"The joy of the Lord is your strength."--_Prov. 5:17._
GOOD Nehemiah built up the wall of Jerusalem; and his friend Ezra did
all he could to teach the Jews to keep the Law of God rightly. It was
Ezra who gathered together the five books of Moses, and collected the
writings of the prophets, and wrote out the history of the kings, and
put nearly all the Old Testament in order as we have it now.
And Ezra and Nehemiah took care to teach the people to keep the Sabbath
again, as the Fourth Commandment had taught them. Nehemiah used to have
the gates of the city shut up, that no stranger might bring any burthen
in, and that no one might come in to sell or buy on God's holy day.
And then they kept the Feast of the Tabernacles. It was a most
beautiful feast. All the people went and cut down great boughs of
myrtle, olive, pine, and citron, and willow trees, and built up arbors
with them, where they lived for seven whole days, to put them in mind
of how their fathers had lived when they came out of Egypt.
And on the great day of the feast, every Jew went up to the Temple
with a green bough in his arm, and stood in the court, and all the
priests came out on the steps with palm-branches, and with silver
trumpets. Then the trumpets were sounded, and everybody waved their
branches for joy. And the priests began a beautiful rejoicing psalm,
and at its most joyful verses the people waved their palms again.
[Illustration: A SOLEMN FAST AND REPENTANCE OF THE PEOPLE.--Neh. 9:1,2.]
At night all the court of the Temple was lighted up with great lamps,
to put the people in mind that the Lord is our light. How beautiful it
must have been, and how happy all the people were to have come back
from worshipping idols, and being punished in a strange land, to praise
their own true God once more, who blessed and made them happy.