Today, I am reading and commenting on Nehemiah 4-6.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

I want to start with something Nehemiah wrote in chapter five verse seventeen. “Moreover, there were at my table 150 men, Jews and officials, besides those who came to us from the nations that were around us.”  I am touching on this because I think it gives insight into the relationship between the returned exiles (whom Nehemiah refers to as “Jews”) and the nations around them.  I think that this here goes along with the Ezra 6:21 where we are told that the people of the land who separated themselves from unclean practices were allowed to eat of the Passover lamb.  Here Nehemiah accepted at his table to eat with him those who came to them from the nations around them.  These were some of those who had left the practices of the peoples of the land and joined with the practices of the Jews.  I am mentioning this because I think it provides context to later passages in Nehemiah which could be read as looking down on the peoples of the land for being the peoples of the land, when this, and the passage from Ezra chapter six, suggest that the separation was about the actions of the people who were rejected, not who they were by birth.

Having written that I want to go back and look at why Nehemiah’s defenses worked.  I have always wondered why Nehemiah’s defenses worked in the face of overwhelming odds.  It struck me today that all along I have missed something.  Nehemiah’s enemies, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem, knew that Nehemiah had the support of Artaxerxes.  So their plan was to sabotage the wall, and kill some of the workers, then escape without being identified.  Nehemiah’s defensive plans meant that they could not accomplish that final piece of the plan.  Their planned attack would have been interpreted by Artaxerxes as rebellion against him.  If it could be tracked back to them, Artaxerxes would have sent his army against them.  Nehemiah’s enemies had sufficient strength to defeat Nehemiah, but not sufficient to stand against the king of Persia.  There are more lessons here than this, but it teaches us an important lesson.  We do not need to be able to withstand opposition.  God just calls us to stand up against it to do His will.  This passage shows us how standing up for what is right can succeed even when we lack the strength to stop our opposition.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.