Nehemiah5chapter 5

Nehemiah 5:1-3

The complaint rises as one voice, poor Jews crying out against their own brethren rather than against Persia, because the crisis inside the wall has turned out worse than the enemy outside it. Some have too many mouths and no food left to feed them; others have already mortgaged field, vineyard and house for corn during a dearth the enemy's siege pressure has made worse. The reproach here is Jew oppressing Jew, in the very season Nehemiah has called the whole city to build together.

Nehemiah 5:4-5

A third group has borrowed against their land simply to pay the king's tribute, a tax the whole province owed and none could refuse. Verse 5 makes the account personal: our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, yet sons and daughters are sold into bondage to make ends meet, some daughters already gone, with no power left to redeem them. Lender and borrower share one blood and one covenant, and that shared claim is the ground of the charge Nehemiah is about to bring.

Nehemiah 5:6-7

Nehemiah's anger is not impulsive: he hears the cry, and then he consults with himself before he rebukes the nobles and rulers, deliberation placed between the provocation and the act. He charges them plainly, ye exact usury every one of his brother, and answers a private wrong with a public remedy, a great assembly set against them. Wesley sets the moment beside Ezra's earlier response to a like sin, one leader reforming his people by tears and another by direct confrontation, both serving the same God by different tempers.

Nehemiah 5:8-9

Nehemiah sets his own record against theirs: we after our ability have redeemed our brethren sold to the heathen, and will ye even sell your brethren, a charge his hearers cannot answer and do not try to answer. The argument turns from fairness to piety in verse 9: it is not good that ye do, and the standard he names is the fear of our God, because of the reproach of the heathen our enemies. The watching nations outside the wall witness against usury inside it as surely as the law of Moses does, since a people who cheat one another hand their enemies a reason to mock.

Nehemiah 5:10-11

Nehemiah admits that he too might lawfully exact money and corn as governor, and gives up the right rather than merely condemning others who use it. He then calls for restitution that is immediate and total, restore even this day, land, vineyard, oliveyard and house, and the hundredth part of the money, corn, wine and oil already exacted. Naming his own claim first, and setting it aside, is the pattern the chapter carries through to his account of the governor's table later.

Nehemiah 5:12-13

The nobles agree in a single sentence, we will restore them and will require nothing of them, and Nehemiah does not trust the sentence alone: he calls the priests and takes an oath of them that they will keep the promise. He then acts out the curse with his own garment, shaking his lap and pronouncing that God so shake out every man from house and labour who breaks this word, and the whole congregation answers Amen and praises the Lord. A promise sworn before priests and sealed with a sign is followed by the plainest verse in the chapter, and the people did according to this promise.

Nehemiah 5:14-16

Nehemiah turns from the nobles' usury to his own twelve years in office, and states his own restraint plainly: I and my brethren have not eaten the bread of the governor, though the office carried the right to it. Former governors took bread, wine and forty shekels of silver from the people daily, and let their own servants rule over them besides, but Nehemiah names none of them by name and sets his own conduct beside theirs instead, so did not I, because of the fear of God. He bought no land while the wall was building, and put his own servants to work on it rather than draw wages from the poor he was governing.

Nehemiah 5:17-18

The ledger widens into a daily account: a hundred and fifty Jews and rulers ate at his table besides the foreigners who came for business or worship, and the kitchen supplied an ox, six choice sheep and fowls each day, with wine laid in every ten days. Even carrying that cost himself, he required not the bread of the governor, and the reason he names is not thrift but mercy, because the bondage was heavy upon this people. A man with the legal right to tax a struggling province instead fed a hundred and fifty of its people from his own purse.

Nehemiah 5:19

The chapter closes on a single line of prayer, the first of the memoir's prayers asking God to remember his work, a shape repeated three times as Remember me, O my God in the book's last chapter: think upon me, my God, for good, according to all that I have done for this people. Nehemiah asks nothing from the people he has just fed and defended, no repayment and no praise, and turns the whole account toward God instead. The prayer sets the pattern the memoir keeps to its last chapter, a governor's ledger kept before God rather than before men.