Trivia question: Who wrote the first political autobiography? He flourished more than 300 years before Caesar, may have been a eunuch, and lived a very eventful life. The man who wrote it was a high official in an empire, became a national leader, the restorer of a city, arguably penned the first constitution as well, and was a religious figure of historical significance.
His name was Nehemiah. He was the cupbearer to the king of Persia, an important post. He carried this distinction with him when he returned to Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century b.c. to reconstruct the city. Jerusalem, at that time, was a ruin, its walls breached, its population intermarrying and dispirited, its leadership corrupt. Nehemiah took it upon himself to restore the city to its former grandeur.
As with all such projects, there was considerable opposition. First, he had individual enemies, and the nations surrounding Judah were none too keen to see its restoration. Moreover, there was a considerable social divide between the nobles and the peasants and small landowners: “We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards and houses, that we might buy corn because of the famine . . . and we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants . . . and we have no power to redeem them for others have our lands and vineyards” (Nehemiah 5:3-5).
Through both reason and force of will, Nehemiah put through reforms that relieved the debts of many, fending off what might have been a ruinous social revolt. He also rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, a great public works project. Such an undertaking required skilled management, and Nehemiah adroitly managed the different families and factions to accomplish the task, which took a scant 52 days.
His mission overlapped with that of Ezra, another major figure in Jewish history. Ezra was more religious and Nehemiah more the statesman; relations between them seemed a bit strained, but remain a subject of speculation. The rabbis, given their religious bent, resented Nehemiah a bit for crafting his own book and story separate from Ezra. Nonetheless, Nehemiah himself enacted religious legislation and addressed one of Ezra’s key issues: intermarriage. Unlike his predecessor, Nehemiah did not ask for the separation of intermarried couples but interdicted further intermarriage. His prohibition was not entirely successful. The struggle reminds modern Jews how eternal are the issues, religious and political, that arise both internally and internationally.
Dov Zakheim is uniquely qualified to write about this. Few who write on the Bible have worked in government, and following in the very exclusive tradition of Abravanel, who served Ferdinand and Isabella prior to the Inquisition, Zakheim is a biblical commentator who has also been a public official. As an ordained rabbi with a deep Jewish education, Zakheim writes with a knowledge of the history of commentary and also political insight. Repeatedly we hear about events in modern Israel, or disputes between China and Taiwan, and of crises in American history and world history, that parallel events in the biblical book of Nehemiah.
Along the way are observations from a lifetime of watching politicians operate. Commenting on the incredulity we may feel seeing priests and Levites jockeying in the temple, Zakheim comments, “But this underestimates the pettiness of even senior officials.” (Zakheim was deputy undersecretary of defense in the mid-1980s and undersecretary of defense during 2001-04: Who was he was thinking of as he wrote those lines?)
Zakheim makes a plausible case that Nehemiah’s reforms amounted to “a new constitution, the first of its kind in Jewish history and perhaps the first of its kind anywhere.” There had been other codes of law, of course, but a constitution is “more than a code of law. It marks a commitment by a people to organize their governance according to agreed-upon principles.” Nehemiah used religious law but was not confined to it, proving a reformer as well as an urban revivalist.
In his conclusion, Zakheim summarizes Nehemiah’s role in this way: “Senior official, governor, statesman, legislator, religious enforcer, national leader, social reformer—Nehemiah was a man of many roles, and he excelled at them all.” Ezra is remembered in Jewish history as the man who restored the Torah to the nation; Nehemiah was the restorer of Israel’s national identity and cohesion. In that sense, both figures and their missions were complementary. Any observer of modern Israel—where questions of religion’s place in nationality are argued each day, and where a small nation is surrounded by enemies—must marvel at how little has changed in a world where so much has changed.
In addition to the roles listed by Zakheim, however, there is one more to add to Nehemiah’s résumé, perhaps the most important one: Nehemiah was the author of his own story. As Pindar wrote several hundred years later, “Unsung, the noblest deed will die.” Nehemiah both made and shaped history. Zakheim’s fluent, learned account credits Nehemiah with a more or less reliable account of the events for which he is the only surviving witness. Yet however this remarkable figure may have shaped or shaded events, it remains true that the nation he revived endured in its land for another 500 years before the Romans exiled them. Two thousand years later, when the walls of the city were refurbished, his legacy was commemorated by his descendants.
David J. Wolpe, rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, is the author, most recently, of Why Faith Matters.
