Today, I am reading and commenting on  Nehemiah 4-6.

Before I get into my study of today’s passage I want to make note of something I only really became aware of after I started writing these blogs:  Nehemiah did not come to Jerusalem to rebuild the walls which had been destroyed during the Babylonian conquest which immediately preceded the Exile.  Rather, he was rebuilding the walls which had originally been built by those who first returned under Cyrus.   So, when Nehemiah got the Jew started rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, their enemies, Sanballat and Tobiah the Ammonite, ridiculed them for even trying to rebuild the walls.  As we read on we realize that part of the reason Sanballat and Tobiah thought the rebuilding effort was a joke was because previous governors of Jerusalem(I am unsure what the correct title was for Nehemiah and his predecessors) were corrupt.    In fact, we even see that a significant number of the Jewish leaders with whom Nehemiah had to work were corrupt, or on the side of Tobiah and Sanballat for other reasons.  n any case, Nehemiah encouraged the workers who were building the wall and they continued to work hard at it.  This led Tobiah and Sanballat to plot, or perhaps, just plant the rumor that they were plotting, to attack the builders when and where they were unprepared.  Nehemiah met this threat by making sure the men who had come with him could be clearly seen to be prepared to repel attackers, and got the rest of those working on the wall to do likewise.

In the middle of today’s passage, which is mostly about the attempts to prevent the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls and how Nehemiah countered those attempts, we have a bit where Nehemiah learns that the elites of Jerusalem, including himself, were oppressing their fellow Jews who were poor.  Initially, it seems like a separate issue from Nehemiah’s efforts to get Jerusalem rebuilt and functioning.  However, I realized today that this bit in the middle explains why Nehemiah was successful in building the walls while his predecessors had left them in ruins.  When Nehemiah realized that he was getting rich off of the misfortune of others, he immediately changed his business practices and convinced the others who were doing likewise to follow his example.  By behaving in this manner, Nehemiah showed the people that rebuilding the walls was not a vanity project for Nehemiah.  He wanted to rebuild the walls because he cared about the protection this would offer the people who could not afford armed guards.  Nehemiah pushed rebuilding the walls because he believed it was in everyone’s best interest to do so.  Which led those who liked things the way they were, because they profited from the vulnerability of others, to attempt to assassinate Nehemiah, or failing that to make him look like he put his interests ahead of those of everyone else.  Despite having been appointed by the king of Persia to govern Jerusalem, and being the leader who could inspire the people to restore it to being a major city, Nehemiah refused to act like he thought he was more important than anyone else.  We should seek  to follow Nehemiah’s example…and its flip side, we should refuse to view ourselves as less important than anyone else.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.