[Granville-Hough] 10 Feb 2009 - Nehemiah & Ezra

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

As I read today's 
headlines about the coming election in Israel, and the emergence of the 
right wing candidates who want to eliminate the citizens of Palestinian 
ancestry, I thought of my discussions three years ago while working on 
Bible stories.  Grandchildren Kendrick and Susannah were frequently 
helpful as they had attended Christian schools where the Bible was 
included in the subject matter.

     Thanks for Kendrick's offer on Nehemiah building the wall.  I was
not going to mention Nehemiah until I discovered you cannot tell the
story of Ezra without also telling the story of Nehemiah.  One of the
classical clerical errors of publishing is that a copyist, by mistake,
copied part of Ezra into Nehemiah.  No one has ever been able to quite
get them separated correctly and to establish an acceptable time line.
Apparently most of the books were written a hundred years after the
events, and the writers got confused on the various Darius and
Artaxerxes, kings of Persia.  They were not as knowledgeable as say,
Shakespeare, on which King Henry he was working on.  The whole effort of
the Jewish "Chronicler" was to be spin-master to prove the Samaritans 
had no claim on being the rightful Jews; that being pre-ordained to be 
the sons of Judah and Joseph, not the remnants of the ten lost tribes. 
Sounds much like the West Bank/Israel conflict today, just continuing 
for 2400 years.
	One of the terrible legacies of Nehemiah and Ezra was their 
introduction of ethnic cleansing.  Those returnees from Persia who had 
married local girls had to give up their wives and children and find new 
wives among the descendants of Judah and Joseph.  So we had bitterness 
from the  discarded families who looked Jewish, acted Jewish, and did in 
fact descend from Jacob.  How many times through history has this legacy 
been visited back on the Jewish people?  How much better would it have 
been if they had accepted all those who were willing to follow the 
instructions from Moses and worship the one Creator of all, whether in 
the temple or on the sacred mountain?
	Sadly, like slavery and polygamy, ethnic cleansing is "in the Bible," 
and some people will cling to the concept.