Too Holy?

Nehemiah 11-13

            When is holy too holy? Between the dissolution of mixed marriage in Ezra (reiterated briefly here) to stern Sabbath enforcement to the exclusion of all of foreign descent, we see post-exilic Israel trying, striving, to live in obedience to the laws of Moses. They had seen the consequences of disobedience, and they were not going to make the same mistake again! The problem is they repeated the error of Eve. In Genesis 3, she added to the Lord’s command: she said they were not only not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but also that they were not even to touch, something the Lord had never said.

            “Neither add nor subtract,” the Lord had said (Deuteronomy 4:2). Here’s when holy becomes too holy—when we start to demand things the Lord never demanded. The Lord had indeed excluded Ammonites and Moabites from the sacred assembly (13:2; Deuteronomy 23:3-6), but they extended the prohibition to all who were of foreign descent. No buying or selling on the Sabbath was indeed the law, and Nehemiah had every right to close the markets (and the gates) against the merchants of Tyre. But threatening to have non-Israelites arrested for waiting outside the gates—doesn’t that seem a bit extreme? Before the exile, Israel’s idolatry was of the usual sort—embracing the false gods of other peoples. After the exile, they still struggled with idolatrous hearts, but the idolatry was more subtle; they were making the law of Moses into a sort of idol all its own and they were making their own faithful observation of it an idol of sorts. Israel after the exile would have done well to remember the words of Psalm 51, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O Lord, you will not despise,” or the words of Hosea 6, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”