Recently at my church we've concluded preaching through Nehemiah. My Sola Panellist colleague, Lionel, preached the last sermon from chapter 13. This details Nehemiah's disappointment at the failure of his reforms to be effectively ‘bedded in’. In chapter 9:38, the people of Israel had made a solemn ‘binding agreement’ expressing their repentance from sin. We find the details in chapter 10 where

• In verse 30, the Israelites promise not to intermarry with the surrounding peoples
• In verse 31, the Israelites promise to keep the Sabbath holy (i.e. no Sabbath trading)
• In verse 39, the Israelites promise not to neglect the house of our God (the Temple).

Chapter 13 details the Israelites' failure to do these exact three things, along with what we sense will be Nehemiah's forlorn attempts to get things back on track. I found the agreement in chapter 10 naively ambitious since the prayer of chapter 9 had just detailed the endless cycle of Israel's sin and disobedience, despite God's compassion and grace in forgiveness.

In passing, Lionel mentioned that when we are disappointed, sometimes, the Bible says, people ‘tear their hair out’. But to indicate Nehemiah's deep frustration at his people's unfaithfulness, Lionel pointed out that in chapter 13:25, Nehemiah was tearing out other people's hair!: “And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. And I made them take oath in the name of God, saying, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves.’” Wisely, in his sermon, Lionel said no more about this, and moved on to the major thrust of the passage.

But this verse made me wonder: pulling hair is what we condemn five-year-olds for! How do we react when we read something that, to our modern sensibilities, seems such an unacceptable method of church discipline?

To get conversation going after church, I joked with a couple of people, saying, “Would you advise pulling their hair out as a good pastoral method of dealing with people who disagree with me?” The modern codes of conduct many denominations have adopted for our ministries would rightly rule such behaviour out of order. Physical chastisement of others is completely unacceptable. (Except when directed by parents to their own children. And even then, we need to control our own anger and take great care to avoid physical injury.)

So how do we assess Nehemiah's actions? Here are my assorted thoughts. Firstly, the book is basically Nehemiah's own report of events—his diary notes of what went on under his stewardship as governor in Jerusalem. As such, it does not come with explicit commentary as to the rights and wrongs of his conduct.

Of course, chapter 1 indicates clearly God's sovereign hand in bringing him to that position at that time, and he is demonstrably a man of prayer and commitment to God's law. So I think we should read and evaluate the report of his actions sympathetically. But I am not convinced this means we can assume everything he did was automatically endorsed by God.

Secondly, we must not overlook the significance of his official civil role of governor. As such, he was invested with God's authority to punish the evildoer: “for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.” (Rom 13:4). We must not impose 21st-century liberal western standards of governance anachronistically upon a fifth-century BC middle-eastern situation.

Thirdly, we must remember that Nehemiah's account is necessarily a selection and summary of all that occurred. He may be omitting a longer account of how he came to decide such people deserved this strong rebuke. Was there some sort of judicial or other disciplinary process or did he just flare up in anger? He does not say.

Fourthly, once we reflect on the dangers of such intermarriage, we can better understand his depth of concern. Nehemiah immediately explained that historically even such a great king as Solomon was led into sin by intermarriage (13:26) and that these arrangements involve treachery to God (13:27).

The parallel and contemporary concern expressed in Ezra 9:1-2 shows even more clearly that the problem with marrying people from the other cultures is their detestable religious and moral practices. This prohibition goes all the way back to the law of Moses (e.g. Deut 18:9-12). These detestable practices included witchcraft, fortune-telling and consulting the dead. But above all, they practised child-sacrifice, burning their children in fires to manipulate and placate false gods like Molech. So the mixed marriage meant a temptation to compromise—such that even the physical welfare of children was at stake. We can see why Nehemiah may have been motivated to take such extreme action! Perhaps even a modern western liberal mindset could understand why he did what he did.

Obviously debating the rights or wrongs of Nehemiah 13:25 is not the main point of the chapter. But his actions sure got me thinking. Of course, you'll be glad to know that I won't be adding hair-pulling to my pastoral repertoire, and I'm not sure we must declare that Nehemiah was completely correct in all he did. But I hope I've provided a worked example of reading something sympathetically that stands out as odd and unacceptable in my own culture.

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