Nehemiah 12:31

THE GRAND PROCESSION ATOP THE WALL TO THE TEMPLE

"Then I brought up the princes of Judah upon the wall, and appointed two great companies which gave thanks and went in procession. One went to the right upon the wall to the Dung Gate; and after them went Hosahaiah and half of the princes of Judah, and Azariah, Ezra, Meshullam, Judah, Benjamin, Shemaiah, Jeremiah, and certain of the priests' sons with trumpets: Zechariah the son of Jonathan, son of Shemaiah, son of Mattaniah, son of Micaiah, son of Zaccur, son of Asaph; and his kinsmen, Shemaiah, Azarel, Milalai, Gilalai, Maai, Nethanel, Judah, and Hanani, with musical instruments of David the man of God; and Ezra the scribe went before them. At the Fountain Gate they went up straight before them by the stairs of the city of David, at the ascent of the wall, above the house of David, to the Water Gate on the east."

"Upon the wall ... upon the wall" (Nehemiah 12:31). Many of the older scholars thought that the grand processions, one moving clockwise, the other counter clockwise, circled the wall around the city, walking on the ground; but the text here flatly declares that they marched atop the wall. This is to be trusted as the way it happened. Excavations by Kathleen Kenyon in Jerusalem have indicated that, "Nehemiah's wall was nine feet wide."[13] As Hamrick noted, "That was ample room for a procession to move along the top of it."[14] (Our map, p. 138, will show how the processions proceeded.)

These verses concern only half the procession; there were two, one led by Ezra the priest the scribe, and the other by the governor Nehemiah. Both began in the area between the Dung Gate and the Valley Gate, Ezra moving northward around the eastern wall of the city, and Nehemiah and his procession heading northward around the western wall, both processions coming together in the vicinity of the temple.