Nehemiah 12:22-26

4. Levites are listed from the time of Joiakim.

TEXT, Nehemiah 12:22-26

22

As for the Levites, the heads of fathers-' households were registered in the days of Eliashib, Joiada, and Johanan, and Jaddua; so were the priests in the reign of Darius the Persian.

23

The sons of Levi, the heads of fathers-' households, were registered in the Book of the Chronicles up to the days of Johanan the son of Eliashib.

24

And the heads of the Levites were Hashabiah, Sherebiah, and Jeshua the son of Kadmiel, with their brothers opposite them, to praise and give thanks, as prescribed by David the man of God, division corresponding to division.

25

Mattaniah, and Bakbukiah, Obadiah, Meshullam, Talmon, and Akkub were gatekeepers keeping watch at the storehouses of the gates.

26

These served in the days of Joiakim the son of Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, and in the days of Nehemiah the governor and of Ezra the priest and scribe.

COMMENT

According to Nehemiah 12:22, records were kept of the Levites from the time of the second high priest after the Return from Captivity until into the fourth century B.C. (cf. Nehemiah 12:10-11); Jaddua may have lived to the time of Alexander the Great. Similar records for the priests covered a like time span, according to many who identify Darius the Persian as Darius III, Codomannus, 336-331 B.C. Because of the late date, Dr. Ironside also calls this a later insertion: cf. comments on Nehemiah 12:10-11. The later hand is only verifying that the records were still being kept in his day.

Nehemiah 12:23 says these records were in the Book of the Chronicles: not the Bible book, but apparently a register kept in the Temple. Johanan may be another spelling for Jonathan, who was a (grand-) son of Eliashib.

Nehemiah 12:24 again describes antiphonal arrangement of choirs.

In Nehemiah 12:25, the gatekeepers would be on duty at the Temple storehouses, not the gates of the city.

Nehemiah 12:26 dates the above list of Levites to the time of Joiakim, a generation later than the previous list of Levites (Nehemiah 12:8-9), and contemporaneous with Nehemiah and Ezra.

WORD STUDIES

PURIFY (Nehemiah 12:27): the basic idea of the Hebrew word is brightness or splendor; i.e. it causes something to shine or be bright. It signifies to be or become clean or pure: to cleanse or purify. It can be done for three reasons. (1) Of physical purity: Ezekiel 39:12 describes the cleansing of the land from corpses. Numbers 8:6-7 speaks of washing and completely shaving the Levites to prepare them for God's service. (2) Of ceremonial purity: Ezekiel 43:26 speaks of cleansing the altar for the new Temple of which Ezekiel had a vision, A leper who had been healed would be purified in a ceremony administered by a priest: Leviticus 14:11. (3) Of moral purity: Malachi 3:3 uses the figure of purifying metal from dross as a parallel of a person's moral cleansing. Jeremiah 33:8 speaks of cleansing through God's forgiveness.

DEDICATION (Nehemiah 12:30: Hanukkah): Sometimes a study of word derivations leads one down some strange and unexpected paths. There are three words formed from the same base, all of which have one common meaning: to choke. Apparently from this come the ideas of being narrow or of closing. A collar is placed around the neck of an animal and it is strangled down so that it can be initiated into man's service and trained for usefulness: thus it becomes dedicated, or consecrated to certain purposes. Each of the italicized words is a translation of one of the forms of this word. Our English word, neck, is derived from this same base (note the N and K, also in Hanukkah). So a wall was collared for man's service.