The Builders Learn to Work Under Guard

In the Hebrew Bible this chapter begins at 3:33, so its verse numbers run six behind the King James. Two words for anger are stacked, “wroth” and “great indignation”, before the mockery begins. Sanballat hears of the building before he sees it, and his reaction comes before any argument.

Sanballat speaks before “the army of Samaria”, the provincial troops he commanded as governor. His five questions escalate. “Feeble” is amelalim, withered, a word for drooping plants. Burned limestone turns to crumbling lime, so the jibe about reviving scorched stones had a builder’s truth behind it.

The word for fox can also mean jackal. Tobiah’s line is a comic image: a wall so flimsy that a small animal climbing it would bring it down. The Ammonite stands at Sanballat’s side, supplying the punchline for the governor’s audience.

Nehemiah turns from reporting the insult straight to God, without introduction, a pattern his memoir repeats. “Give them for a prey in the land of captivity” asks that the mockers suffer what Judah had suffered: plunder and exile.

The wording closely follows Jeremiah’s prayer against his persecutors: “forgive not their iniquity, neither blot out their sin from thy sight” (Jeremiah 18:23). “Provoked thee to anger before the builders” may also be read “they have insulted the builders” to their faces.

The whole circuit was joined up to half its height, a continuous line with no gaps before any section rose higher. “The people had a mind to work” is literally “the people had a heart to work”, the Hebrew locating the will in the heart.

With the Ashdodites added, enemies stand on every side: Samaria to the north, Ammon east, the Arabs south, Ashdod on the coast to the west. “Made up” is literally that healing had come on the walls, the word arukah used for new flesh growing over a wound (Jeremiah 8:22).

“To hinder it” is literally to make confusion in it, to throw the work into disorder. The coalition’s plan is not necessarily a siege, which would have been open rebellion against a Persian governor, but disruption.

Setting a watch day and night meant taking men off the wall to stand guard. The cost of that decision lands in the next verse, where the builders say they are running out of strength.

In Hebrew this verse has the short, falling rhythm of a lament and a near rhyme, as if the workers had made a song of their exhaustion. The “bearers of burdens” carried rubble and stone in baskets. The rubbish is the debris from 586 BC, still lying where it fell.

The adversaries’ plan relies on surprise: they will be among the builders before anyone sees them. The Book of Nehemiah records their private words, which Nehemiah learned of only through the warnings in the next verse.

“Ten times” means again and again, as in Genesis 31:7. The Jews living near the enemy’s towns kept bringing warnings. The second half of the verse is obscure in Hebrew; it may be a plea to the workers from those villages to come home to protect their own.

Nehemiah posts men in the lowest and most exposed places behind the wall, where it was weakest, and on the open heights. Grouping them “after their families” meant each man stood beside his own kin, with swords, spears and bows.

“Great and terrible” is the phrase Nehemiah used of God in his first prayer (1:5). The speech ends with a list of what is at stake: brothers, sons, daughters, wives and houses. The order moves outward from kin to home.

“Brought their counsel to nought” is the verb used in Ezra 4:5, where hired counsellors worked “to frustrate their purpose”. Now it is the enemy’s purpose that is frustrated. Every man returns to his own section, the assignments of chapter 3 still in force.

“My servants” are Nehemiah’s own retainers, his household men. “Habergeons” is the 1611 word for coats of mail, from the old French hauberk. The rulers standing “behind” the house of Judah may be supporting them or directing them from the rear.

Burden-bearers could carry a load on the head or shoulder with one hand, leaving the other free for a weapon. The weapon here, shelah, is a javelin or throwing spear, light enough to hold while walking.

Masons needed both hands for stone, so they wore swords at the belt instead. The trumpeter stands by Nehemiah: the governor’s position is the command post, and the signal comes from wherever he is.

The circuit was about four kilometres, and the builders were strung out along it in small groups. “Separated upon the wall, one far from another” is a frank admission of how thin the line was.

“Our God shall fight for us” echoes Moses at the Red Sea, “The LORD shall fight for you” (Exodus 14:14), and Joshua 23:10. The trumpet decides where the defenders gather, and God is expected to do the fighting there.

“Till the stars appeared” means until full darkness; the Jewish day was later reckoned to end when three stars could be seen. Half the men held spears for the whole working day, so every stone was laid by half the available hands.

Workers from outlying towns such as Jericho, Tekoa and Zanoah now had to sleep inside the city. Each brought a servant, so the same men could build by day and stand guard by night, with no journeys home between.

The last clause is obscure in Hebrew, literally “each his weapon, the water”. It may mean that each man kept his weapon at hand even when he went for water. The King James takes it as an exception for washing. The whole wall was finished in fifty-two days (6:15).