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“Giving Sense and Understanding: Ezra’s Reading of the Law”
Nehemiah 8:1–3, 5–6, 8–10
Luke 4:14–21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your eyes, O God: our strength and our redeemer.
Greetings, everyone! It is an honour to be here at the invitation of Rev. Scott here at Northwood United Church.
Today’s Scriptures are about reading. Reading, believe-it-or-not, used to be a public act! We think of reading generally to be a private thing that happens in our mind when we sit and read a book silently to ourselves using our eyes. “Silent reading” they called in my grade school classes. And yet, in an era where many were illiterate, and writing materials were scarce, people often went to hear texts read to them. Even the word “lecture”, which many of us would associate as going to listen to an expert on a topic speak to us, actually means to go listen to someone give a reading. Clearly, this is a word that has changed its meaning in a world where even the most vapid and pointless works are available to read in paper or digital formats.
As we see in today’s texts, public readings are given in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Today’s Old Testament text is Nehemiah chapter 8, in which Ezra reads the scroll of the law to the reassembled Jewish people, returned from the exile in Babylon. Ezra and Nehemiah are a funny couple of books buried in the middle of the Bible, among the books generally considered literary or “Holy Writings.” These literary works of the Bible include the Book of Psalms, the Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Ruth and Esther. And yet Ezra and Nehemiah are also lodged here: they tell the story of the Hebrew people, now called “Jews” because the survivors were mostly of the Tribe of Judah, returning to their land after Cyrus the Great had conquered Babylon and enacted a kind of early religious tolerance. In some ways, it seems like the narrative of the Hebrew Bible ends at Second Chronicles, when Cyrus makes the edict allowing the Jews to return home.
And yet, as we know, it is one thing to say one is going to do something, and another thing entirely to do it. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah detail the laborious process by which the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem and laboured to rebuild it. There is even a part in the story where the local Persian administrators, called “Satraps”, didn’t get the memo that the Jews were allowed to rebuild, so the Jewish people had to send people to go all the way back to Persia and find the decree from Cyrus, who at this point had died and had been succeeded. And you thought getting paperwork for your construction projects was difficult!
Ezra is a scribe, possibly the first individual in the Bible referred to as a “Rabbi,” and his literacy and knowledge of the Law allows him to reconstitute the Jewish people under the religious law of Moses. Nehemiah is the political leader of the Jewish people returned from exile. The book of Ezra tells the first part of the story of return from exile, and Nehemiah tells the second part. And it is in this second part, the Book of Nehemiah, where Ezra gathers the assembled people, and reads them the Law. This act had not been done since before the exile to Babylon, and it was a very emotional moment for the returned people.
As a new Christian at the age of 21, I was bothered by the fact that Churches often seemed to only read a select few passaged from the Bible every Sunday and endeavoured to really
understand the Bible for myself. Somehow, amidst reading all those obscure books in the middle of our Christian Bibles, especially the 12 minor prophets, figures such as Nahum and Zephaniah, as well as Ezra and Nehemiah. I also read through all of Ezekiel: talk about a book no one reads! And what has stuck with me through all these years in the event narrated in today’s passage. It says that Ezra read out the law in the presence of the assembled people, and made it understandable to them. What did it mean to make the text of the Law understandable to the people? While the text doesn’t tell us, I can certainly speculate. I would make the argument that when Ezra read the law to the assembled people, he translated it into Aramaic and also gave interpretations of the text. On the one hand, the people of Israel had spoken Hebrew prior to the exile to Babylon, but after at least 70 years in exile, the newer generations had grown up speaking Aramaic, which was the language of Babylon. This is why Aramaic became the language spoken by the Jewish people all the way through the time of Jesus and into the second exile around 150 AD. Also, given that the Law had not been read aloud in over a generation, Ezra most likely gave his own interpretations on parts of the Law that were difficult to understand for a people in an entirely different context. This interpretive method is probably the beginning of the Rabbinic tradition of interpreting the Law of Moses, and this tradition would go through the Pharisees and their successors the Rabbis, which is why the Jewish religion as we know it is called “Rabbinic Judaism.”
Since we’re just getting to know each other for the first time, I should tell you that I have a PhD in Jewish Philosophy, and I worked as the personal assist to thesis adviser, Rabbi David Novak, for 11 years. I still help him with things even after his retirement at the end of 2022. I also study with his Rabbinic gang on Tuesday nights, via Zoom since the Pandemic. So I asked Rabbi Novak about this passage (as I ask him about many passages), and he agreed that it was most likely that Ezra not only translated the text into Aramaic, but gave his own interpretations as well. I am just imagining what it would have been like to be there: listening to him not only read out the entire law, but also reading it in a second language, plus giving his own interpretation. How long would that have taken? I and many other people these days have attention span issues, and I wonder what it would be like to experience this.
Public readings are a theme this week, as our Gospel passage from Luke also features Jesus reading the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah to the assembly of his Synagogue in Galilee. Synagogue means a school, in Yiddish they are called shul, and the Greek literally means “learn together” (Sun + Agoge). I always gotta make sure to clarify that a Synagogue is not the same as the Temple, as there was only one Temple, in Jerusalem, and it was destroyed in 70 AD. The Synagogues were under the control of the Pharisees, later the Rabbis, and the Temple was under the control of the priestly sect called the Sadducees. So Jesus enters his home Synagogue, and people had heard of the wonders of his teachings, miracles, and ministries, and he comes into the Synagogue and reads the scroll of Isaiah, declaring that the Good News, the Evangelion in Greek, the Gospel in Anglo-Saxon. While we believe this is the truth proclaimed by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, next week you will see that the audience had a different reaction. But that is a story for next week… To be continued.
To conclude, seeing that Ezra translated the original Hebrew of the Law into the language the people now spoke, Aramaic, and later there was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in 200 BC, we see that the Bible can be translated and understood in all languages. In this Sunday of the week of Christianity Unity, we pray for the unity not only of denominations, but the right relations between all peoples. The Bible is not an English book: the Bible is available to all
people in all languages. As an intercultural Church, the United Church of Canada seeks to share and live the Good News of Jesus Christ with all peoples each according to their understanding. Amen.