Nehemiah 6: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Sanballat and Geshem try four times to lure Nehemiah to a meeting outside Jerusalem, then send an unsealed letter accusing him of plotting to make himself king. Nehemiah denies the charge and keeps working. A prophet named Shemaiah, hired by Nehemiah's opponents, urges him to hide inside the temple, but Nehemiah refuses and sees the trap. The wall is finished in fifty-two days, and the chapter ends by noting that nobles in Judah were tied to Tobiah by marriage and kept passing messages between him and Nehemiah.

Claim by Claim

1. 6:1
   • Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arabian, and the rest of Nehemiah's enemies heard that Nehemiah had built the wall.
   • They heard that no breach was left in the wall.
   • At that time Nehemiah had not yet set up the doors in the gates.
2. 6:2
   • Sanballat and Geshem sent a message to Nehemiah.
   • They asked Nehemiah to come and meet with them together in one of the villages in the plain of Ono.
   • They intended to do Nehemiah harm.
3. 6:3
   • Nehemiah sent messengers to them.
   • Nehemiah said he was doing a great work.
   • Nehemiah said he could not come down.
   • Nehemiah asked why the work should stop while he left it and came down to them.
4. 6:4
   • They sent the same message to Nehemiah four times.
   • Nehemiah answered them the same way each time.
5. 6:5
   • Sanballat sent his servant to Nehemiah with the same message a fifth time.
   • The servant had an open letter in his hand.
6. 6:6
   • The letter said it was reported among the nations that Nehemiah and the Jews intended to rebel.
   • The letter said Geshem said it.
   • The letter said this was why Nehemiah was building the wall.
   • The letter said that according to these reports Nehemiah intended to be their king.
7. 6:7
   • The letter said Nehemiah had appointed prophets to proclaim about him in Jerusalem.
   • The letter said the prophets declared there is a king in Judah.
   • The letter said these reports would be told to the king.
   • The letter urged Nehemiah to come and take counsel together with them.
8. 6:8
   • Nehemiah sent a reply to him.
   • Nehemiah said no such things as he claimed had happened.
   • Nehemiah said the man was inventing them out of his own heart.
9. 6:9
   • They were all trying to make Nehemiah and his people afraid.
   • They said the workers' hands would be weakened from the work so that it would not be done.
   • Nehemiah asked God to strengthen his hands.
10. 6:10
    • Nehemiah went to the house of Shemaiah son of Delaiah son of Mehetabel.
    • Shemaiah was shut up or confined.
    • Shemaiah proposed that they meet in the house of God, inside the temple.
    • Shemaiah proposed that they shut the doors of the temple.
    • Shemaiah said men were coming to kill Nehemiah.
    • Shemaiah said they were coming by night to kill him.
11. 6:11
    • Nehemiah asked whether a man like him should flee.
    • Nehemiah asked who, being as he was, would go into the temple to save his life.
    • Nehemiah said he would not go in.
12. 6:12
    • Nehemiah recognized that God had not sent Shemaiah.
    • Nehemiah recognized that Shemaiah had spoken the prophecy against him.
    • Tobiah and Sanballat had hired Shemaiah.
13. 6:13
    • Shemaiah was hired so that Nehemiah would be afraid.
    • He was hired so that Nehemiah would act as advised and thereby sin.
    • He was hired so that they would have grounds for an evil report against Nehemiah.
    • He was hired so that they might reproach Nehemiah.
14. 6:14
    • Nehemiah asked his God to remember Tobiah and Sanballat according to these works of theirs.
    • Nehemiah asked God also to remember Noadiah the prophetess.
    • Nehemiah asked God to remember the rest of the prophets who had been trying to make him afraid.
15. 6:15
    • The wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul.
    • The wall was finished in fifty-two days.
16. 6:16
    • All Nehemiah's enemies heard of it.
    • All the surrounding nations saw it and were afraid.
    • They fell greatly in their own eyes.
    • They knew that this work had been done by Nehemiah's God.
17. 6:17
    • In those days the nobles of Judah sent many letters to Tobiah.
    • Letters from Tobiah came to them.
18. 6:18
    • Many in Judah were bound by oath to Tobiah.
    • Tobiah was the son-in-law of Shechaniah son of Arah.
    • Tobiah's son Jehohanan had taken the daughter of Meshullam son of Berechiah as his wife.
19. 6:19
    • They spoke of Tobiah's good deeds in Nehemiah's presence.
    • They reported Nehemiah's words to Tobiah.
    • Tobiah sent letters to make Nehemiah afraid.

Words Worth Explaining

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

6:1

Sanballat was the governor of Samaria, the province just north of Judah; Tobiah held office in Ammon, east of the Jordan; Geshem led an Arab confederation to the south. All three were officials of the Persian empire whose own standing would shrink if Jerusalem became a fortified city again. Doors were the last stage of the work: a gateway without hung doors cannot be shut, so until then the wall could not actually keep anyone out.

6:2

Ono lay on the coastal plain about twenty-five miles northwest of Jerusalem, roughly a day's journey away, outside the territory Nehemiah governed, in a border district where neither side held clear authority.

6:3

"Come down" is literal geography, not a figure of speech: Jerusalem sits high in the hill country, and traveling to the plain of Ono meant descending several thousand feet.

6:5

Letters were normally rolled, tied, and sealed with clay so that only the named recipient could read them. An unsealed letter carried by a servant could be read by anyone along the road, so its charges were effectively being published, a deliberate act of pressure rather than an oversight.

6:6

Gashmu is another spelling of the name Geshem, closer to the Arabic form. Judah was a province of the Persian empire, and rebuilding a city wall could be presented as preparing to revolt; rebellion was a capital charge, so the accusation was not a mere insult.

6:7

Judah had had no king of its own since Babylon destroyed Jerusalem about 140 years earlier. Prophets in Israel's history had publicly named and endorsed new kings, so "appointed prophets to announce there is a king in Judah" is an accusation of staging a claim to the throne, treason against Persia.

6:8

"Thou feignest them out of thine own heart" means you are inventing this yourself. In the King James, "heart" usually stands for a person's mind and will, the place where decisions are made, rather than for feelings.

6:9

"Strengthen my hands" and "their hands will give up" use a standard Hebrew idiom in which the hands stand for nerve and staying power. To have slack or weak hands is to lose heart; to have strengthened hands is to keep going.

6:10

The Hebrew phrase behind "shut inside his house" is unclear. It may mean Shemaiah was confined by some ritual restriction, or under some other form of seclusion, or that the detail is meant to explain why Nehemiah had to come to him. The text does not say.

6:11

The temple building itself was open only to priests; an ordinary Israelite who went inside broke the law and could be put to death. Nehemiah was not a priest, so taking the advice would have been a public offense, which is why it was offered.

6:12

A prophet was understood to be speaking a message received from God, and speaking on commission from a paying client was a recognized abuse of the role. Nehemiah's point is about who was paying Shemaiah, not about whether the danger was real.

6:13

The scheme was to get Nehemiah to commit a public, provable religious offense in a moment of panic, so that the attack on him would no longer be a rumor they had to invent but a real charge they could repeat.

6:14

"Prophetess" is not an odd term: women served as prophets in Israel alongside men, Miriam, Deborah and Huldah are named as such in earlier books. These prayers asking God to "remember" people for what they did are a recurring feature of Nehemiah's first-person account.

6:15

Elul was the sixth month of the Hebrew year, falling in late August and September. The twenty-fifth of Elul here corresponds to early October, around 445 BC.

6:16

The Hebrew says the surrounding nations "fell greatly in their own eyes", an idiom for a collapse in self-assurance and standing, not for sorrow.

6:17

The "leading men" were Judah's landowning aristocracy, the families with wealth and local influence. Their private correspondence with Tobiah ran alongside, and against, Nehemiah's official position.

6:18

Marriage between families created binding legal obligations, often sealed by oath, and those obligations outlasted the wedding. Tobiah had married into one prominent Judean family and married his son into another, so a network of men in Judah were formally bound to act in his interest. His name and his son's are both Hebrew names containing the name of Israel's God.

6:19

"Uttered my words to him" means they carried back to Tobiah whatever Nehemiah said in private. He was being praised to his face by men who were reporting on him behind his back.