Summary: Bible - Book of Nehemiah

The GIST

Nehemiah is the memoir of a man who left a comfortable post at the heart of an empire to repair a ruined city. Nehemiah was cupbearer to Artaxerxes, king of Persia, in the capital at Susa, an important office. In the twentieth year of the king's reign, word reaches him that Jerusalem, destroyed by the Babylonians well over a century earlier and only partly resettled, still lies open and broken. He asks to be sent there. The book, told largely in his own voice, relates how he rebuilt the walls in the teeth of opposition, how the law of Moses was read to the people, and how he struggled to hold the community to its commitments.

Until the sixteenth century it was not a separate book at all but the second half of Ezra, and together Ezra-Nehemiah forms the last chapter of the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars call its first-person core the Nehemiah Memorial and date his first term in Jerusalem to 445 to 433 BC. Few books in the Bible feel so much like the work of a particular person: practical, devout, combative and never far from prayer.

What It Says

Bad news in Susa (chapter 1). Travelers from Judah tell Nehemiah how things stand. The survivors there are in great distress, and "the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire." He sits down and weeps, fasts for days, and prays. The prayer confesses the sins of Israel, his own family's among them, recalls God's promise to gather his people if they return to him, and ends with a request for favor before the king.

The request (chapter 2). Months later, while serving wine, he is caught looking sad in the royal presence. "Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick?" the king asks, and Nehemiah is terrified. He explains that the city where his ancestors are buried lies waste. The king asks what he wants, and between the question and the answer comes one of the shortest prayers in Scripture: "So I prayed to the God of heaven." He asks for leave, for letters of safe conduct, and for timber from the royal forest. He gets all of it, and an escort as well.

In Jerusalem he says nothing for three days. Then he goes out by night with a few men and rides around the broken walls to see the damage for himself. Only then does he gather the leaders and lay out his plan, telling them how God's hand had been with him. Their answer: "Let us rise up and build." From the start there is hostility from powerful neighbors: Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arabian, who mock the idea and hint that it amounts to rebellion.

The wall goes up (chapters 3 and 4). Chapter 3 is a list, and a telling one. Section by section and gate by gate it names who repaired what: priests, goldsmiths, merchants, district rulers, men working opposite their own houses. The mockery continues. "What do these feeble Jews?" Sanballat sneers, and Tobiah adds that if a fox climbed their wall it would fall down. Nehemiah answers with prayer and work, and the wall rises to half its height, "for the people had a mind to work."

Ridicule turns to a plan of attack. Nehemiah posts guards and rallies the people: "Be not ye afraid of them: remember the LORD, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren." From then on half his men stand armed while the other half build, and the laborers themselves work with a weapon in reach, each one "with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon." A trumpeter stays at Nehemiah's side to sound the alarm.

Trouble inside (chapter 5). The next threat is not from outside. Poor families cry out that they have had to mortgage fields and even sell their children into bondage to pay their debts, and that the lenders are their own countrymen. Nehemiah is furious. He summons the nobles and shames them publicly: "ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God?" They agree to restore the fields and cancel the claims. He adds that in twelve years as governor he never drew the food allowance his predecessors had taken, because the burden on the people was heavy.

Plots and completion (chapter 6). With the wall nearly done, his enemies try to lure him out to a meeting in the plain. His reply is famous: "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down." They send the same message four times, then an open letter accusing him of planning to make himself king. A hired prophet urges him to hide in the Temple from assassins. "Should such a man as I flee?" he answers. The wall is finished in fifty-two days, and the surrounding peoples, he says, saw that the work was done with the help of God.

The law is read (chapters 7 to 10). Nehemiah sets guards, finds the city large but thinly peopled, and looks up the register of those who first returned from exile. Then the scene shifts to a great assembly. Ezra the scribe stands on a wooden platform and reads from the book of the law from morning until midday, while Levites move among the crowd explaining it: they "read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense." The people weep as they listen. They are told not to. "This day is holy," Nehemiah and Ezra say; go, eat and drink and share with those who have nothing, "for the joy of the LORD is your strength." Finding the Feast of Booths described in the law, they keep it, living in shelters made of branches.

A day of fasting follows, with a long prayer that retells Israel's whole history from creation and Abraham through Egypt, the wilderness and the kings, setting the people's repeated rebellion against a God who is "ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger." It ends with a frank admission that they are servants in their own land. The leaders, priests and Levites then seal a written covenant. They promise not to intermarry with the surrounding peoples, to keep the sabbath, to forgo debts in the seventh year, and to support the Temple with offerings, wood and tithes.

The city filled and the wall dedicated (chapters 11 and 12). Lots are cast so that one family in ten will move into Jerusalem. After further lists of priests and Levites comes the dedication. Two great choirs walk in opposite directions along the top of the wall and meet at the Temple, and the celebration is such that "the joy of Jerusalem was heard even afar off."

The second visit (chapter 13). The book does not end there. After twelve years Nehemiah returns to the king, and when he comes back to Jerusalem he finds his reforms unraveling. Tobiah, his old enemy, has been given a room in the Temple courts; Nehemiah throws his furniture out. The Levites have not been paid and have gone back to their fields. Merchants are trading on the sabbath, so he shuts the gates and threatens those who camp outside. And Jewish men have again married foreign women, whose children cannot even speak the language of Judah. His response is characteristically fierce: he "contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair." The last words of the book are a prayer in his own voice: "Remember me, O my God, for good."

Why It Matters

Nehemiah is often read as a study in leadership. He prays before he acts and plans before he speaks. He shares the work, refuses the perks of office, and will not be distracted or frightened off. But the book is equally honest about the limits of what a leader can achieve. A wall can be built in fifty-two days. A people is harder to rebuild, and the final chapter shows how quickly resolve fades.

The rebuilding of the wall and the reading of the law belong together in the book's design: the city is made secure, and then the city and its people are dedicated to the law of God. It is a scene of a text read aloud and explained to ordinary men, women and all who could understand.

The book's concern with separation from neighboring peoples troubles many modern readers, as the parallel passage in Ezra does. In its own setting it reflects a small province inside a vast empire, surrounded by stronger neighbors and anxious about survival. A rabbinic tradition, interestingly, was cool toward Nehemiah himself, saying he was denied credit for the book because of his habit of disparaging others. Historians today are divided as well. Some treat the memoir as a first-hand source of great value, while others are far more skeptical, and most agree the book was edited over a long period.

Who Should Read It

Read Nehemiah if you have a hard project to finish and people to bring with you. It is among the most readable narratives in the Old Testament, brisk and personal, and its hero is easy to picture. It will also interest anyone curious about the world after the exile, and it is best read together with Ezra, its other half.