Book of Nehemiah

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A century and a half after the armies of Babylonia broke the walls of Jerusalem and carried its leading families east, the city’s defenses still lay in heaps. The Temple had been rebuilt — a second one stood on the mount where the first had burned — but a sanctuary without a wall was a sanctuary anyone could enter, and the province around it was small, poor, and surrounded by neighbors with their own claims. This is the ground on which the Book of Nehemiah opens: not a kingdom but a district of the Achaemenid Empire, one Persian administrative unit among hundreds, holding the memory of having once been the seat of David’s house and finding that memory hard to defend with broken stone.

The book recounts how that wall was raised again in the mid-fifth century BCE, and then how the community behind it set about deciding what it now meant to belong to Jerusalem. Its central figure is Nehemiah, a Judean serving at the imperial court as cupbearer — a trusted official who tasted and served the king’s wine and so stood, daily, within arm’s reach of the throne. Word reaches him that the survivors back in the province are in distress and the city’s gates burned, and he asks the king, Artaxerxes, for leave to go and set it right.

A voice in the first person

Much of the book is written not about Nehemiah but as Nehemiah — a sustained first-person narrative that scholars call the Nehemiah memoir. It runs through the opening chapters, the account of the building and its enemies, and the later record of reforms; the rest of the book, including the great scene of the reading of the Law, is told in other voices and drawn from other sources, then set within his frame. The memoir is one of the most distinctive pieces of writing in the Hebrew Bible: vivid, defensive, particular, and addressed half to God. At intervals the narrative breaks off to speak directly upward — remember me, O my God, for good — turning a building report into something closer to a petition laid before a judge.

That double address has long puzzled readers. The memoir reads at once like the report of a Persian provincial official justifying his tenure and like a votive or memorial inscription of the kind a benefactor might leave to be read by a god rather than a successor. The repeated calls to be remembered, the careful tally of what was done and what it cost, the insistence on the writer’s own faithfulness against detractors — these belong to a recognizable genre of the ancient Near East, in which a man records his deeds and asks his deity to weigh them. Read that way, the book is not first a history but a man’s account of himself, submitted for review.

The night ride and the opposition

Granted royal letters of safe-conduct and an escort of cavalry, Nehemiah reaches the city and waits. Then, by night and telling no one his purpose, he rides out along the line of the ruins to see for himself what can be done — past gates consumed by fire, over rubble his mount cannot cross. Only after he has measured the damage with his own eyes does he call the inhabitants together and propose the work.

The opposition is immediate and named. Sanballat, the governor of the neighboring province of Samaria, and Tobiah, an official with kin and clients inside Jerusalem itself, treat the project first as a joke and then as a threat. They mock the builders — a wall of burned stones, raised by feeble hands, that a fox could topple. They circulate the charge that to wall the city is to plan rebellion against the empire. When ridicule fails they plan an armed raid; when force is checked they try to lure Nehemiah into a meeting on the plain, or into the Temple itself under pretext of danger, where he might be discredited or killed. The memoir keeps a precise account of each maneuver and of how it was met: half the men building, half standing under arms; the laborers working with a tool in one hand and a weapon near at hand; a trumpeter at Nehemiah’s side to gather the scattered crews if an alarm sounded along the circuit.

The wall is finished, the text says, in fifty-two days — completed on the twenty-fifth of the month Elul. The number is almost certainly meant to be heard as remarkable, and it has been read both as a builder’s boast and as the literal record of a forced, frightened pace. Whichever it is, the speed is the point: when the surrounding peoples see how quickly it has gone up, the memoir notes, they lose their nerve, perceiving that the work has been carried through with help beyond the human.

From stone to community

With the circuit closed, the book turns from masonry to the harder question of who lives inside it. A census of the returned families is taken — long lists of names by clan and town, the bureaucratic skeleton of a people reconstituting itself. Then comes the scene the whole book has been moving toward, told now in the third person: the scribe Ezra stands on a wooden platform before the assembled people in the open square and reads aloud from the book of the Law of Moses, from first light until midday, while Levites move through the crowd giving the sense of it so the hearers understand. The people weep at what they hear, and are told instead to feast, for the day is holy. In the days that follow they keep the Festival of Booths as it had not been kept since the days of Joshua, and then bind themselves by a written, sealed covenant to live by the Law they have heard.

The reforms that follow are the cost of that covenant, and the memoir does not soften them. Nehemiah confronts the wealthy who have taken the fields and even the children of their poorer neighbors as security against debt, and forces the cancellation of the bonds — debt-slavery within the community judged intolerable in a people just freed from a foreign one. He shuts the gates against trade on the sabbath and drives the merchants from the walls. And he moves, harshly, against marriages with the surrounding peoples, breaking up households and expelling a member of the high-priestly family who had allied by marriage with Tobiah. These measures are presented not as cruelty but as the price of keeping the restored community distinct — a small population deciding that survival meant boundaries, drawn around the table and the bedroom as much as around the city. The closing chapter returns to the first-person voice for a last accounting of these acts, and ends, as the memoir has ended each of its movements, by asking God to remember them: remember me, O my God, for good.

One book, then two

In the Hebrew canon, Ezra and Nehemiah were not two books but one. The Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah are halves of a single composition, and the Masoretic scribes who fixed and counted the text treated the pair as a single work and placed their statistical notes — the running totals of verses, the mark of the middle verse — only at the end of Nehemiah, reckoning both together as if no seam ran between them. The earliest Christian witnesses inherited the same unity: the church father Origen, in the early third century, listed the canon of the Jews and named what he called the first and second Ezra as one book. The division into two named books was a Latin development, carried into Jerome’s Vulgate, where they appear as I and II Esdras; and it entered Hebrew manuscripts only late, becoming standard in printed Hebrew Bibles from the sixteenth century. The book whose own last sentence is Nehemiah’s was, for most of its history, the back half of the book of Ezra.

Scholarship still treats the two as closely bound — the product of a shared editorial setting, even where the first-person memoirs beneath them, Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s, are distinct in voice and origin. They are paired in the Tanakh among the Ketuvim, the Writings, the last division of the Hebrew canon and the last of its books to reach fixed form; Christian Bibles reclassified the pair among the historical books, between Chronicles and Esther. An older theory made the whole of Ezra-Nehemiah the closing volume of a single sweep running through Chronicles, the work of one Chronicler; the stronger recent view, argued in detail by H. G. M. Williamson, separates Ezra-Nehemiah from Chronicles and reads it as its own composition, built around the two memoirs and the documents set between them.

Those documents are themselves part of the puzzle, though they cluster in Ezra rather than Nehemiah: the Aramaic letters and decrees that purport to reproduce real correspondence with the Persian chancery. The book of Nehemiah is by contrast almost wholly Hebrew, and its problems are of a different kind — the relative dating of Ezra and Nehemiah, which the text’s own chronology makes hard to reconcile; how much of the memoir is Nehemiah’s own words and how much later editorial shaping; and where the lists and the cultic material that interrupt the first-person narrative came from. These are among the longest-running questions in the study of the Second Temple period, and they remain genuinely contested.

The record outside the book

What is not contested is the world the book describes. Yehud was a real and modest province of the Achaemenid system, and the men who oppose Nehemiah leave traces outside scripture. A bundle of Aramaic papyri from the Jewish military colony at Elephantine in Egypt, dating to 407 BCE — a generation after the events the memoir relates — appeals to the authorities at Jerusalem and Samaria and names the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, asking their help to rebuild a temple. The Sanballat of the memoir was thus a real officeholder of exactly the rank and region the book assigns him. Seal impressions recovered from a cave at Wadi Daliyeh, where refugees had hidden a generation or two later, carry the title again — one read as belonging to a Delaiah, son of Sanballat, governor of Samaria — and the epigrapher Frank Moore Cross used such finds to reconstruct a whole Sanballatid dynasty governing Samaria across the later Persian period, the founder of which was Nehemiah’s antagonist. The quarrel the book records between two provincial governors over a city wall sits, in other words, on documented ground.

Reception and afterlife

For the traditions that received it, the book is more than a building record. Jewish memory held Nehemiah as the model of the layman who acts where priests and prophets do not — a courtier and governor, not a clergyman, who rebuilds the city with his own authority and his own funds and asks only to be remembered for it. His restoration of the walls stood beside Ezra’s restoration of the Law as the twin pillars of the community’s second beginning, the stone and the scroll. The two figures’ fasts and reforms anchor the rabbinic picture of how the post-exilic community was reorganized after the silence that followed the last of the prophets — the period of the last post-exilic prophets, among them Zechariah, whose visions had urged the Temple’s rebuilding a lifetime before Nehemiah came to wall the city. The grief over the first destruction the Bible had recorded in Lamentations is here answered by a rebuilding. Christian readers placed the book among the historical writings of the Old Testament and drew from it a recurring image of resolve under siege: the leader who prays and posts a guard, who answers mockery by laying another course of stone.

The text itself stays close to the ground. It is a book with very little miracle in it and a great deal of accounting — names, dates, distances, finances, the lengths of wall assigned to each family. Its grandeur is the grandeur of an ordinary man’s ledger kept under threat. A wall raised, a people counted, and a man asking, in its last line, to be remembered for good.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The Hebrew text of Nehemiah is preserved in the Masoretic tradition and is available in parallel Hebrew and English at the Sefaria digital library (Nehemiah), including the assembly and reading of the Law in chapter eight (Nehemiah 8). The standard critical commentary in English is H. G. M. Williamson’s Ezra, Nehemiah (Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 16; Word, 1985), which set the terms of the modern discussion by distinguishing the Ezra and Nehemiah memoirs from the lists and documents around them and by separating the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah from that of Chronicles. Lester L. Grabbe’s Ezra-Nehemiah (Old Testament Readings; Routledge, 1998) treats the literary and the historical questions together and presses hard on how much of the narrative can stand as history of the Persian period. The problem of the memoir’s literary type — court narrative, official report, or votive memorial — is examined in Mark J. Boda’s and others’ work and at length in Jacob L. Wright’s dissertation on The Contradictions of Genre in the Nehemiah Memorial (Duke, 2008). For the external attestation of Sanballat, the foundational study of the Wadi Daliyeh seals and the Samaria papyri is Frank Moore Cross’s reconstruction of the Sanballatid governors, which set Nehemiah’s antagonist on documented epigraphic ground. A working bibliography for the book is maintained by the Society for Old Testament Study, including the Blenkinsopp and Williamson commentaries and the major monographs on the memoir and the reforms.

→ Related: Book Of Ezra · Ezra · Tanakh · Achaemenid Empire · Temple Mount · Lamentations · Second Temple Judaism · Babylonia · Old Testament · Torah · Zechariah