Wednesday, August 6th

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Nehemiah 7:4-25 (ESV)

The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt.
Then my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles and the officials and the people to be enrolled by genealogy. And I found the book of the genealogy of those who came up at the first, and I found written in it:
These were the people of the province who came up out of the captivity of those exiles whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried into exile. They returned to Jerusalem and Judah, each to his town. They came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Raamiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvai, Nehum, Baanah.

The number of the men of the people of Israel: the sons of Parosh, 2,172. The sons of Shephatiah, 372. The sons of Arah, 652. The sons of Pahath-moab, namely the sons of Jeshua and Joab, 2,818. The sons of Elam, 1,254. The sons of Zattu, 845. The sons of Zaccai, 760. The sons of Binnui, 648. The sons of Bebai, 628. The sons of Azgad, 2,322. The sons of Adonikam, 667. The sons of Bigvai, 2,067. The sons of Adin, 655. The sons of Ater, namely of Hezekiah, 98. The sons of Hashum, 328. The sons of Bezai, 324. The sons of Hariph, 112. The sons of Gibeon, 95.

If you’re like me when you see lists of ancient names like this in the Bible you tend to “skim” just a bit! After all, the names are strange to us, hard to read, and harder to pronounce! Yet, there are a number of places in scripture where God gives us long lists of names like this. Sometimes the lists of names are genealogies; sometimes they are lists of people who were involved in a certain event; and sometimes, as in this case, they are a census of sorts. In fact, scholars tell us there are over 2,500 personal names in God’s word!

So why is this long list of tongue twisting names along with precise census numbers included in the story of Nehemiah? Why does God want us to read these names some 4000 years after the event? Wouldn’t the story be easier to read and just as significant without this list of names.

The answer is, of course, yes, it would be easier to read; but no, it not be as significant without this list of names. And here’s why!

Think of this part of chapter 7 as a kind of ancient Facebook page. Now, I know Facebook is a Pandora’s Box of the useless and trivial piled on top of photos of what your friends ate for supper last night, but hear me out. At some kind of fundamental level Facebook exists because people matter. We build our profiles, post our comments and share our photos because we believe we matter to someone and because we want to stay connected in some way to the people who matter to us.

I think that’s why the Bible includes so many names, and that’s why Nehemiah went through the painstaking process of taking a census of the people living in Jerusalem. He did it because people matter.

At FBCG we believe that people matter to God; not just people who look like us, dress like us or talk like us; but all people! Our “Serve the World” initiative includes local ministry partners like Emmanuel House that enables working families, many of them refugees from war-torn regions of the globe, to escape the cycle of poverty and purchase their own homes. We have global partners like “Stephen’s House” in Ukraine that will one day provide a compassionate ministry to young men with special needs, young men that are largely forgotten and cast away by their own society. Our “Growing to Serve” ministry expansion project includes new space dedicated to “Masterpiece Ministries”; a ministry for special needs kids and their families. We do these things simply because the Bible tells us that people matter to God.

So go ahead and try to read that list of names again! And when you come to names like Zattu, and Zaccai, and Binnui, ask God to help you pay attention to the people all around you who need to know that God knows their names!


Pastor Brian Coffey