nobles

Nehemiah 7:4-5: “Now the city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it, and the houses had not yet been rebuilt. So my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles, the officials and the common people for registration by families.”

When the Israelites finally entered the Promised Land, each tribe and family got an allotment of property defined by God himself. God told Joshua where the boundaries should be. At that time there was no king. Joshua led the people with the aid of the judges, the ones selected to help the people upon the advice of Jethro. There was the Levitical priesthood. Other than that, the family and clan structure was the government.

How far things had drifted by Nehemiah’s day! The word that caught me in the above passage, part of the ongoing narrative of the rebuilding of Jerusalem, was “noble.” When did the Jews get nobles? Isn’t the very idea of a privileged elite class at odds with God’s vision for his people?

I suppose it may have gotten started when Israel demanded a king. A king will have relatives who will seem more blue-blooded because of that relationship. And a king will want to bestow favors on those who support him, and titles and lands are the most common of those favors.

It probably didn’t help when the conquering Assyrians and Babylonians came in. Their governments likely were full of nobles, and their method of governing conquered territories probably included setting up a local nobility that owed their prominence to the new king.

However it happened, by the time of Nehemiah there were at least three classes in Jewish society: the nobility, the government officials, and the common folk. The fact that Nehemiah had to register them all by families suggests that national identity by tribe and family had degraded over time.

It doesn’t seem like this class society was helping the Jews. In fact, earlier in the book of Nehemiah he addresses the social injustices of the nobles and officials taking advantage of the commoners.

I don’t like the word “common” to describe people, and I think God might not either. How can anyone made in his image be considered common? It’s a word we use to say there’s nothing important or special about someone, but aren’t we to consider everyone as important to God and special in his eyes?

I’m going to pay attention to those times when I want to think someone else is inferior to me. The ones we call rednecks and Walmart people and trailer trash – they aren’t common either, but I tend to look down my nose at them. That’s thinking like a noble, and God’s Plan A didn’t include nobles.