The Wall Becomes a Place for Thanksgiving

The list reaches back to the first return, nearly a century before the wall. Zerubbabel is “son of Shealtiel”, as in Ezra 3:2 and Haggai 1:1, though 1 Chronicles 3:19 makes him the son of Pedaiah, Shealtiel’s brother; a levirate marriage is one proposed explanation. Seraiah heads the priests here as in 10:2.

The twenty two priestly houses listed in verses 1 to 7 are matched, house by house, by the heads of the next generation in verses 12 to 21. The two lists set side by side let a reader trace each family one step down the line. Amariah, Malluch and Hattush all sealed the covenant in 10:3–4.

Rehum here corresponds to Harim in verse 15, the same three consonants in a different order, and Meremoth to Meraioth. Copyists working from names they did not know shifted letters easily, which is why the two lists rarely agree in every spelling.

Of the twenty two houses listed here, fifteen appear among the priests who sealed the covenant in 10:2–8, Ginnetho among them as Ginnethon. Iddo is the house of the prophet Zechariah, as verse 16 will show.

Miamin is the Mijamin of 10:7 and Maadiah the Maaziah of 10:8, one letter apart. Bilgah held the fifteenth of David’s courses. In verse 17 the head of Miamin’s house is missing, a name that fell out in copying.

An “and” stands before Joiarib, and the names from here to verse 7 are absent from the covenant seals in chapter 10; some think they were added to the list later. Joiarib held the first course (1 Chronicles 24:7), and 1 Maccabees 2:1 traces Mattathias, father of Judas Maccabeus, to “the sons of Joarib”.

Jedaiah appears twice, here and in verse 6, and verses 19 and 21 give the two houses different heads, Uzzi and Nethaneel, so they were two families. The phrase “in the days of Jeshua” dates the list to the first high priest after the exile.

“Over the thanksgiving” is literally over the songs of thanks, the todot. A Levite called Judah stands among them, carrying the tribe’s name inside Levi. Jeshua, Binnui and Kadmiel are the Levite houses of 10:9.

“Over against them” describes two choirs facing each other, one answering the other. Ezra 3:11 describes the same way of singing at the laying of the temple’s foundation: “they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks”. Bakbukiah’s house carries on into Nehemiah’s own day (11:17).

The high priests from the return onward, father to son. Eliashib is the high priest who built the Sheep Gate in 3:1 and who, in 13:4–7, gives Tobiah a room in the temple. Joiada’s son will marry Sanballat’s daughter (13:28).

Jonathan is the Johanan of verses 22 and 23. An Aramaic letter from Elephantine dated 407 BC mentions “Johanan the high priest” in Jerusalem, and Josephus makes Jaddua the high priest who met Alexander the Great (Antiquities 11.326–339). The line runs well past Nehemiah’s own time.

Joiakim’s days fall between Jeshua and Eliashib, the generation after the first return. From here each line gives the house first and its head second: Meraiah headed the house of Seraiah, Hananiah the house of Jeremiah.

Meshullam heads the house of Ezra here, and another Meshullam heads Ginnethon in verse 16: two priests of one name in a single generation. Jehohanan, “the LORD has been gracious”, is the fuller form of John.

Melicu is the Malluch of verse 2, and Shebaniah the Shechaniah of verse 3. Joseph is a rare name in the Old Testament after Genesis; it turns up here and in Ezra 10:42.

Harim and Meraioth are the Rehum and Meremoth of verse 3. Adna and Helkai appear nowhere else. A list like this is kept for a practical reason, so that each house knows who answers for it.

The head of Iddo’s house is Zechariah, almost certainly the prophet, whom Zechariah 1:1 calls “the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo” and Ezra 5:1 simply “the son of Iddo”. The prophet who urged the temple’s rebuilding was also a priest who served in it.

“Of Miniamin” stands with no name after it: the head of this house has dropped out of the text. Miniamin is the Miamin of verse 5. Piltai, head of Moadiah, occurs only here.

Jehonathan and Jonathan (verse 14) are the same name in its long and short forms, used within four verses of each other. Shammua heads the house of Bilgah.

Mattenai means “gift of the LORD”, from the same root as Nethinims, the given ones. Joiarib and Jedaiah, the first two of David’s courses, stand together here as they do in 1 Chronicles 24:7.

Sallai is the Sallu of verse 7, and Kallai, his house’s head, almost rhymes with it. Eber, head of Amok, carries the name of the ancestor of Abraham from whom the word Hebrew may come (Genesis 10:21).

The second Jedaiah has Nethaneel at its head. The list gives heads for twenty one houses where verses 1 to 7 had twenty two: Hattush has no entry.

Four high priests are named for the Levites’ records, running to Jaddua. “Darius the Persian” is an unusual label, perhaps to distinguish him from “Darius the Median” of Daniel 5:31, and perhaps a sign that the note was written after Persian rule had ended.

“The book of the chronicles” is sefer divre hayyamim, the same Hebrew title the books of Chronicles carry, though here it names a temple record. Johanan is called “son of Eliashib” though verses 10 and 11 make him a grandson; son often means descendant. Ezra 10:6 mentions a chamber in the temple belonging to this Johanan.

David is called “the man of God”, a title usually given to prophets such as Moses and Elijah; 2 Chronicles 8:14 gives it to him in the same connection, the ordering of the Levites. “Jeshua the son of Kadmiel” may be a slip for “Jeshua, Binnui, Kadmiel”, the trio of verse 8.

Mattaniah and Bakbukiah were singers in verses 8 and 9, so the first three names may belong with the singers of verse 24 and only Meshullam, Talmon and Akkub with the gates. “Thresholds” is asuppim, storehouses, the “house of Asuppim” of 1 Chronicles 26:15 that the gatekeepers guarded.

Jozadak was the high priest carried into exile by Nebuchadnezzar (1 Chronicles 6:15). The verse sets Joiakim’s days beside those of Nehemiah and Ezra, giving the records three reference points, one priestly and two named leaders of the book.

“Dedication” is chanukkah, the word used of the altar’s dedication in Numbers 7:10 and later given to the Maccabean feast of lights. Cymbals, psalteries and harps are the three instruments of David’s arrangement for the Levites (1 Chronicles 15:16; 25:1).

“The plain country round about” is kikkar, the circle or district around the city. Netophah lay near Bethlehem, and 1 Chronicles 9:16 also places Levites in “the villages of the Netophathites”. The choir had to be gathered from the countryside before it could sing in the city.

The house of Gilgal may be Beth-gilgal near Jericho, where Joshua first camped in the land (Joshua 4:19). The singers had built their own villages round Jerusalem, living on land they farmed; that arrangement explains where they go in 13:10 when their portions fail.

The law has no rite for purifying a wall, but Leviticus 14:49–53 prescribes the cleansing of a house with cedar, hyssop and running water. Priests and Levites begin with themselves, then the people, then the stone, the reverse of the order in which the wall was built.

The top of the wall was broad enough to walk in procession. The companies are todot, literally “thanksgivings”, named for what they do. Turning right toward the Dung Gate takes the first company south along the route Nehemiah rode alone by night in 2:13, when the wall was rubble.

Half of the princes of Judah walk with each company, so neither procession outranks the other. Hoshaiah leads this half; his name means “the LORD has saved”.

An Ezra walks here in the middle of the first company, while Ezra the scribe goes in front of it in verse 36, so this may be a priest of the same name. Azariah and Meshullam are among the commonest names in the book.

Judah and Benjamin may be men with those names, or leaders representing the two tribes that made up the returned community. Shemaiah and Jeremiah are priestly names from verses 1 and 6.

The trumpets are the priests’ instruments, the silver trumpets that Numbers 10:10 orders blown “in the day of your gladness”. Zechariah’s pedigree runs six generations back to Asaph, David’s musician, which is unusual for a trumpeter; the ranks of singers and priests blur in the procession.

David is credited with making the Levites’ instruments in 1 Chronicles 23:5, and Amos 6:5 mocks the idle rich who invent instruments “like David”. Ezra the scribe goes in front of this company. Hanani may be Nehemiah’s brother of 1:2 and 7:2.

The Fountain Gate stood near the Pool of Siloam (3:15). From there the company climbs the stairs of the City of David, past the remains of David’s palace, to the Water Gate, where chapter 8’s reading took place. Its route runs past the square where the law was read.

The second company goes the other way, north, and Nehemiah walks at its rear. The Tower of the Furnaces (3:11) and the Broad Wall (3:8) mark the west side, stretches of wall that chapter 3 records being rebuilt.

The gates come in the reverse of the order in which chapter 3 records their building: there the Sheep Gate, the towers of Meah and Hananeel, the Fish Gate and the Old Gate came first; here the procession walks them backwards to the Sheep Gate. The Prison Gate is the gate of the guard, where they stop.

The Hebrew says the two thanksgivings stood in the house of God, the choirs again named for their song. Nehemiah writes himself in, “and I”, as he wrote himself onto the wall by night in chapter 2.

Seven priests with trumpets recall the seven priests with trumpets who walked round Jericho until its wall fell (Joshua 6:4). Whether the book intends the echo it does not say; the wall here is being blessed, not brought down.

Eight more priests and the singers with their overseer, Jezrahiah, whose name means “the LORD shines forth”. “Sang loud” is literally “made themselves heard”, and the next verse says how far the sound carried.

The root for joy occurs five times in this one verse in Hebrew. “Heard even afar off” recalls Ezra 3:13, where at the laying of the temple’s foundation the shouting and the weeping of the old men mingled and “the noise was heard afar off”. This time the book records no weeping.

“Rejoiced for the priests and for the Levites that waited” means that Judah was glad of its ministers on duty, and showed it in grain. “The portions of the law” are the shares fixed by the law, so the officials collect what is owed, not what is offered at whim.

“The ward of the purification” is the watch that kept the unclean out of the holy precincts. 2 Chronicles 8:14 says Solomon set the priests, Levites and porters in their courses “according to the order of David his father”, the precedent this verse invokes.

David and Asaph are paired like founder and director. 1 Chronicles 16:7 has David deliver a psalm of thanksgiving “into the hand of Asaph and his brethren” on the day the ark came to Jerusalem.

The days of Zerubbabel and of Nehemiah bracket the whole period of the return, the first governor and the latest. “Every day his portion” is the phrase Exodus 5:13 uses for the daily tally of bricks under Pharaoh; the measure of slavery has become the measure of provision.