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The Rebuilding of Jerusalem. In the 20th year of Artaxerxes I (445 or 444 BC), [4] Nehemiah was cup-bearer to the king. [5] Learning that the remnant of Jews in Judah were in distress and that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down, he asked the king for permission to return and rebuild the city, [6] around 13 years after Ezra's arrival in Jerusalem in ca. 458 BC. [7]
Building the Wall of Jerusalem. The Book of Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible, largely takes the form of a first-person memoir by Nehemiah, a Jew who is a high official at the Persian court, concerning the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile and the dedication of the city and its people to God's laws ().
Nehemiah was passionate for the glory of God, so even while driven by empathy, before he formulated any plan, his first response was to pray to God. [16] Eight times in his prayer, Nehemiah uses the term servant to refer himself, the Jewish people or Moses, also to begin and to close his prayer, showing his 'reverential submission' to God. [17]
When Nehemiah returned he threw Tobiah's furniture out of the temple and drove out Eliashib's grandson (Neh 13:4-9). According to David Kimhi , [ 2 ] this is the political background to the allegorical vision of Satan , the Angel of the Lord and Eliashib's (possibly deceased) grandfather Joshua the High Priest in Zechariah 3.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II occupied the Kingdom of Judah between 597–586 BCE and destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem. [3] According to the Hebrew Bible, the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, was forced to watch his sons put to death, then his own eyes were put out and he was exiled to Babylon (2 Kings 25).
[9] [10] H. E. Ryle suggests that Nehemiah is the king's "favourite cup-bearer". [11] Nehemiah is sad, and the king asks why. McConville argues that the display of a long face before the king shows three significant aspects of Nehemiah: courage, godliness and wisdom, which bear dire risk of his life (cf. Esther before Ahasuerus, Esther 4:11). [12]
With the hand of God upon Nehemiah, along with Nehemiah's far-sighted policy and cunning, he was kept out of the hands of these neighbor-foes. According to Nehemiah 13 "28, Nehemiah discovered that one of the grandsons of the current high priest, Eliashib , had married a daughter of Sanballat and was thus son-in-law of his chief enemy.
In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, it was believed that Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah came from the same author or circle of authors (similar to the traditional view which held Ezra to be the author of all three), but the usual view among modern scholars is that the differences between Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah are greater than the similarities, and that Ezra–Nehemiah itself ...