The Wall Closes, but the Letters Keep Coming

Geshem the Arabian was more than a local rival. A silver bowl from Tell el-Maskhuta in the Nile delta is inscribed by “Qaynu son of Gashmu, king of Qedar”, and most scholars identify this Gashmu with him, which makes him the ruler of an Arab kingdom along Judah’s southern flank. The bracketed admission about the doors is typical of Nehemiah’s precision; they are hung in 7:1.

Ono lay in the coastal lowland near Lod, a long day’s ride northwest of Jerusalem and on the edge of the province; men of Lod and Ono appear among the returnees in 7:37. Meeting “in some one of the villages” sounds like neutral ground. The Book of Nehemiah tells the reader the purpose before Nehemiah gives his answer.

“Come down” is literal as well as figurative: Jerusalem sits in the hills and Ono in the plain below. The reply is a question that turns the invitation into arithmetic. If he leaves, the work stops, and a day’s absence is two days of travel besides.

Four more identical approaches, four identical answers. Nehemiah varies nothing, adds no explanation, and so gives the other side no new words to use against him. Pressure by repetition fails against a man who is content to repeat himself.

Official letters were rolled, tied and sealed with a clay bulla. An “open letter” was unsealed on purpose, so the servant and anyone on the road could read it. By the time it reached Nehemiah the accusation it carried had already been made public.

Gashmu is a fuller spelling of Geshem, close to the form on the Qedar bowl. The charge of rebellion has a history: in Ezra 4:12–16 an earlier letter to this same Artaxerxes had stopped building by calling Jerusalem “the rebellious and the bad city”. Sanballat reaches for the weapon that had worked before.

The accusation had a plausible hook. Haggai and Zechariah had spoken of Zerubbabel in royal terms a generation earlier (Haggai 2:23; Zechariah 6:12–13). “Now shall it be reported to the king” reads as a threat with a price attached: meet us, or this goes to Susa.

Nehemiah answers the open letter in one sentence. “Feignest” is bada, to invent, a verb found elsewhere only in 1 Kings 12:33, of the feast Jeroboam “devised of his own heart”. The accusation is given the same origin as a counterfeit festival.

The King James prints “O God” in italics because the Hebrew lacks it: the text simply says “and now, strengthen my hands”. Most read it as a prayer; a few as Nehemiah’s resolve. The hands pick up the enemies’ hope that the builders’ hands would drop, the image Ezra 4:4 had used of an earlier stoppage.

“Within the temple” is the hekhal, the holy place, which only priests could enter; Numbers 18:7 sets death as the penalty for an outsider who comes near. Shemaiah’s warning is cast as an oracle, with the last line repeated for effect: they come to slay thee, by night they come to slay thee.

Two questions, one about courage and one about standing. “Being as I am” is a layman, and one who serves a foreign king; if he was a eunuch, as a royal cupbearer might be, Deuteronomy 23:1 barred him even from the assembly. Some Greek manuscripts of 1:11 call him eunouchos. That is an inference, and it is contested.

“I perceived” is hikkir, to recognise, as one recognises a disguise. A prophet hired against Israel is the charge the Law brings against Balaam (Deuteronomy 23:4), a passage the Book of Nehemiah itself reads aloud in 13:2. Tobiah’s name now stands before Sanballat’s, perhaps because Tobiah had friends among the priests (13:4).

Nehemiah lays out the plan as a chain of purposes: that he be afraid, act on it, sin, give them material for a report, and be discredited. The end of the chain is “reproach” once more, the thing the wall was built to remove (2:17).

Noadiah is the only named prophetess in the Old Testament after the exile, and the only one it names as false; Ezekiel 13:17 condemns such women without naming them. The Greek translation turns Noadiah into a man. “Think thou upon” is the verb of 5:19, now asking God to remember against.

Elul is the sixth month, late summer into early autumn. Counting back fifty two days puts the start in the month Ab, soon after Nehemiah arrived. Josephus, writing centuries later, gives two years and four months (Antiquities 11.179); the Book of Nehemiah’s figure is the short one, and it is exact to the day.

“Saw these things” and “feared” are the same Hebrew consonants read with different vowels, and several modern versions follow “feared”. “Cast down in their own eyes” reverses 4:2, where Sanballat scoffed before the army of Samaria. The neighbours draw the same conclusion as the builders: God did it.

“In those days” goes back over the fifty two days: the letters ran while the wall went up. The Hebrew says the nobles “multiplied” their letters, and they flowed both ways. The officials who refused to put their necks to the work in 3:5 had not been idle.

Tobiah’s name means “the LORD is good”; he married into the house of Arah, a returning family of 652 men (7:10), and his son married the daughter of Meshullam son of Berechiah, who repaired two sections of wall (3:4, 3:30). “Sworn unto him” means bound by oath, a formal alliance and not mere friendship.

“His good deeds” is tovotav, a play on the name Tobiah. The nobles praise the man in front of Nehemiah and carry Nehemiah’s words back to him, and the chapter closes on one more letter, this time sent to frighten.