Nehemiah: The Governor Who Cancelled the Debts

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Much of it is Nehemiah’s own memoir, written in the first person. Other material was added by the editor who joined it to Ezra. In my day it was the second half of the book of Ezra.

When: Nehemiah came to Jerusalem as governor in 445 BC. The book was put together around 400 BC or later.

Where it fits: It is set in Jerusalem in the 400s BC, about 140 years after the city fell in 586 BC and after the Temple was rebuilt (Ezra 6). It continues the story of Ezra.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: Nehemiah 1, Nehemiah 5 and Nehemiah 8.

Words to Know

Cupbearer — the servant who tasted and served the king’s wine. A trusted position close to the throne.

Governor — the Persian official in charge of a province. Nehemiah was governor of Judah.

Usury — interest, what a lender charges for a loan. The Law forbade charging it to a fellow Israelite, and especially to the poor.

Collateral — property handed over as security for a loan: a field, a house, even a child.

The Book in Brief

Nehemiah is a history in thirteen chapters. Much of it is told by Nehemiah himself, in the first person.

In chapter 1, Nehemiah, a Jew who serves as cupbearer to the Persian king Artaxerxes in Susa, hears that the walls of Jerusalem are still broken and its gates burned. He weeps, fasts and prays. In chapter 2 the king notices his sad face and sends him to Jerusalem as governor, with letters and timber. Nehemiah inspects the ruined walls by night and calls the people to build. Chapter 3 lists the families who repair each section. Their neighbors Sanballat, Tobiah and Geshem mock them and then plot against them, and in chapter 4 half the workers stand guard while the other half build. Chapter 5 tells of poor families losing their fields and children to debt. Nehemiah is furious, makes the lenders give everything back, and refuses the governor’s food allowance. In chapter 6 his enemies try to lure and frighten him, and the wall is finished in fifty-two days.

Chapter 7 gives a list of the families who returned. In chapter 8 the people gather, and Ezra reads the Law aloud while the Levites explain it. The people weep, then keep the feast of booths. In chapter 9 they fast, confess their sins and pray a long prayer that retells their history. In chapter 10 they sign a pledge to keep the Law, avoid marriage with the surrounding peoples, rest on the Sabbath and support the Temple. Chapter 11 tells how one person in ten, chosen by lot from the rest of the people, moves to live in Jerusalem. In chapter 12 the wall is dedicated, with two choirs walking in procession along the top of it.

In chapter 13, after a time away at the Persian court, Nehemiah returns and finds the pledge broken. Tobiah has been given a room in the Temple, the Levites have not been paid, people are trading on the Sabbath, and some men have married foreign wives. Nehemiah puts each wrong right. The book ends with his short prayer that God will remember him for good.

Nehemiah was a Jew serving at the Persian court in Susa as the king’s cupbearer. One day his brother came from Judah with news. Jerusalem’s walls were still broken down, and the people there were in great affliction and reproach (Nehemiah 1:3).

Nehemiah sat down and wept for days. When he served the king wine, the king noticed his face. Why is your face sad, since you are not sick? Nehemiah was terrified, because you did not look unhappy in front of a Persian king. But he told the truth, and the king sent him to rebuild (Nehemiah 2:1–8).

The wall

Nehemiah rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem in fifty-two days (Nehemiah 6:15). He organizes it by families, each one repairing the section near its own house (Nehemiah 3).

Neighboring officials try to stop him: Sanballat the governor of Samaria, Tobiah the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arab. The builders work with a tool in one hand and a weapon in the other (Nehemiah 4:17).

Those enemies were real people. A letter written in 407 BC by Jews living on an island in the Nile, at Elephantine, mentions the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria.¹ The same letter names the high priest in Jerusalem, Johanan, who also appears in this book (Nehemiah 12:22).

Go deeperHow big was Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s day?

Nehemiah says the city was wide and large; but the people were few therein (Nehemiah 7:4). Archaeology agrees with the second half.

Before the Babylonians came, Jerusalem had spread west from the old hill of David onto a second hill. Around 700 BC that new part was ringed with a wall. The Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad uncovered a stretch of it in the 1970s. It is about seven meters (23 feet) thick.² After 586 BC the western hill was largely empty. The Persian-period remains found so far lie mostly on the narrow old ridge south of the Temple, the original City of David.³

So Nehemiah’s Jerusalem was a small town, nothing like the city before the fall. Scholars still argue about what that means for his wall. Some think he built a short wall around a small town. Some think the long list of gates and towers in chapter 3 describes a later age, in the Hellenistic period after Alexander the Great, when the city had grown again. Others think the finds fit the book well enough.³

Chapter 11 shows the same problem from the inside. The leaders already lived in the city, and the rest of the people cast lots so that one in ten would move in (Nehemiah 11:1).

The cry

Then comes Nehemiah 5, the chapter I want you to read twice.

While the wall is going up, there is a great cry of the people, and their wives, against their own fellow Jews.

Some say they have many children and must get grain just to stay alive.

Some say, We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses. Let us get grain, because of the famine.

Some say, We have borrowed money for the king’s tribute using our fields and our vineyards as collateral.

And then: Behold, we bring our sons and our daughters into bondage to be servants, and some of our daughters have been brought into bondage. It is also not in our power to help it, because other men have our fields and our vineyards (Nehemiah 5:1–5).⁴

Read that list again. It is the same list I grew up hearing in Galilee. Borrow to eat. Mortgage the land. Borrow to pay the tax. Lose the land. Lose the children.

What Nehemiah did

Nehemiah says, I was very angry when I heard their cry (Nehemiah 5:6).

He called a great assembly and confronted the nobles and officials. You exact usury, everyone of his brother (Nehemiah 5:7). We have been buying back our own people who were sold to foreigners, he said, and now you are selling your own brothers, so that they have to be sold back to us.

They had nothing to say.

Then he gave them an order: Restore to them, even today, their fields, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the grain, the new wine, and the oil, that you are charging them (Nehemiah 5:11).

They agreed. He made them swear it in front of the priests. Then he shook out the fold of his robe and said, So may God shake out every man from his house, and from his labor, that doesn’t perform this promise. And all the people said Amen (Nehemiah 5:12–13).

He also refused the food allowance the governor was entitled to, because the bondage was heavy on this people (Nehemiah 5:14–18).

That is the only place in my scriptures where you can watch the land being given back and the interest refunded, all in one day, by order of the man in charge.

When I taught my friends to pray forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12), it was a prayer for a world where Nehemiah 5 happened every day.

Go deeperWhat the Law said about lending, and how people got around it

Nehemiah did not invent his order. He stood on laws older than himself. If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor. You shall not charge him interest (Exodus 22:25). Every seventh year a creditor was to cancel what he was owed (Deuteronomy 15:1–2). The Law even warns lenders not to refuse a loan because the year of release is near (Deuteronomy 15:9). In Nehemiah’s day the people signed a pledge to forgo the seventh year and the collecting of every debt (Nehemiah 10:31).

But the rule was hard to keep. In the years before I was born, lenders were refusing to lend as the seventh year drew near, and the poor were shut out. A famous teacher named Hillel, who lived shortly before my time, found a legal way around it, called a prosbul. A lender who signed one handed his bonds over to the court, which could then collect them even after the seventh year. The Mishnah says Hillel did this because people had stopped lending. It kept loans flowing, but in effect it let debts outlive the year of release.⁵

The anger never went away. Josephus says that when the Jews rose against Rome in AD 66, the rebels burned the public archives in Jerusalem. They wanted to destroy the lenders’ bonds, he writes, so that the poor would rise against the rich.⁶ Nehemiah’s day was not the last time that debt tore a people apart.

The day the Law was read

In Nehemiah 8, all the people gather in the square by the Water Gate, and Ezra reads the Law aloud from early morning until midday. The Levites go among the people and help them understand. They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading (Nehemiah 8:8).

Later Jewish teachers connected this verse with the custom of translating the reading into Aramaic, for people who no longer understood Hebrew well.⁷ In my day, that is probably how the scriptures were heard in many synagogues. Someone read the Hebrew, and someone gave the sense.

When the people hear the Law, they start to weep. Nehemiah and Ezra stop them.

Go your way. Eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared, for today is holy to our Lord. Don’t be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10).

The holy day is a feast. And a feast is not holy unless food goes out to the people who have none.

Go deeperThe feast they found in the Law

The leaders who read the Law that week found something they had not been doing. It told Israel to live in booths for seven days in the autumn. This was the Feast of Booths, also called Sukkot. It came after the harvest and remembered the years in the wilderness (Leviticus 23:39–43). The people went out for olive, myrtle and palm branches and built shelters on their roofs, in their courtyards, in the Temple courts and in the city squares. Since the days of Jeshua the son of Nun to that day the children of Israel had not done so. There was very great gladness (Nehemiah 8:17).

By my day it was the greatest feast of the year. Josephus calls it the holiest and most important of the Hebrew feasts.⁸ John remembers that I went up to it quietly, that I taught in the Temple halfway through, and that on its last and greatest day I stood and called out that anyone who was thirsty should come to me and drink (John 7:2, 10, 14, 37).

Many scholars think that call was linked to a ceremony of the feast. The Mishnah says that each morning a priest drew water in a golden flask from the pool of Siloam and poured it out at the altar. It was written down around AD 200, and scholars debate how much of it goes back to my day.⁹

The gates on the Sabbath

Near the end, Nehemiah finds people treading wine presses and bringing in grain on the Sabbath, and merchants from Tyre selling fish in Jerusalem. He shuts the city gates at dusk before the Sabbath and posts guards so that no load can come in. When the merchants camp outside the walls, he threatens to arrest them (Nehemiah 13:15–22).

The Sabbath, for Nehemiah, was the day the market stopped. That is close to what the Law intended. A day when no one could be made to work, and nobody could buy and sell.

The other side of Nehemiah

Nehemiah also does what Ezra did, and worse.

He finds men who have married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab, whose children cannot speak the language of Judah. I contended with them, and cursed them, and struck certain of them, and plucked off their hair (Nehemiah 13:25).

He is the same man who cancelled the debts. He is fierce for the poor of his own people and fierce against the foreigners in their families. My scriptures do not make him simpler than he was.

Remember me

All through his memoir, Nehemiah stops to pray one short prayer: Remember me, my God, for good, all that I have done for this people (Nehemiah 5:19; see 13:14, 22, 31).

It is a very human prayer. He did hard things, some of them good and some of them harsh, and he wanted God to remember the good.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Nehemiah 5:1–13.

You will find: families losing their land and their children to debt, and a governor who forced the lenders to give it all back.

Then read Nehemiah 8:9–12. See what made the holy day holy.

The Short Version

• Nehemiah, the Persian king’s cupbearer, became governor of Judah and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem.
• His enemy Sanballat appears in a letter from 407 BC found in Egypt.
• In Nehemiah 5, families were losing land and children to debt, and he made the lenders return the land and the interest.
• When the Law was read, the Levites gave the sense, and the holy day ended with food sent to those who had none.
• He was also violent against men with foreign wives. My scriptures show him whole.