Wednesday Bible Study: Thank God it ' s over

We have finally come to the end of Nehemiah. Just a reminder, we ' re following the order of books in the protestant Old Testament, which is different from the Tanakh. That ' s important here because we have already read the Book of Ruth, which was written later than this and comes after it in the Tanakh, although it is set in the time of the Former Prophets, specifically in the time of Judges, before the founding of  the kingdom and construction of the Temple.The Book of Ruth is relevant here because it is all about the marriage of a Moabite woman and an Israelite man. This chapter, parallel to the last chapter of Ezra, is all about how that is utterly forbidden. So clearly there was a later school of thought that did not accept the prohibition of intermarriage. Note that the setting of Ruth, though it ' s long before these events, is well after the purported events that constitute the basis for the prohibition. However, the Torah and Prophets -- specifically Joshua -- are very confused about those events. The citation here in Nehemiah 1-3 is clearly from Deuteronomy 23, which it more or less quotes directly and which corresponds to the " Book of the Law " or " Book of Moses " here and in the Deuteronomistic History. However, the story as rendered in Deuteronomy actually corresponds to the story told in Joshua, which supposedly came later, which contradicts the story of Balaam in Numbers 23 and 24, in which he refused to curse the Israelites. Be all that as it may,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs