person
Shimshai
שִׁמְשַׁי
Shimshai was a scribe who, along with Rehum the commander, wrote a letter to King Artaxerxes opposing the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
- verses
- 4
- first named
- Ezra 4:8
- last named
- Ezra 4:23
- period
- Exile and Return
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Shimshai?
Shimshai is mentioned in Ezr.4.8, 9, 17, and 23 as a scribe who, together with Rehum the commander, opposed the rebuilding of Jerusalem during the reign of King Artaxerxes of Persia. Shimshai and Rehum wrote a letter to the king, accusing the Jews of rebuilding the city and its walls, and claiming that this would lead to rebellion against the Persian Empire. In response to their letter, Artaxerxes ordered the work on the city to cease until further notice. Shimshai and Rehum, along with their associates, then went to Jerusalem and forcibly stopped the Jews from rebuilding the city. This opposition temporarily halted the reconstruction efforts until the reign of King Darius, who later allowed the Jews to resume their work on the temple and the city.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Stands in the same events as
- Rehum5 events
- Rest Of Associates5 events
- Jerusalem3 events
- Artaxerxes1 event
- Bishlam1 event
- Mithredath1 event
- Tabeel1 event
Places
Where this happens
The places the claims about this person reach, drawn where the gazetteer locates them. A point is where a row puts them and never where tradition does; no line joins two points, because the rows state where and not in what order.
The pattern
Where Shimshai is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
4 verses across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in Ezra (4).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 4, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources