Nehemiahchapter 5
19 verses · BSBNehemiah book hub →
Speaks with:Nehemiah 13×5Leviticus 25×5Ezra 4×2Psalms 37×2Exodus 22×2Isaiah 5×1
Summary
Chapter summary
The threat turns inward. A great cry rises from the people against their own brethren: fields, vineyards, and houses mortgaged for grain and for the king's tribute, sons and daughters brought into bondage. Nehemiah is very angry, holds a great assembly, and confronts the nobles: 'Ye exact usury, every one of his brother… Ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God?' They agree to restore the lands and the money, and he shakes out his lap as a sign against any who fails to perform it; the assembly says Amen and praises Jehovah. Then his own accounting: twelve years as governor without eating the bread of the governor, because the bondage was heavy upon the people.
Context
History · Nehemiah — Nehemiah overview
- A. 1–5 A great cry: our children are as theirs, yet we sell them into bondage
- B. 6–13 Restore it to them this day, and the assembly answers Amen
- C. 14–19 Twelve years as governor without eating the governor's bread
The outline
A.A great cry: our children are as theirs, yet we sell them into bondagevv. 1 to 5
Read vv. 1 to 5 →B.Restore it to them this day, and the assembly answers Amenvv. 6 to 13
Read vv. 6 to 13 →C.Twelve years as governor without eating the governor's breadvv. 14 to 19
Read vv. 14 to 19 →
The world behind this chapter
Nehemiah 5The history
The complaint comes in three tiers, and each is an economic snapshot. Large families with no grain in a famine year. Families mortgaging fields, vineyards and houses to buy food. And families borrowing money specifically to pay the king's tribute against their land — Persian provincial taxation was assessed in silver and had to be paid whether the harvest came in or not.
The end of that road was debt slavery, which the law allowed but hedged about with limits. Children were being sold into servitude, and some daughters already were, by creditors who were their own countrymen and nobles.
Nehemiah's remedy is a public restoration — return the fields, vineyards, oliveyards and houses, and the hundredth part of the money and grain — sworn before the priests, with a symbolic shaking-out of the lap as a curse on anyone who breaks it. He also states his own record as governor: for twelve years he did not take the governor's food allowance, though earlier governors had "laid burdens upon the people," and he fed a hundred and fifty men at his table daily out of his own resources.
What it meant to them
The rebuke lands where the workers could not have expected it. The wall was going up against enemies outside, and the community was being hollowed out by lenders inside.
His argument is reputational and covenantal at once: "ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the heathen our enemies?" A people who bought their brothers' children back from foreigners and then enslaved them themselves had no standing to talk about anything.
Sources cited
- Edwin Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible
- K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
- Alfred Edersheim, Bible History: Old Testament (public domain)
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Nehemiah 5. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.