Sunday Sermonette: Render unto Artaxerxes

The main point of Chapter 6 is one that has been emphasized repeatedly in Ezrah/Nehemiah. The Jews have no ambition to restore their independence. Nehemiah is avowedly a servant of Artaxerxes, and he treats the claim by hostile neighbors that he ' s planning to rebel and declare a new Jewish kingdom as libelous. So, the idea of a Jewish state was abandoned, in fact forcibly rejected, long before the creation of rabbinical Judaism and the Roman diaspora. I will just make one more observation, that a Persian diaspora continued even after the restoration of the Temple. We ' ll encounter this in the next, very curious, Book of Esther.6 When word came to Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies that I had rebuilt the wall and not a gap was left in it —though up to that time I had not set the doors in the gates—2 Sanballat and Geshem sent me this message: “Come, let us meet together in one of the villages[a] on the plain of Ono. ”But they were scheming to harm me;3 so I sent messengers to them with this reply: “I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?”4 Four times they sent me the same message, and each time I gave them the same answer.5 Then, the fifth time, Sanballat sent his aide to me with the same message, and in his hand was an unsealed letter6 in which was written:“It is reported among the nations—and Geshem[b] says it is true ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs