The temple servants lived on the hill of Ophel, and Ziha and Gishpa were in charge of them. – Nehemiah 11:21

Today's Scripture Reading (November 20, 2023): Nehemiah 11

When we were starting out, my wife and I would often drive to a nearby hill where the newest houses in the city in which we lived were being built. At the time, we lived in a basement suite in an older part of the city. But on these occasions, we would dream of the day we might emerge from a rented basement and buy one of the lovely houses built on the hill. We never did live on the hill; long before we were financially able to buy a house on the hill, we moved away from the city where the dream had originated. But I still remember the dream of living up on the hill.

The language here is a little strange. Ophel basically means hill or maybe a fortified hill. So essentially, the translation here says that "the Temple servants lived on the hill of Hill." But the passage basically indicates a raised ridge within the city of Jerusalem where the temple servants lived. Incidentally, a similar area in the city of Samaria was also called the Ophel.

Temple servants is also a key phrase in the passage. The temple servants, or temple slaves, indicate the Nethinim, Gentiles, people not born of Israelite descent but bound for service in the Temple. They became the servants of the Levites, the tribe responsible for the care of the Temple. At the time of the writing of Nehemiah, the Nethinim were fully integrated into the life of Israel. As such, they were part of Israel's covenant with God. However, they would undergo a steady decline in reputation after this time to the point where they would occupy one of the lowest rungs of Israelite society and were forbidden to intermarry with any of the descendants of the recognized tribes of Israel.

It was these Nethinim who occupied the hill in Jerusalem. Unlike the hill my wife and I went to look at, dreaming of the day when maybe we would be able to live there, the hill in Jerusalem was occupied by what were essentially foreign slaves. But their distinction is not that they were enslaved, but that they were dedicated for service in the Temple. They would perform the tasks in the Temple that their Levite Masters were either unable or too busy to do. And where the Levites would serve in the Temple on a rotating basis, the Nethinim would be the constant faces, performing the duties that had to be done to keep the Temple running. They were the people of the hill who served daily on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Nehemiah 12