These searched for their family records, but they could not find them and so were excluded from the priesthood as unclean. – Nehemiah 7:64

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 28, 2017): Nehemiah 7

I am a cousin of Prince William through his mother, Princess Diana. Well, at least we can keep the rumor going that that is true. The real truth is that we have to go back a little more than 20 generations, to sometime in the 16^th century, to make the connection between the future King of the United Kingdom and myself – all of the time working through genealogies that have been kept by families for generations. I am also related to Ulysses S. Grant, just not the Ulysses S. Grant that happened to be the 18^th President of the United States. Or, maybe it was the President. History, especially of the more personal variety, can become fairly murky. Making the direct connections is hard. Another of my relatives served as an advisor to King Edward II and was rumored to be of royal descent. How he was related is unknown and, at this point, unknowable.

But all of these are just rumors, muddied by time. They don’t really count for anything. There is no prestige to the rumors. They are interesting facts from a family point of view, but nothing more. And nothing that is for sure.

As the exiles returned to Judah at the end of the Babylonian exile, there were those who believed that they were descendants of the priests of Judah. They had heard the family rumors and stories told around the campfire of the times when their ancestors had ministered inside the Temple of Jerusalem. But the problem was that all of this was nothing more than a rumor. They had no proof that they descended from the line of priests. Nehemiah was desperate for more priests to work in the Temple, but not desperate enough to just take these stories as truth. So he examined the records that he could find and searched for the names of these individuals, but these names were not identified in the archives.

The fact that the names couldn’t be found did not mean that these men were not of the priestly line, just that that lineage could not be proven for certain. And as far as Nehemiah was concerned, the priests who would serve in the new Temple had to have an established relationship with the priests of Judah who served in Solomon’s Temple before it was destroyed. To minister in the Temple, God said that you had to be of a particular lineage. And there was no way that Nehemiah was going to cut corners and allow someone who was not of the line of the priests to minister in the Temple. Rumors were not enough, Nehemiah needed the facts.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Nehemiah 8