Nehemiah 13:5 Commentary and Bible Study

When Nehemiah had returned to Persia, or soon afterward, Eliashib ‘had prepared for him [Tobiah] a great chamber, where aforetime they laid the meat offerings.’ That is amazing! It was a very large area with a high ceiling which could be turned into a splendid headquarters and home for Tobiah, with other chambers no doubt attached to it. All this was made over to him. This is something that the Hebrew suggests (as does the English) had been done with great care. ‘He had prepared for him, a great chamber, where aforetime they laid the meat offerings, the frankincense, and the vessels, and the tythes’ for the Levites. How could they do that? We know there were nothing like the numbers of Levites in Jerusalem at this time that there were in the time of David, in fact at first almost none had returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Empire. So they had a far, far smaller number of them: one count of Levites given in this book is very small indeed. But the law stated that those attached to the temple had to be supported by the ordinary people while they had their tour of duty in Jerusalem, and that is mentioned. Furthermore, they had closed down the offerings, and the people were not bringing them any longer, and the priests and the Levites were not active, and the house of God was not operational, and because of this the store rooms were not needed, and so Eliashib had handed this over to Tobiah. What a high priest! As soon as the governor of Jerusalem returns to Persia, he does what he likes with the temple. This was the store area where holy things were stored: the provisions for the Levites, the singers, the porters, and the offerings. When Eliashib had requisitioned those rooms and altered them and prepared them to be a kind of uptown palace for Tobiah, the enemy of Nehemiah and the Jews, he must have displaced the function of the temple. There would be no provisions for any Levites who still came into town; there would be no offerings to be offered by the priests. This is an extraordinary thing. It is not simply that Eliashib has accommodated Tobiah. He has displaced the normal worship of the temple in order to accommodate him. It is a monstrous evil. How can the high priest do that? People elsewhere would never believe it. Surely the high priest of Israel, the functioning high priest would never bring the temple worship virtually to an end, and accommodate in the temple an enemy, and an Ammonite – somebody who by the law of Israel is expressly banned, prohibited from entry – and give him a place to live, when he desires to come to Jerusalem from his own place not so very far away!