“On that day the Book of Moses was read aloud in the hearing of the people and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into the assembly of God, because they had not met the Israelites with food and water but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing.) When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent.” (Neh 13:1-3).
Exclusion is not so pleasant but neither is disruption or chaos. In this set of verses we have two groups excluded.
The first group excluded are the Ammonites and Moabites. The Scripture tells us clearly why they are not admitted into the assembly of God and that is because of a righteous judgment of God. When the Israelites passed through the lands having left Egypt and on their way to Canaan, they came through peaceably.
The Ammonites and Moabites lived in the Jordan River area, and when the Israelites came through, they did two evil things. There was the sin of ommission, withholding food and water from them, and the sin of commission, hiring a prophet to curse them (it actually got worse when that didn’t work),
The first sin was not meeting the Israelites with food and water. In our contemporary “rights” culture, we wouldn’t understand this. Except that in this area and still to this day, one of the highest values was and is hospitality and generosity. You take care of the ones passing through the land. Always. To not do so was one of the most offensive things an individual, a family or a nation could do.
So when the Israelites came through, the Ammonites and Moabites denied them food and water in their hour of need. This was one of the greatest insults and a grave evil of the people.
Not only did they not offer hospitality, but they hired Balaam to curse them. He tried to curse them but every time he tried, God turned the cursing into a blessing. Much to the frustration of the Ammonites and Moabites.
For these two reasons, God brought judgment upon them. They were never to be admitted into the assembly of God at the temple for their actions.
It’s important to note that Tobiah in the book of Nehemiah was an Ammonite. This is the person the leading priest Eliashib allowed not just in the assembly, but allowed to live inside the temple.
Now to the second group excluded. This was “all who were of foreign descent.”
All foreigners were now out. This might seem hard to understand but it was for a season and time. It wasn’t a command of God for all time like the Moabites and Ammonites.
The reason was because it was a time of rebuilding and restoring. Much was going on and the enemies of God, the foreigners, were doing everything they could to infiltrate and destroy Israel from within. They were also undermining Nehemiah’s leadership every step of the way. So for now Nehemiah said, “out.” None. They needed to first get their own house in order, be strong themselves, and make good decisions first.
We will see later on in Isaiah that all foreigners would be welcomes. In fact, they were prophesied that they would come to Israel. Just not in this season at this time.
Sometimes when we come back to God and there are people in our midst pulling the other way, we have to make hard decisions. For the people of the time, this was one of them.
