Nehemiah 12 · a question people ask
How do you purify a wall?
The chapter doesn't say how. It says only, "The priests and the Levites purified themselves; and they purified the people, the gates, and the wall" (12:30). In Hebrew both are the verb taher (tap purified), which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as "be clean, pure": first in the form "purify oneself", then in the form "cleanse, purify". The same verb told how, before the Passover at the finished temple, "the priests and the Levites had purified themselves together" (Ezra 6:20), and Nehemiah uses it again when "they cleansed the rooms" (13:9). The chapter doesn't say what was done to the gates and the wall, or why, and these notes don't guess.
The verses
“The priests and the Levites purified themselves; and they purified the people, the gates, and the wall.”
“Because the priests and the Levites had purified themselves together, all of them were pure. They killed the Passover for all the children of the captivity, for their brothers the priests, and for themselves.”
“Then I commanded, and they cleansed the rooms. I brought into them the vessels of God’s house, with the meal offerings and the frankincense again.”