to set aside the spirit in us that is comfortable with ‘death’ and ‘slavery,’ that would actually prefer it, and instead to go the way of the cross which separates us from the world and brings us into the life Christ offers us.

Also interesting are points Schocken makes about the intermixing of narrative and cultic practices (narratives issue forth into cultic practices and reinforce them) and the centrality of “priestly” practices in the Torah generally (the widening of priestly laws to the people says something about the growing concept of priesthood of all believers).  Later on the shift of learning and interpretation from the priestly class to the people will use this concept as its inspiration (504). 

He suggests this—I am saying it in a way that goes somewhat beyond what he strictly says. Priests in ancient cultures were set aside as a class to “mediate between the divine and human realms” (505). There were strict rules about whom they could marry, and what activities they were barred from.  There was “a conscious parallel between priests as part of a select circle and sacrificial animals—as well as the people of Israel.  That is, all three stood at the center of concentric circles dedicated to God; and as one moved out (toward Levite and commoner, animals permitted for eating and those forbidden, and neighbors and foreigners), one got further and further away from the divine” (506).

There are many theories about how animal sacrifice came to be integral with worship—a gift, a way of entering into communion with the divine, with one’s community and the divine, as a way of achieving atonement or expiation where “the gods receive life as a substitute for the sinner’s own” (507). In the Bible sacrifice for atonement is almost always for “unintentional sins, whereas deliberate wrongdoing may not be atoned for through this system” (508). In Leviticus, sacrifice is designed “primarily to maintain or repair the relationship between God and Israel,” to support the maintenance of the covenant relationship.

Leviticus 1 – There are several kinds of ritual sacrifices described in the first chapters.  The first is the “holocaust” or wholly burnt offering.  If an “animal” it must be “a male with no defects” (1:3, 1:10), from the herd or flock (no ass or camel, no wild animal).  Anyone can bring the offering, place his hand on its head and slaughter it; “the Lord will accept its death in your place to purify you, making you right with him” (1:4). The priests shall sprinkle its blood on the altar at the entrance to the Meeting tent.  If it is a bird it shall be a turtledove or young pigeon. Again the precise method is detailed.

Leviticus 2 – The next type of offering is the grain or cereal offering.  It shall be of fine flour with olive oil on it and frankincense.  Part of it is offered and part of is kept by the priest as an offering.  The offering may also be presented in baked (unleavened) form, fried on a griddle or deep-fried.  The only things not allowed in the cake are leaven [yeast] and honey. Yeast and honey may be added to an “offering of the first crops of your harvest, but these must never be offered on the altar as a pleasing aroma to the Lord” (2:12).

All grain offerings must contain salt – “Do not let the salt of the covenant of your God be lacking from your cereal offering” (2:13). The New Living Translation of this line is “Season all your grain offerings with salt to remind you of God’s eternal covenant.” Schocken notes points out that in Middle Eastern cultures even to the present, salt is used in sealing agreements—salt was considered indestructible.

Leviticus 3 – The peace (shalom) offering: the animal offerings may be male or female (but without blemish).  The animal is to be slaughtered at the entrance to the Tabernacle and its blood spattered on all sides of the altar. Only the fatty portion and inner organs are offered up to the Lord.  It proceeds otherwise in the same manner.  It does not specify here what happens to the rest; but the rest could be just eaten by anyone ‘unpolluted’.

“You must never eat any fat or blood. This is a permanent law for you, and it must be observed from generation to generation, wherever you live” (3:17).

Early Christian Writers

Justin Martyr (100-165 AD) – First Apology

29 – It is the ethic of Christians when they marry, to marry for the purpose of bringing up children, and if they don’t marry the “live continently.” “[P]romiscuous intercourse” is so outside the realm of Christian life that a member of the community petitioned the Roman Governor in Alexandria for permission to have a surgeon “make him a eunuch.” It was not lawful for surgeons to do this without such permission. And the Governor refused the petition. So the young man “remained single, and was satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did.”

And the writer mentions also Antinous, a Bithynian youth who was a sexual partner of Emperor Hadrian’s, so beloved that when he drowned in the Nile in 130 AD, he was “deified” by the emperor. Some speculate that his death was actually a sacrifice by him or Hadrian to the gods. It isn’t completely clear to me why this is brought into the conversation here but probably to emphasize the difference between what the Roman authorities “esteemed” and what Christians “esteem” as holy in sexual matter.

30 – So how would a Christian distinguish the miraculous deeds Jesus did from those who practice magic in one form or another. The writer says he will offer proof, and a good bit of the proof Justin Martyr will rely on is the prophesies of Christ that came from the Jewish prophets. That “things that have happened and are happening [are] just as they were predicted.”

Of the Hebrew Prophets

31 – Now we get to the part of the story, which was very personal to Justin Martyr – the story of the Jewish prophets whose prophecies seemed so fulfilled in the Jesus story.

Justin Martyr’s account of how the Jewish prophetic writings were preserved and assembled is hard to verify. I do not know if what he says here is accurate, but he believed that the writings were sent to Alexandria – to the library there – by Herod the Great at the request of one of the Ptolemies of Egypt.

These prophetic writings became part of the Septuagint and were disseminated all over the world. And in these books of the prophets “we found Jesus our Christ foretold as coming, born of a virgin, growing up to man’s estate, and healing every disease and every sickness, and raising the dead, and being hated, and unrecognized, and crucified, and dying, and rising again, and ascending into heaven, and being, and being called, the Son of God. We find it also predicted that certain persons should be sent by Him into every nation to publish these things, and that rather among the Gentiles [than among the Jews] men should believe on Him. And He was predicted before He appeared, first 5000 years before, and again 3000, then 2000, then 1000, and yet again 800; for in the succession of generations prophets after prophets arose.”