Always there are public officials, it doesn’t matter where you go, who, during their tenure, amass far more wealth than you would think possible given their salaries. Who can say how they do it? Let me count the ways, but they do it.
These people all regard Shebna as their patron saint. They are his antitypes. Where the homes of God-fearing people will post some favorite scripture, like maybe the Lord’s prayer, their homes post Isaiah 22:15-18, the mission statement of their hero. Not the penalty part—where he is wadded up like a ball to be tossed into the wastebasket. That’s not an outcome they figure will happen. The mission statement part is where they focus:
“Go in to this steward, to Shebna, who is in charge of the house, and say, ‘What is your interest here, and who is there of interest to you here, that you hewed out a burial place here for yourself?’ He is hewing out his burial place in a high place; he is cutting out a resting-place for himself in a crag. ‘Look! Jehovah will hurl you down violently, O man, and seize you forcibly. He will certainly wrap you up tightly and hurl you like a ball into a wide land. There you will die, and there your glorious chariots will be, a disgrace to your master’s house.” (22:15-18)
Shebna is the only individual specifically rebuked in these many chapters of Isaiah. We’ have seen Babylon, Assyria, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Etheopia, Egypt, Edom, Arabia, Tyre, and Sidon all chewed out in previous chapters, but no individual people. Then there are groups of people: rulers and princes (3:1–15), elders and dignitaries (3:2–3), women of Zion (3:16–4:1), priests and prophets (28:7–13), scribes and wise men who rely on human counsel (29:14–15, 30:1), but no individuals. A few individuals are named, such as Ahaz, but they are not rebuked. So, Shebna must have been pretty bad to be disfavored so. And yet, it doesn’t seem that way when compared to the corruption of our time. The guy wants a fancy burial place? There are worse things than that.
Just how fancy a burial place are we talking about? For what was he ignoring his official duties to prepare? Was he going the way of the Egyptian kings, scheming out a lavish pyramid for himself? No. Much more modest than that. I mean, his offense seems not too much more than reaching for a luxury sedan when an econobox would do just fine. He can’t hold a candle to his modern-day antitypes. If his example of pride and self-aggrandizement got God going, what are we to say of modern figures who outdo him twentyfold? If you hold public office, you’re not supposed to abuse it.
We know for sure that his proposed burial place was no pyramid because it has been found. No one ever said that the tomb would not be built. They just said he would not be around to die in it. He’d be wadded up and tossed like a ball. But, the tomb was built, and it is one of the more elaborate tombs in the area: a rock-cut tomb with finely dressed stonework, chambers, and a monumental inscribed lintel over the entrance bearing the words: “This is [the sepulcher of …]yahu who is over the house. There is no silver or gold here but [his bones] and the bones of his maidservant with him. Cursed be the man who will open this.” It is widely acknowledged as his.
It’s in the town of Silwan, just across the Kidron Valley from ancient Jerusalem. In 1870, French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau caught wind of it and paid the place a visit. it was occupied!—long ago turned into a private dwelling in the densely packed town! Today, it’s even more densely packed. It’s mostly working-class Palestinian families living in a crowded urban neighborhood of East Jerusalem—concrete houses, narrow streets, kids playing football, satellite dishes, the usual city-suburb mix.
There is no word on whether the current resident experienced the curse warned about. Maybe that terrible experience commenced with the visit of the archeologist himself. He knocked on the fellows door, or rang the doorbell, or something, and talked him into letting him chisel out the inscription, so he could spirit it off to the British Museum, where it rests today.
Roving archaeologists are always pestering me, too. They are incessantly ringing my doorbell—or at least you never know when they may start—to abscond with my “Home Sweet Home” banner just over the support beams, or if not that, then the welcome mat that says “Don’t Bug Me.” Here I’ll be tilting back in my easy chair watching TV, when someone pounds on the door. Another archeologist! I am inclined to tell him to take a hike. He doesn’t have to know everything. But it is an archeologist, after all, from the university, and I don’t want to appear disdainful of education. I say, “Don’t I know you from the archeologists’ party?” He replies: “Who are you to blow against the wind?” I let him in and he and his cohorts strips the house bare.
It’s not such a rare thing as it might at first seem, for people to build and live over, around, or even inside the tombs. It is known as a “necropolis,” a city build among the dead. It has happened in far more modern times than Shebna’s. Colonial Cemetery, for example, in Savannah, Georgia, might, at first glance, seem one of the many town squares that dot the city, though a much enlarged one, but it is not counted as one. It has not even been a complete cemetery since Civil War times, because the Union soldiers camping out one cold overnight took to burrowing into the tombs for warmth and threw all the remains outside. The city has been the setting for many battles through the years as to be described a necropolis. Our tour guide told us of one church in which the preacher preached long to the Confederate troops, and then the following Sunday, the very same sermon to the Union troops who had killed off the Confederate ones during the intervening week.
So it is with Silwan. There’s about fifty tombs in the area. It’s choice property. Those dead were placed there centuries ago. Might as well recondition the place for more modern use. They don’t all make for homes, and when they do, they might just be a section of the home, or the modern home might sit atop the ancient structure. Maybe it serves as the garage or basement or pool room. But some old tombs would serve as livestock enclosures, water cisterns, storage spaces, or even sewage dumps. (The latter would have been the ultimate put-down of Shebna, but his foretold abasement was not to that degree).
Clermont-Ganneau had it easy. These days, homeowners are more likely to chase archaeologists away with pitchforks. They’ll zero in on some ancient rock-cut tomb currently embedded in or under modern houses. they may be completely inside private properties, with deeds going back generations. Let them in and you may find yourself ensnared in property claims, eviction risks, or ideological disputes. You never know when politics might be involved, where nobody trusts anybody, and what you buy as “research” is actually some resettlement scam. It’s almost like picking up your phone today for an unknown caller. Horrible things can happen. Who would do such a thing?
They come in with their hi-fullutin’ super educated ways and make your life a living hell. There have been digs so undermining foundations or triggering structural damage as to render homes unsafe or uninhabitable—say, when they conduct excavations just three or four meters under the structure, so that families have no choice but to leave. File damage claims filed in court and it might be honored, but other times you might be told that you should just suck it up for science. They all but claim squatters rights on your house, throwing wild, archaeological parties and chipping away at your infrastructure in the process, college-kid interns peeing in the corners of your basement. It is easier not the let them get a toehold in the first place. They are usually turned away.
Thus, Shebna’s friend Bob has a tomb that remains unexcavated to this day. Following his mentor, only one step better, he too was raiding the public till. This fellow is unmentioned in the Bible record, unmentioned anywhere, in fact. It’s only I that I know of him. But he too, was planning for the high death with his own blinged-out rock-cut condo. He too earned a rebuke, but not before he had finished his tomb. There is an Archie Bunker type who lives in it now. Every time archaeologists come calling, he chases them away with a shotgun.
****** The bookstore
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