Lives of Scripture

Eliashib the high priest appears at the start of Nehemiah's wall-rebuilding account, rising with his fellow priests to rebuild the Sheep Gate and consecrate it, then continuing the wall as far as the Tower of the Hundred (Nehemiah 3:1). His name heads the list of builders, a priestly household leading by example in the physical work of restoring Jerusalem's defenses. But Nehemiah 13 records a serious lapse: while Nehemiah was away in Persia, Eliashib -- who was related by marriage to Tobiah the Ammonite, one of the chief opponents of the wall project (see Nehemiah 2:10, 19; 4:3; 6:1-19) -- had prepared a large storeroom for Tobiah inside the temple courts itself, in space that had been used to store the tithes and offerings for the Levites and singers (13:4-5). When Nehemiah returned and discovered this, he was greatly displeased, threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the room, ordered it purified, and had the storage vessels and offerings restored to their proper place (13:6-9). Eliashib's story is a sobering coda to the wall-building narrative: the same priestly leader who helped rebuild Jerusalem's physical defenses also, through family loyalty or compromise, opened the temple itself to the very opposition the wall had been built against -- a lapse Nehemiah's zealous reform had to correct.