Nehemiah 13:29

Defiled the priesthood. Nehemiah considered such a marriage of a member of the high priest’s family a pollution of the priesthood, being opposed in principle, as it was, to the sacredness of the priestly office (see Lev. 21:7, 14).

The covenant of the priesthood. Not the covenant of the everlasting priesthood which God had granted to Phinehas (Num. 25:13), but the covenant God had concluded with the tribe of Levi and with Aaron and his descendants (Ex. 28:1). This covenant required the priests to be “holy unto their God” (Lev. 21:6, 8), who had chosen them to be ministers of His sanctuary and stewards of His grace.

With the expulsion of Sanballat’s son-in-law from Jerusalem may be connected the building of the schismatic temple of the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim. Josephus relates (Antiquities xi. 7. 2) that Manasseh, a brother of the high priest Jaddua, married Nikaso, a daughter of the satrap Sanballat, a Cuthite. When on that account the Jewish authorities excluded him from the priesthood, he established the temple and worship on Mt. Gerizim with the assistance of his father-in-law. Many other priests, presumably, made common cause with him. Josephus, however, places the story in the time of Alexander, about a century after Nehemiah. It is entirely possible that the story itself is true and that Josephus simply made a mistake in the time. We know that he places Sanballat 100 years too late (see p. 373). That Josephus calls the schismatic leader a brother of Jaddua, hence a grandson of Joiada, while the Bible calls him a son of Joiada, can easily be explained by assuming either that Josephus made a mistake, or that, as so often in the Bible, “one of the sons of Joiada” (v. 28) stands for “one of the grandsons of Joiada.”