The Revival Under Ezra and Nehemiah

The setting is a small, poor province. Cyrus's decree in 538 BC sent the first group home under Zerubbabel and Jeshua, and the second temple was finished in 516 BC (Ezra 6:15). It was not Solomon's temple, the walls were rubble, and the community was surrounded by peoples who did not want it there. Into that province, a generation apart, came two men.

Ezra arrived in 458 BC, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:7–8). He was a scribe skilled in the law of Moses, and the book explains him in one verse: Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments (Ezra 7:10). Seek, do, teach — in that order. (The traditional sequence, Ezra first and Nehemiah thirteen years later, is the one the books themselves present; a minority of scholars reverse it.)

His first crisis was not from outside. The princes came and told him the people had not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands and had intermarried with them, and the leaders were first in the offense (Ezra 9:1–2). Ezra tore his garment and his mantle, pulled hair from his head and beard, and sat down stunned until the evening sacrifice. Then he knelt, spread out his hands, and prayed a prayer with no defense in it: our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up to the heavens (9:6).

In the middle of that prayer he asked for something small: that God would give “a little reviving in our bondage” (Ezra 9:8). He was not asking for the empire to fall. He was asking for life inside the situation he was actually in.

While he prayed and wept and lay before the house of God, a very great congregation gathered — men, women, and children — and the people wept bitterly (Ezra 10:1). Shechaniah spoke first: we have trespassed, yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing. Within three days the men of Judah and Benjamin sat in the open square by the temple, trembling because of the matter and because of the heavy rain (10:9), and the cases were examined household by household through the winter (10:16–17). What followed — the sending away of foreign wives — is the hardest passage in the book. The text reports it without commentary, and readers have wrestled with it ever since; it is recorded here because the record records it.

Nehemiah came in 445 BC, the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (Nehemiah 2:1). He was the king's cupbearer, he wept and fasted and prayed when he heard the wall was broken down, and he was sent. The wall was finished in fifty-two days, on the twenty-fifth of Elul — and even the surrounding nations perceived that this work was done by our God (6:15–16).

Then came the morning everything turned on. On the first day of the seventh month, the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate and asked Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses (Nehemiah 8:1–2). Nobody summoned them. A wooden platform had been built for the purpose (8:4). Ezra read from early morning until midday, and the ears of all the people were attentive. When he opened the book, all the people stood up; he blessed the LORD, and they answered Amen, Amen, lifting their hands, and bowed with their faces to the ground (8:5–6).

Thirteen named Levites moved through the crowd while he read, and they gave the sense, and caused the people to understand the reading (Nehemiah 8:7–8). The hearing broke them, and the whole assembly wept. Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest, and the Levites stopped it: this day is holy to the LORD your God; do not mourn or weep. Go eat the fat and drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared — the joy of the LORD is your strength (8:9–10).

The next day the heads of families came back to study, and found it written that Israel should live in booths during the feast of the seventh month (Nehemiah 8:13–14; Leviticus 23:39–43). They built them on their roofs, in their courtyards, in the courts of God's house, and in the squares by the Water Gate and the Gate of Ephraim. Since the days of Joshua son of Nun, the text says, the people of Israel had not done so, and there was very great gladness (8:17). Booths had been kept after the first return (Ezra 3:4) — what was unmatched was the manner of it and the joy in it. Day by day Ezra read from the book, seven days, and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly.

Three weeks later, on the twenty-fourth day, they came back with fasting, sackcloth, and earth on their heads. They read the law a quarter of the day and confessed a quarter of the day (Nehemiah 9:1–3), and the Levites prayed a prayer that walks the whole story — creation, Abraham, the Exodus, the wilderness, the judges, the prophets, the exile — returning again and again to the same two admissions: You are a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful (9:17), and You are just in all that is brought upon us (9:33). Then they made a written covenant and sealed it with their names, and got specific about it: the sabbath, the third of a shekel for the service of the house, the wood offering, the firstfruits and tithes, ending with we will not forsake the house of our God (9:38; 10:32–39). The coda is honest — Nehemiah went back to the king, returned later, and found the tithes neglected, the sabbath being sold, and the intermarriage back (13:6–27). A covenant on paper still has to be kept on Monday.