Nehemiah
Author: Nehemiah
Nehemiah leaves the Persian court to rebuild Jerusalem’s wall and to bind the city to the law.
Outline
The journey and the wall (1–6)
Nehemiah mourns, receives leave from Artaxerxes, and finishes the wall despite mockery and plots.
The list and the reading (7–8)
The city’s residents are enrolled, and Ezra reads the law while the Levites explain it.
Confession and covenant (9–10)
The people retell their history, confess, and seal an agreement about the house and the sabbath.
The city settled, then neglected (11–13)
Jerusalem is populated, the wall is dedicated, and Nehemiah returns to find the reforms slipping.
Key verses
Nehemiah 2:17
Nehemiah tells the officials to rebuild the wall so they will no longer be a disgrace.
Nehemiah 8:8
The Levites read from the book of the law and give the sense so the people understand.
Nehemiah 13:14
Nehemiah asks God to remember him for the good he has done for the house.
Nehemiah is cupbearer to Artaxerxes when his brother Hanani arrives from Judah. The report is blunt: the survivors are in trouble, the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and the gates are burned. Nehemiah weeps, fasts, and prays, using the language of Deuteronomy about a people scattered for disobedience and gathered if they return. When he brings the king his wine, the king notices his sadness. Nehemiah prays a short prayer and asks for leave to rebuild the city of his fathers’ graves, with letters for timber and for safe passage. The king grants it. The book wants the reader to see both the prayer and the administrative letter.
He arrives, inspects the walls by night, and only then tells the officials what God had put in his heart. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem mock the plan. The work is organized by gates and households. Nobles of Tekoa will not stoop to the work. Other families repair the section in front of their own houses. When the mockery turns to a plot of attack, half the men work and half hold spears. Nehemiah will not come down to a meeting in the plain of Ono. A prophet is hired to frighten him into hiding in the temple, which would have been a sin for a layman. The wall is finished in fifty-two days. The nations around are afraid, the book says, because they perceive that the work was done with the help of God.
Building the wall is not the whole task. The returned community has been charging interest of their own poor. Nehemiah makes the nobles restore fields, vineyards, and houses, and he contrasts their lending with his own refusal to take the governor’s food allowance. A genealogy of the first returnees is repeated from Ezra. Then, on the first day of the seventh month, the people ask Ezra to bring the book of the law. He reads from morning until midday. The Levites give the sense. The people weep as they hear, and Nehemiah tells them the day is holy and that the joy of the Lord is their strength. They find the command about Booths and keep the feast.
A long prayer in chapter 9 retells creation, Abraham, Egypt, the wilderness, the judges, and the exile, and it confesses that the kings and the priests have not kept the law. The leaders seal a covenant about marriages, the sabbath, the wood offering, and the tithe. Lots are cast to bring one in ten to live in Jerusalem. The wall is dedicated with two choirs walking in opposite directions. Nehemiah then returns to the king. When he comes back to Jerusalem he finds Tobiah given a room in the courts of the house, the Levites unpaid, the sabbath broken by traders, and marriages to women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. He throws Tobiah’s goods out, restores the portions, shuts the gates on the sabbath, and contends with the men who have married foreign wives. The book ends with his repeated plea that God remember him. The wall stands. The reform has to be done again.