Ezra 7:7 Commentary and Bible Study

‘And there went up some of the children of Israel’ – the ‘some’ is in italics, but it's sad that it has to be there: only some of them – ‘and of the priests, and the Levites.’ This is a summary verse. When you get to chapter 8, the journey is described in more detail, and the exact numbers of the people who went, and who refused to go, or who would only go when they were given a personal invitation, and so on. And among them you read about the Levites, that they had got so far on the journey, and they had pitched their first camp. The journey from Babylon to Jerusalem would take them four months as the crow flies. It is only about 520 miles, but they would have to go via Carchemish, and go round a mountain and through a treacherous valley, and the total journey distance would be about a thousand miles. It would take four months. Don't forget, they were not an army; they were civilians with wives and children, little children. They had to camp every so often, and so it was a long trip, but they got to their first camp about 11 or 12 miles and they stop to check that everybody is with them and to count the numbers, and they make a discovery: no Levites. We’ll come to this in chapter 8. No Levites! How are they going to successfully continue with the ministry and all the functions that only Levites can do if none of them have come. So a party is sent back to Babylon to encourage Levites to come too, and they found Levites, not many, but a fair number, who were willing to go, but they were waiting to be asked. You could focus on chapter 8 just to analyse the different responses of people to the call of God. Some would go just on public proclamation, without any personal contact, a general public appeal. Others would wait until somebody approached them. Others would wait longer until they had special approach – ‘We really need you. We’ve got none of your type’, and then they would come. So you may say, there are the willing; there are the not-so-willing; and there are the too settled and the too comfortable, even among those who in the end will respond and make up to 8000, and then there were more who won't stir themselves at all. ‘And the singers, and the porters, and the Nethinims.’ Well, they were descended from Canaanites who were servants, and undertook the most menial tasks in the running of the temple – ‘unto Jerusalem, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the king.’