The Book Read Out Loud

Before the wall was ever built, another man had come up the same road from Babylon, carrying something heavier than timber. His name was Ezra, a priest and a scribe — a man who copied the law of God and studied it. And the thing about him that mattered was this: Ezra had set his heart to search out the law of the Lord, to do it, and to teach it. King Artaxerxes gave him a letter. Any Jew in the empire who wanted to go home with Ezra could go; silver and gold were to be carried to the house of God; and Ezra was to appoint judges who knew the law of his God, and teach it to anybody who did not. Ezra gathered the families at a river called Ahava and found that not one Levite had come, so he sent men to fetch some. Then he did something that cost him. He had told the king that the hand of their God was on everybody who looked for him — so he was ashamed to ask for soldiers to guard the road. He called a fast at the river instead, and they asked God for a safe journey. And God listened. They weighed the silver and the gold and the vessels into the hands of twelve priests. “You are holy to the Lord, and these things are holy. Stay awake and keep watch over them, until you weigh them out in the house of the Lord in Jerusalem.” They set out on the twelfth day of the first month, reached Jerusalem four months later with nothing taken on the road, and weighed it all out again, piece by piece.

And then something hard happened in Jerusalem. The leaders came to Ezra and told him that many of the men who had come back from the captivity — priests among them — had married women from the peoples living round about, and that the leaders had been the first to do it. Ezra tore his clothes. He pulled hair out of his head and his beard, and sat on the ground and said nothing until evening. Then he knelt and spread out his hands and prayed, and said he was too ashamed to lift his face, because their wrongs had risen higher than their heads. A great crowd gathered around him while he prayed, men and women and young people, and they were crying out loud. And a man named Shecaniah stood up and said, “We have broken faith with our God. But even now there is hope for Israel. Let us make an agreement before God to send away all these wives, and the children born to them. Get up. This rests on you, and we are with you. Be strong, and do it.” So it was done. They gathered in the square in front of the house of God in the winter rain, shivering, and took three months over it, town by town. The men who had married foreign wives sent them away, and the children with them. The names of the men were written down, family by family.

Years went by. Nehemiah came, and the wall went up in fifty-two days. And on the first day of the seventh month all the people gathered as one man into the wide square in front of the Water Gate, and asked Ezra to bring out the book of the law of Moses. They had built him a wooden platform to stand on, and thirteen men stood up there with him, six on his right and seven on his left. He opened the book where everybody could see it, and when he opened it, every single person in that square stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people lifted their hands and answered, “Amen. Amen.” And they bowed down with their faces to the ground. Then he read — from the first light of morning until the middle of the day, to the men and the women and everyone old enough to understand. And while he read, Levites went in among the crowd, group by group, saying what the words meant, so that the people understood what was being read. And the people cried. All of them, standing there in the square, crying, when they heard the words of the law. And Nehemiah the governor, and Ezra the priest, and the Levites who were explaining it said to them, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn, and do not weep. Go home, eat rich food and drink something sweet, and send some round to anybody who has nothing ready, because this day is holy. And do not be downcast, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” And the Levites went through the crowd quieting them: “Be quiet now. The day is holy. Do not be sad.” So they went off to eat and drink and send shares to other people, and to be very glad — because they had understood the words that had been read to them.

The next day the heads of the families came back to Ezra to look at the law more closely, and found something written in it: in the seventh month, at the feast, the children of Israel were to live in tents made of branches. “Go out to the hills and bring back branches — olive, and wild olive, and myrtle, and palm, and any leafy tree — and make booths, as it is written.” So the whole city went out and came back loaded with green branches, and built little leafy huts everywhere: on the flat roofs, in the courtyards, in the courts of the house of God, and in the open squares. They lived in them seven days. Nobody had done it that way since the days of Joshua son of Nun, and there was very great gladness; and every day the book was read out loud.

On the twenty-fourth day of that month they came back, fasting, in sackcloth and dust. They read out of the book, and then said out loud the wrong things they had done and the wrong things their fathers had done. And the Levites stood on the stairs and called out, “Stand up and bless the Lord your God, from age to age!” And then came a long prayer: the whole story, said back to God. “You are the Lord, you alone. You made heaven, and the heaven of heavens, and the earth and the seas and everything in them, and you give life to all of them. You chose Abram and brought him out of the land of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham. You saw how our fathers were treated in Egypt and heard them crying at the Red Sea, and you tore the sea open and they walked through on dry ground. You led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and gave them bread out of the sky and water out of a rock. “But they were proud and stiff-necked and would not listen, and forgot the wonders you did, and made themselves a calf out of melted gold. And you did not abandon them in the wilderness. Forty years you fed them; their clothes did not wear out and their feet were not worn raw. You gave them the land, and they ate and were filled and grew fat and lived softly in your great goodness. And then they turned away, and threw your law behind their backs, and killed your prophets. So you handed them over to their enemies; and when they cried out you heard them and sent people to save them — and as soon as they had rest they went back to doing evil, again and again. And still you did not make an end of them. “And now, our God — you have been right in everything that has come on us, and it is we who have sinned. Look at us. We are slaves today, standing in the land you gave our fathers, and other men are kings over it and do as they please with us.” Then they wrote it down as a promise, and the leaders and the priests and the Levites put their names and their seals on it: to keep the sabbath, not to marry into the peoples around them, and to bring the tenth of everything to the house of God.

Inside the new wall the city was still nearly empty. So the leaders lived in Jerusalem, and everybody else drew lots, one family in every ten, to leave their villages and come and live in the city. And then they dedicated the wall. They brought in the Levites and the singers from the villages round about, with cymbals and harps and lyres, and put two great companies of thanksgiving up on top of the wall itself. One went off to the right with the trumpets, and Ezra walked in front of them; the other went the opposite way, with Nehemiah behind it. They went right around the top of the city and met at the house of God, and stood there and sang. That day they were glad, because God had made them very glad; and the gladness of Jerusalem was heard a long way off.

And then Nehemiah came back. He had gone back to the king for a while. When he asked leave and returned to Jerusalem, he found things had slipped. Eliashib the priest, who kept the storerooms, had made friends with Tobiah — the same Tobiah who had said a fox could knock the wall down — and given him a great room inside the courts of the house of God, where the offerings and the tenths for the Levites were kept. Nehemiah threw every stick of Tobiah’s furniture out into the street, had the rooms scrubbed, and carried the offerings back in. The Levites had not been given their share, so the singers and the workmen had gone back to their own fields to eat. He argued with the officials about it. “Why has the house of God been abandoned?” He gathered them and put them back at their posts, and all Judah brought in the tenth of the wheat and the wine and the oil again, and he put honest men in charge of handing it out. Then the sabbath. He saw men treading winepresses on the sabbath day, and loading donkeys with grain and wine and grapes and figs, and traders bringing fish and every sort of goods into Jerusalem to sell. “What is this evil thing you are doing, treating the sabbath day as if it were any other day? Did your fathers not do the same? And did God not bring all this trouble on us and on this city?” So he had the gates shut before the sabbath and set his own servants at them, and nothing came in until it was over. The traders camped outside the wall once or twice, waiting. “Why are you sleeping in front of the wall? If you do it again, I will lay hands on you.” From that time they did not come on the sabbath. And the marriages had started again. He found Jews who had married women of Ashdod and Ammon and Moab, and half their children could not speak the language of Judah at all. He argued with those men and cursed them, and struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear not to give their daughters to those peoples or take their daughters for their sons. He reminded them of Solomon, whom God loved and made king over all Israel, and even he was turned aside by foreign wives. And the high priest’s own grandson had married Sanballat’s daughter, so Nehemiah drove him out of Jerusalem. Then he set the priests and the Levites in order again, each man at his own work, and the wood for the altar and the first of the harvest coming in at the right times. And he prayed: “Remember me, my God, for good.”