God’s Word Forms God’s People

Good leaders serve the people so that they can understand the Word. In verse 9 we see the people’s response to their understanding the Word that has been read:

Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to all of them, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people were weeping as they heard the words of the law.

The understanding of the Word provokes weeping, which is the right response, suggesting repentance. Paradoxically, the right response of weeping opened the way to freedom to rejoice (v. 10):

Then he said to them, “Go and eat what is rich, drink what is sweet, and send portions to those who have nothing prepared, since today is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, because the joy of the Lord is your stronghold.” And the Levites quieted all the people, saying, “Be still, since today is holy. Do not grieve.”

The weeping will be postponed until after the Festival of Booths, to the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month (9:1). The people will deal with the conviction they feel for their sin in chapter 9. The appointed days of the Festival of Booths are upon them, so the people should rejoice at the Festival. Not to do so would be to add more transgression to the disobedience that has them weeping.

158They are told not to grieve, “because the joy of the Lord is your stronghold” (8:10). What does “the joy of the Lord” mean? This phrase refers to Yahweh’s joy, Yahweh’s good pleasure. What has Yahweh’s good pleasure been? It has been to move the heart of Cyrus to allow them to return to the land to rebuild the temple, and it has been to bring Ezra and Nehemiah back to the land to lead the rebuilding of people and wall. Yahweh’s good pleasure is for the people. Yahweh has taken delight in restoring them to the land, causing the rebuilding of the temple, and completing the project on the walls.

What is their stronghold? Their stronghold is God’s joy in saving, restoring, and protecting them. Yahweh’s joy is what protects them. Yahweh’s joy is their stronghold.

Who is more important than God? Who could be happier than God? Who could more effectively protect His people than God?

But what of their sin? The reading of the Word has caused them to feel the guilt of their sin, and they are weeping. Yes, they are sinful, but look at what Yahweh has done for them. How do they know that Yahweh is joyfully disposed toward them? They are in the land with temple and wall rebuilt.

The joy of the Lord is more potent and powerful than even the joy of Joe White, as good a man as Joe is. Can you imagine what it would feel like to know someone was taking almighty joy in you?

Would you believe me if I told you that God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ takes almighty joy in those who put their faith in Jesus?

Would you believe me if I told you that God is pleased with you? How do we know He’s pleased with us? He tells us in His Word.

What is probably the most famous verse in the whole Bible?

God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

God loves His people. God takes delight in His people. In Ephesians 1:18 Paul speaks of the riches of God’s glorious inheritance in the saints.

Nehemiah 8:12 shows that the people were made strong by the knowledge of God’s joy in them:

Then all the people began to eat and drink, send portions, and have a great celebration, because they had understood the words that were explained to them.

159They rejoice because they have understood Scripture.

Do you?

Have you considered what a gift it is to understand the Bible?

Praise God for the Bible. Hallelujah! Blessed be the One who has revealed Himself. To Him be thanks and praise, world without end.

Nehemiah 8:13-18

I have suggested above that Ezra had engaged in significant teaching and that he and Nehemiah had planned and prepared for the event we have just read about in verses 1-12. That they were teaching and planning does not mean that everyone was fully on board with the program or fully informed of all that the law of Moses required. Some, however, had to have been convinced for the preparations we have observed to have been made. Then the event of the reading of the Torah was probably designed to win the hearts of the rest of the people to the Lord and His Word.

We have seen that it was a success, and that success then led to the people needing to know more, so verse 13(my trans.) tells us,

On the second day, the heads of the fathers’ houses of all the people, the priests, the Levites came together to Ezra the scribe, to study the words of the Torah.

After the assembly on the first day, recounted in verses 1-12, on the second day9 the “heads of the fathers’ houses” gathered with the priests and Levites before Ezra for Bible study.10 In Ezra 7:10, Ezra set his heart for this, to study and do and teach the Torah to God’s people, and he was commissioned to teach God’s law in Ezra 7:25. In Leviticus 10:11 Aaron was instructed to teach the people God’s commands, establishing teaching as a priestly role (cf. 2 Kgs 17:27). In addition to the priests teaching, fathers are commanded to teach the Torah to their sons in 160Deuteronomy 6:7. So the “heads of the fathers’ houses” are going to be the fathers who come to study the Bible so that they can teach it to their families.

Ezra knows what time it is. He knows it’s the seventh month; accordingly, he teaches the people what the Torah requires in the seventh month:

They found written in the law how the Lord had commanded through Moses that the Israelites should dwell in booths during the festival of the seventh month. (Neh 8:14)

The passage to which Ezra took the fathers was the one the families needed to obey in the immediate future. The fathers then took the message to their families, as we see in verse 15:

So they proclaimed and spread this news throughout their towns and in Jerusalem, saying, “Go out to the hill country and bring back branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths, just as it is written.”

With the leaders of the families on board, verse 16 describes how the people obeyed God’s Word and prepared to celebrate the festival:

The people went out, brought back branches, and made booths for themselves on each of their rooftops, and courtyards, the court of the house of God, the square by the Water Gate, and the square by the Gate of Ephraim.

Israel’s Festivals commemorated what God had done for them in the past. As they celebrated Passover, Booths, and Weeks year after year (see Deut 16), they re-enacted what God had done for them at the exodus from Egypt, in the sojourn through the wilderness, and upon their entry into the land to enjoy its fruits. Re-enacting the past in this way would shape their view of the world, and this no doubt contributed to how the Old Testament authors constantly compare the way God will save His people in the future to the way He saved them in the past.

By celebrating the festivals every year, the narratives of what God had done for His people in the past became paradigmatic constructs, schematic models of the type of thing God does for His people. Those who had been preserved through the return from exile and the effort to rebuild the wall would naturally think of what God had done for them 161in the present in terms of what God had done for previous generations in the past.

Nehemiah 8:17 communicates what I am trying to describe:

The whole community that had returned from exile made booths and lived in them. They had not celebrated like this from the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day. And there was tremendous joy.

By noting that they had “returned from exile,” Nehemiah invites his audience to compare the journey made by the returnees to the journey celebrated at the Festival of Booths. By mentioning Joshua, Nehemiah invokes the way Israel conquered the land under him, and it is as though Ezra, a new Moses, has been joined by Nehemiah, a new Joshua, for a kind of new exodus and new conquest of the land.

I don’t think Nehemiah means to claim that this was the only Festival of Booths celebrated like this since the time of Joshua. I think, rather, that he’s being hyperbolic. His point is to link this celebration of the Festival with Joshua for the typological purpose described above. There are several hyperbolic statements like this one in the OT, none of which we should read in an overly literal fashion—of the Passover kept by Hezekiah in 2 Chronicles 30:26:

There was great rejoicing in Jerusalem, for nothing like this was known since the days of Solomon son of David, the king of Israel.

And of the Passover kept by Josiah in 2 Chronicles 35:18 (cf. 2 Kgs 23:22):

No Passover had been observed like it in Israel since the days of Samuel the prophet. None of the kings of Israel ever observed a Passover like the one that Josiah observed with the priests, the Levites, all Judah, the Israelites who were present in Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Pressed literally these statements could be in conflict with one another, but there is no conflict if the chronicler is speaking hyperbolically. The point that Nehemiah is making is the same point that the chronicler is making about the Passovers kept by Hezekiah and Josiah: these were times of magnificent fervor and the Lord’s blessing was evident.11

162The returnees worshiped according to the Lord’s instructions, and we see their devotion to Scripture in Nehemiah 8:18:

Ezra read out of the book of the law of God every day, from the first day to the last. The Israelites celebrated the festival for seven days, and on the eighth day there was an assembly, according to the ordinance.

God’s Word makes known God’s good pleasure, and God’s mighty acts on behalf of His people show them that He loves them. Those mighty acts are then celebrated in the memorials that God gives His people so that they remember what He has done for them and how He loves them.

Have you felt the joy of the Lord? Do you believe His Word? Do you see what He has done for you? Will you be one who receives the Lord’s Word, feels His joy, and has that as your stronghold?

Elul, the month in which the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day (Neh 6:15, Oct 2, 445 bc), was the sixth month, and with the wall complete the people now gather in Jerusalem “on the first day of the seventh month” (8:2, Oct 8, 445 bc). I owe the modern dates to Steinmann, Ezra and Nehemiah, 508.

Steinmann dates these events to October 22-28, 445 bc. Steinmann, Ezra and Nehemiah, 517.

Blenkinsopp sees a typological connection between Joshua and Ezra here. He writes, “The implied analogy between Joshua and Ezra as leader of a new occupation guaranteed by observance of the law newly promulgated fits the typological pattern which we have noted at several points in the narrative to date.” Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah, 290.

So also Blenkinsopp, “The statement that it had not been done in this manner since the time of Joshua must be taken programmatically rather than literally, as in the other instances where this kind of formula is used in C (2 Chr 30:26; 35:18). It implies correspondence between Ezra’s aliyah and the exodus from Egypt, and between the return to the homeland of the deportees and Joshua’s occupation of the land. The reader is therefore invited to think of Joshua’s assembly at Shechem in the course of which statutes and ordinances were made and written and the people rededicated itself to the service of YHVH (Josh. 24).” Ibid., 292; see also Throntveit, Ezra-Nehemiah, 99.