Nehemiah Chapter 7
Please read: Nehemiah 7 –
Now that the wall was finished Nehemiah turned his attention to the people that lived there. His purpose in building the wall was complete and he now wanted to see what he could do to help the people who had come back to the promised land. We read that there were homes that had been destroyed in and around Jerusalem and had not yet been rebuilt. Nehemiah said that God put it on his heart to take a census. The ancestry of the 12 tribes had always been important and Nehemiah wanted to do what he could to help the people restore their family heritage.
Nehemiah called the people together to take a census, but he started with reading the census recorded by Ezra. What we find in this chapter is the census of those who first came back to Judah with Ezra. He was in a sense taking a roll call of who was there from each of the families recorded previously by Ezra.
Let's Reflect
1. Nehemiah no longer felt it necessary to act as governor now that the walls of Jerusalem were finished. He instead put his brother in charge, the man who had first informed him of the disarray of the wall. What was his brother’s name?
2. According to verse 2 what did Nehemiah say about his brother that gave him authority to be the governor versus some other man?
3. What does vers 5 tell us about the genealogical record that Ezra had written?
4. If you go back and read the genealogical record written down by Ezra in the second chapter, you will find that there are some small variations in the numbers of the various recorded families. Some Bible scholars believe this was simple copying errors since in the Hebrew a slight little mark (like an accent mark) above a letter (or number) would make it become a totally different number. Others believe that there had been updates made to the family records in the book. What is important is that we know that these slight differences are not things that cause doctrinal errors. Both passages, the account that Ezra recorded and the account that Nehemiah read and possibly copied, state the same grand total. What was that total? See verse 66 and Ezra 2:64
5. Both passages also give attention to the detail of some men who thought they should be recorded as with the family of priests, but they were not. Why?
6. Nehemiah also read the recording of the animals they had brought with them, and he also read the recording of what other items?
