Shemaya the Scribe - Quick Facts

The Bible contains little information about the scribe and prophet  Shemaya the Nehelamite (Hebrew: שמעיה הנחלמי Sh-mā-yā), one of the biblical authors of Exodus. In fact, he wrote the oldest stories we have in the book of Exodus, which is often referred to by academics as the "E source" of Exodus.

The Bible does tell us Shemaya was taken from Judea to captivity in Babylonia in 597 BCE, after the Judean king mysteriously and suddenly died, and his eight-year-old son replaced him on the throne. 

This disaster happened because the now-dead Judean king allied Judea with Egypt and against Babylonia, refusing to pay taxes to the Babylonians. Once he was replaced by a boy king, the Queen Regent negotiated a deal with the Babylonians: the royal family, royal court, generals and thousands of Hebrew workers would be taken to Babylonia. The workers would live and rebuild a war-torn Babylonian city. And in return, the royal family and its court and priests would live comfy lives in Babylonia and Jerusalem would not be destroyed.

From his captivity in Babylonia, we have a letter Shemaya sent to Jerusalem (in Jeremiah 29), which references the many scrolls Shemaya wrote and sent from Babylonia to Judea. He also expressed his desire that someone in Jerusalem give Jeremiah a beating, because Shemaya was calling for and prophecizing that Yahweh would quickly return the captives to Judea, whereas Jeremiah told them to make themselves at home in Babylonia because they will never return. Shemaya didn't like that. He called Jeremiah "crazy".

This was the political and social context in which Shemaya lived, and once we put the entire picture together, we learn that he was a populist leader, a man of the people, and he looked down on kings and other supposedly important people. And he was funny! And satirical and oppositional. He was great, really.

He also wrote most of chapters 40-43 in the book of Isaiah, attributed to a writer they call "Second Isaiah" who lived in Babylonia. He had a beef with the exiled Hebrew establishment, and they did not include his texts in their annals, which explains why they were not included in the first edition of the Bible. Since he sent so many of his texts to the richest and most influential Hebrew families, they kept them, passed them on through the generations, and they were later added to the canon in 140 BCE.

Because of his beef with Jeremiah, Shemaya went down in history as a false prophet, but he was greatly respected in his time, and was still respected centuries later, as can be attested by a later writer dropping his name as a character in a tale about Golden Calves and internal divisions with Judeans and Israelites (1 Kings, chapter 12).