Red Ink

Red ink.  The bane of literary students, or any student for that matter.  You know what it means: misstake, eRr0r, wrong answer, ruuunnnn-on sentence (that was one of my specialties, still is, for all that.)  My husband is a teacher, and with some of his exams he allows what I call a do-over (he calls it a “revision”, which sounds much more professorial.) The red ink, or whatever he uses, shows the mistakes which, as disappointing and uncomfortable as it may be at the time, is actually a good thing.  The student then gets another chance.

This is what happened with the people in Nehemiah’s day.  Having returned from their seventy-year exile to their home in Jerusalem, they were now being instructed from God’s book of the Law, some of them undoubtedly for the first time.  Their collective reaction is quite compelling: