Nehemiah 4: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Sanballat and Tobiah mock the Jews for rebuilding Jerusalem's wall, and Nehemiah prays against them. When the wall reaches half its height, a group of neighboring peoples plots an attack, so Nehemiah posts guards day and night and stations the people by families with weapons. He tells them to rally wherever they hear the trumpet, and from then on the workers build with a weapon in hand, half the men stand guard from dawn to dark, and neither Nehemiah nor his brothers, his servants or his guards change clothes.

Claim by Claim

1. 4:1
   • Sanballat heard that we were building the wall.
   • Sanballat became angry when he heard it.
   • Sanballat was greatly indignant.
   • Sanballat mocked the Jews.
2. 4:2
   • Sanballat spoke before his kinsmen and before the army of Samaria.
   • He asked what these feeble Jews were doing.
   • He asked whether they would restore things for themselves.
   • He asked whether they would offer sacrifices.
   • He asked whether they would finish in a single day.
   • He asked whether they would bring the stones back to life out of the heaps of rubble.
   • He said the stones had been burned.
3. 4:3
   • Tobiah the Ammonite was standing beside Sanballat.
   • Tobiah said that if a fox went up on what they were building, it would break down their wall of stones.
4. 4:4
   • The speaker asks God to hear.
   • The speaker says that we are despised.
   • The speaker asks God to turn their reproach back on their own head.
   • The speaker asks God to give them as plunder in a land of captivity.
5. 4:5
   • The speaker asks God not to cover their iniquity.
   • The speaker asks that their sin not be blotted out from before God.
   • The reason given is that they have provoked God to anger in front of the builders.
6. 4:6
   • We built the wall.
   • The whole wall was joined together up to half its height.
   • The people had a heart to work.
7. 4:7
   • Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites heard that the repair of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward.
   • They heard that the gaps in the wall were beginning to be closed.
   • They became very angry.
8. 4:8
   • All of them conspired together.
   • They conspired to come and fight against Jerusalem.
   • They conspired to cause confusion and harm to it.
9. 4:9
   • We prayed to our God.
   • We set a guard against them day and night because of them.
10. 4:10
    • Judah said that the strength of the burden-bearers was failing.
    • Judah said there was much rubble.
    • Judah said that we are not able to build the wall.
11. 4:11
    • Our adversaries said that they would not know or see anything.
    • Our adversaries said they would come into their midst.
    • Our adversaries said they would kill them.
    • Our adversaries said they would make the work stop.
12. 4:12
    • The Jews who lived near them came.
    • They said it to us ten times.
    • Their message was that the enemy would come upon them from every direction they turned; the wording of the original is obscure, and it is unclear whether the threat is stated as being against 'you' or against 'us'.
13. 4:13
    • I stationed people in the lower places behind the wall.
    • I stationed people on the exposed heights.
    • I set the people by their families.
    • They were set with their swords, their spears, and their bows.
14. 4:14
    • I looked.
    • I rose up.
    • I spoke to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people.
    • I told them not to be afraid of them.
    • I told them to remember the Lord.
    • I said the Lord is great and awesome.
    • I told them to fight for their brothers, their sons, their daughters, their wives, and their houses.
15. 4:15
    • Our enemies heard that their plan was known to us.
    • God had brought their plan to nothing.
    • We all returned to the wall.
    • Each man returned to his own work.
16. 4:16
    • From that day on, half of my servants did the work.
    • The other half held spears, shields, bows, and body armor.
    • The officials stood behind all the house of Judah.
17. 4:17
    • Those who built on the wall and those who carried burdens were loaded up.
    • Each worked at the work with one of his hands.
    • Each held a weapon with the other hand.
18. 4:18
    • Each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side.
    • Each built while wearing his sword.
    • The man who sounded the trumpet stayed beside me.
19. 4:19
    • I spoke to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people.
    • I said the work is great and extensive.
    • I said we are spread apart on the wall, far from one another.
20. 4:20
    • I said that wherever they heard the sound of the trumpet they were to gather to us there.
    • I said our God would fight for us.
21. 4:21
    • We labored at the work.
    • Half of them held the spears.
    • They held them from the rising of the dawn until the stars came out.
22. 4:22
    • At that time I also said to the people that every man and his servant should lodge inside Jerusalem.
    • The purpose was that they would be a guard for us by night.
    • The purpose was that they would work by day.
23. 4:23
    • Neither I, nor my brothers, nor my servants, nor the men of the guard who followed me took off our clothes.
    • The final clause is obscure in the original: the King James states that each one took his clothes off only for washing, while the words can also mean that each kept his weapon even when going for water.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

4:1

Sanballat was the leading official of Samaria, the province just north of Judah, and had authority he stood to lose if Jerusalem became a walled city again. The wall in question had been broken down when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem about 140 years earlier; until it was rebuilt the city had no defenses and no standing as a real city. In Hebrew Bibles these opening verses are numbered as the end of chapter 3, so verse numbers here run six ahead of some other editions.

4:2

"His associates" translates a word meaning his fellow officials or kinsmen; the army of Samaria was the provincial garrison he could call on. "Will they offer sacrifices?" is a jeer at the idea that religious ceremony could substitute for engineering. The stones are "burned" because limestone scorched in the fire that destroyed the city crumbles and flakes, and was widely considered useless for building.

4:3

Tobiah was an official with interests east of the Jordan; "the Ammonite" marks him as tied to Ammon, a neighboring people long hostile to Judah. The fox remark is a stock insult about shoddy building: the wall is so flimsy that the weight of a small animal would topple it.

4:4

"Carried off as loot to a land where they are prisoners" describes deportation, the standard fate of a defeated population in this period, and the very thing that had happened to the people of Judah themselves two generations earlier.

4:5

"Cover" and "wipe away" are both ordinary words for pardon, drawn from the idea of an entry being erased from a written record. The prayer asks that the entry be left standing.

4:6

"Had a mind to work" is an old phrase. It means the people wanted to do it and put their whole heart into it.

4:7

The list names groups on every side of Jerusalem: Samaria to the north, the Ammonites east across the Jordan, Arab groups to the south, and Ashdod, an old Philistine city on the coastal plain, to the west. The point is that the city was surrounded.

4:9

A guard is someone who watches for danger and shouts a warning.

4:10

Before any new wall could go up, the collapsed and burned remains of the old one had to be hauled away by hand. The complaint is not laziness; the clearing work was enormous and produced nothing visible.

4:12

"Ten times over" is a Hebrew idiom for "again and again," not a literal count. The second half of this verse is difficult in the Hebrew and translations differ over whether the neighboring Jews are warning that attacks will come from every direction, or urging the workers to come back home to defend their own villages.

4:13

The Hebrew describing where Nehemiah posted the men is obscure. It may mean the low or unfinished stretches of wall, or open ground behind it; translations vary. "By families" means each clan was stationed together, so men fought beside their own relatives.

4:14

Where the King James has "great and terrible," the word meant inspiring awe and dread, not "dreadful" in the modern sense of bad. The nobles and officials were the heads of the leading families and the district administrators named in chapter 3.

4:16

"Habergeons" in the King James are coats of mail, body armor of linked metal rings or scales. "My servants" means Nehemiah's own staff and retainers as governor, not household slaves; a provincial governor kept an armed personal following.

4:17

"Laded" in the King James simply means "loaded." The picture is of the men hauling stone and rubble, who could carry with one arm and keep a weapon in the other hand; the builders, who needed both hands, wore their swords instead, as the next verse explains.

4:18

The trumpet is a ram's horn, used not as a musical instrument but as a signaling device whose single carrying note could be heard across a long work site.

4:21

From first light until the stars appeared is a working day of roughly fourteen hours. Ordinary labor stopped at dusk because there was no useful artificial light, so this describes people pushing well past a normal day, with half the manpower standing guard rather than building.

4:22

Most of the workforce lived in villages outside Jerusalem and would normally have walked home each evening. Staying inside the city overnight cost them the commute but doubled the number of men available for the night watch.

4:23

The last clause is uncertain in the Hebrew. The King James understood it as "each took his clothes off only for washing"; many modern translations read it as "each kept his weapon in his hand, even when he went for water." The sense either way is that the men stayed dressed and ready around the clock.