Written in Stone
Remember, please, the word which You commanded Your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples; Nehemiah 1:8 NASB
The word which You commanded – Nehemiah is a personal account of the effort to reconstruct fallen Jerusalem. It’s a vivid, compelling, intensive story of one man’s fervent desire to restore God’s glory in the chosen land. It begins with a prayer—a prayer apologizing for apostasy and pleading for remembrance. What does Nehemiah ask God to remember? His faithfulness to the covenant people. And how does Nehemiah know about this promise? Nehemiah cites God’s word to Moses.
This might seem perfectly clear, and without much additional consideration, we move past this reference to Moses and pursue the rest of the story. But perhaps we should pause here and ask ourselves, “How did Nehemiah, an exile living in Susa in the Babylonian Empire, know what God told Moses?” Nehemiah wrote this story in the last quarter of the fifth century B.C.E. after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E. The Babylonian Captivity destroyed the Israelite civilization. Nehemiah, and those like him, were removed from Israel and scattered across the Babylonian Empire. We would imagine that this forced migration meant leaving behind all the vestiges of Israelite culture. But now we discover something quite important and equally improbable. Israel took its sacred texts with them. Apparently Babylonians were not concerned about religious material. Moses ends up in Susa.
Why does this matter? It matters because it tells us that whatever the form of the sacred texts that left Israel with the captives, those texts were available in Babylon. Israel might have been expelled from the land, but they did not lose the connection with God in the process. The scroll found in the wall in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah was carried to Babylon in some form, and it connected God’s people with God’s purposes even when they were no longer in God’s land. This is crucial for two reasons. First, it explains why Nehemiah was distressed about the state of Jerusalem. Nehemiah might have been in Babylon but his heart was still in Jerusalem, and the connection through Moses to the Promised Land motivated him to return. Secondly, this verse tells us that the Pentateuch was considered the authoritative document of Israel, even in captivity, and its promises would come to pass no matter what because the God of Israel was the God of the whole world, despite the claims of the Babylonian Empire. If Nehemiah could appeal to God via Moses, then Moses’ words still governed history.
In the last few centuries there has been considerable debate about the form and content of the Hebrew Bible. Scholarly examination still raises questions and concerns about textual transmission and the authenticity of many passages of the canonized Tanakh. But this much seems clear. Moses prevailed. Whatever the actual content of the text, whether redacted or not, Moses’ works were the paradigm of Jewish faith even in exile. And that faith kept the Jewish people together. Moses was the glue to God, and still is. Perhaps what separates Christianity from Judaism begins in the Pentateuch, not in the Gospels. Without a deep and abiding attachment to the priority of God’s words to Moses, the community identity changes completely.
Topical Index: canon, Tanakh, Moses, textual transmission, Nehemiah 1:8
