Nehemiah 7

So, I began reading this chapter of Nehemiah, and it didn’t take very long for a wave of deja vu to wash over me. Haven’t I heard this somewhere before? I thought. Sure enough. Fifteen days ago, when we studied Ezra chapter 2. The information contained in both chapters is nearly verbatim.

Of course, this isn’t the only place in the Bible where there are parallel stories, facts, and information. But with two chapters in such close proximity to each other, I had to wonder, why is all of this stuff in here twice? Why would the Spirit inspire both of these authors to write down nearly the same thing?

I suppose a great deal of the answer to that question lies in how you view the topic of inspiration. Some people believe that inspiration works like dictation; sort of like the Spirit has a list of things that need to be written down, and He doles the information out to different people by whispering in the ear. But I don’t think inspiration works quite that way. I think God inspires people, not material.

Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries. While Nehemiah was overseeing the reconstruction of the Jerusalem wall, Ezra was concerned with bringing the spiritual law back to Israel. They both lived and worked in the same time period. But it’s not known whether they compared notes when they wrote their memoirs. They probably didn’t. And they both ended up using some of the same significant facts and figures in their stories. I guess some people could look at that and complain that God is wasting space in the Bible. After all, if a chronicled list of all the exiles who returned from Babylon is in the Bible once, does it really need to be there twice? For what purpose?

Well, I believe that one of the reasons it’s "in there" is because God values corroboration. It is precisely because He doesn’t work on the "dictation" method of inspiration that we find these sorts of duplicate passages in Scripture. They were written by separate people with separate perspectives; thus, they act as corroborating witnesses.

Ironically, it sometimes works the opposite way in Scripture: Authors who relate the same story in different passages, but end up with different details. For instance, none of the four Gospel writers agree about how many people went to Jesus’s tomb on Easter Sunday morning. That’s an example of how small details get changed over the course of time and with differing perspectives, yet the witness about the larger point of the story is consistent.

God likes corroboration. He never asks us to "take His word for it." And often, He doesn’t even ask us to take the word of only one other person for it. In Scripture, God provides a wealth of evidence from a variety of sources to make His case and help us make an informed decision. He will never ask us to make a choice without providing the evidence!