Nehemiah 4:1

The chapter before this one, Nehemiah 3, is a long roll of families and groups, each repairing its own stretch of the wall in good order. The “But” that opens chapter 4 turns from that scene to the men outside who hated it. The work was going well, and that is exactly the news Sanballat heard: “we builded the wall”, where bânâh is the plain verb for building and chôwmâh is a city’s wall of protection.

The year is about 445 BC, in the reign of Artaxerxes I of Persia. Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem’s walls in 586 BC. Jews had been returning for nearly a century, first under Zerubbabel and Joshua (Ezra 1–6) and then with Ezra about thirteen years before this (Ezra 7–10), and still the city lay open to raids and to the contempt of its neighbours. Nehemiah, cupbearer to the king, had been told that the wall was broken down and the people were in great reproach (Nehemiah 1:3). He wept, fasted and prayed (Nehemiah 1:4), asked God to prosper him before the king (Nehemiah 1:11), and came with royal permission to call the people to rise up and build (Nehemiah 2:17–18). A city’s wall in that day was its security and also its honour, a sign of its strength and of the standing of the God its people served. So rebuilding it restored the safety, the identity and the worship of God’s covenant people.

Sanballat the Horonite was most likely the governor of Samaria, the region north of Judah, serving under Persia in the province called Beyond the River. With him stood Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arabian. A fortified Jerusalem meant a stronger Judah, and they took that as a threat to their own power in the region. Their dislike was already on record. When Nehemiah first arrived, it grieved Sanballat and Tobiah that someone had come to seek the good of Israel (Nehemiah 2:10), and when the building was announced they laughed the Jews to scorn (Nehemiah 2:19). Politics explains part of this anger. Beneath it lies hostility to what God was doing for his people and his city, and that is why progress in the work stirred it up.

Three words describe Sanballat’s reaction, and they grow in force. “He was wroth” is chârâh, a verb for anger kindling and blazing up, which Scripture uses both of God’s anger and of man’s. “Took great indignation” joins kaʻaç, to be vexed or angry, with râbâh, to increase or make great, so his vexation was large. Then the anger comes out of his mouth: he “mocked the Jews”. The verb lâʻag means to deride, to laugh someone to scorn, and it can carry the idea of mimicking a foreigner’s speech.

Sanballat speaks “before his brethren and the army of Samaria”. The word for brethren, ʼâch, is the ordinary word for a brother and here means his own people. Chayil, “army”, is a word for strength, ability or wealth that also names a military force. His contempt is therefore public and official, spoken with armed men listening, which told the Jews that force stood behind the laughter. He asks five questions, and each expects the answer that the Jews will fail.

“What do these feeble Jews?” The word ʼămêlâl means languid, drooping, without vigour. He fastens it to Yᵉhûwdîy, “Jews”, as a label, and asks what such people could possibly do, using ʻâsâh, the broadest Hebrew verb for doing or making.

“Will they fortify themselves?” The verb here is ʻâzab, a word of wide range that covers loosening, relinquishing and forsaking, and that the KJV renders “fortify” in this place. Sanballat is sneering at the idea that these people could make themselves secure.

“Will they sacrifice?” Zâbach means to slaughter an animal, usually as a sacrifice. The jibe can be taken in more than one way, and each fits his tone. He may be mocking their devotion, as if they thought offerings would raise the wall for them. He may be picturing a dedication sacrifice for a wall that will never be finished, or offerings made to gain strength for the work. In every case he is laughing at their trust in God.

“Will they make an end in a day?” Kâlâh means to finish or bring to an end, and yôwm is the common word for a day. A city wall was a work of years, and he ridicules their eagerness as the hurry of people who have no idea what they have taken on.

“Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of the rubbish which are burned?” This is the sharpest of the five. Châyâh means to live, and in this form to bring back to life, so he speaks of the stones (ʼeben) as dead things that would need a resurrection. They lie in heaps (ʻârêm) of rubbish, where ʻâphâr is the usual word for dust or loose earth, and they are burned (sâraph). The Babylonian fire had left charred debris that was hard to reuse, and Nehemiah himself had described the city as lying waste (Nehemiah 2:17–18).

There is an irony here that Sanballat could not see. Everything he says about the builders’ weakness is the very thing that gives God the glory when the wall is finished (Nehemiah 6:15). To underrate God’s people is to underrate their God. The word to Zerubbabel generations earlier had been “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit” (Zechariah 4:6), and Paul says that God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, so that no flesh should glory in his presence (1 Corinthians 1:27–29). The builders could have answered Sanballat with the psalm: “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” (Psalm 118:6).

Tobiah the Ammonite “was by him”, standing at Sanballat’s side, so the two speak as allies. He was a man of rank, probably an official in the Ammonite territory east of the Jordan. His name, Ṭôwbîyâh, means “goodness of Jehovah”, and he spends it opposing the LORD’s work.

His joke narrows Sanballat’s scorn to the quality of the building: “if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall”. Shûwʻâl means a fox or a jackal, a small, light animal. Tobiah says that one of them trotting along the top would bring the wall down. The verb pârats means to breach or break through, so he pictures a collapse. He calls it “their stone wall”, chôwmâh with ʼeben, and the grand phrase is sarcasm, since in his telling it is a loose pile of rubble. The taunt also carries a second insult. A work that a fox could ruin hardly deserves a real enemy’s attention.

God’s people had heard this kind of thing before and would hear it again. Israel could say that she had been afflicted many times from her youth and that her enemies had still failed to prevail against her (Psalm 129:1–3).

Nehemiah’s next words are addressed to God. The narrative records the prayer without any introduction, as if he turned from the taunts straight to heaven: “Hear, O our God”. This is his habit throughout the book, from his first days of weeping and fasting onward. He calls on “our God”, the God of the covenant who has bound himself to this people, and he lays the plain fact before him: “we are despised”. The word bûzâh means contempt, a thing scorned. He is telling God how things stand, and he trusts that God defends those who are despised for doing his will.

Verse 6 is the true answer to the mockers. “So built we the wall” comes directly after the prayer, and the “we” is the whole community of chapter 3, each group at its own section. “All the wall was joined together” uses qâshar, to tie or bind, so the separate stretches were now knit into one continuous line around the city. “Unto the half thereof” uses chêtsîy, half or middle, and means that the wall had reached half its height all the way round.

The reason given is “for the people had a mind to work”. The Hebrew for “mind” is lēḇ, the heart, which in Scripture is the centre of the whole person: thought, will and affection together. The phrase is literally “a heart to do”, with ʻâsâh, the same verb Sanballat used when he asked what these feeble Jews were doing. They were willing from the inside, and so the taunts aimed at their spirit missed. Prayer and labour go together in this verse. The same people who asked God to act picked up their stones and built.

Such willingness is itself God’s gift. Paul writes that it is “God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13), and God promised through Ezekiel to give his people a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26). Proverbs adds that the plans of the diligent lead to plenty (Proverbs 21:5). The story then goes on to the next round of opposition, when the enemies plot to attack, and finally to the day the wall is finished (Nehemiah 6:15).

The scorn poured on the builders points forward to the scorn poured on Christ. He too looked feeble by the world’s measure, and at the cross passers-by, priests and the thieves beside him all mocked him (Matthew 27:39–44). He was the one the psalm calls a reproach of men and despised of the people (Psalm 22:6). Where Nehemiah prayed that his enemies’ sin would stay unforgiven, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34).

Nehemiah’s longing for justice and Jesus’s prayer for mercy meet at the cross. Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and for all who believe he has blotted out the record that stood against us (Colossians 2:14). In the same act he triumphed openly over the powers that opposed him (Colossians 2:15). His resurrection turned the reproach of the cross into glory, and God has highly exalted the one who humbled himself to death, so that every knee shall bow to him (Philippians 2:8–11). He will also judge the world in righteousness on the day God has appointed (Acts 17:31), so the justice Nehemiah asked for will be done.

Christ is a builder as well. “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). He has broken down the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14) and is raising a house with himself as the chief corner stone (Ephesians 2:20). Its stones are people. Sanballat asked whether burned stones could be made to live, and Peter calls believers “lively stones” built up into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), people once dead in sin and now made alive. As on Nehemiah’s wall, the body grows as every part does its share (Ephesians 4:16).

This passage tells us ahead of time that work done for God draws scorn, and that the scorn often grows as the work goes forward. Jesus said the same to his disciples, that the world which hated him would hate them also (John 15:18–20), and he called those who are reviled for his sake blessed (Matthew 5:11–12). Peter tells believers to count such trials as a share in Christ’s sufferings and to be unashamed of bearing his name (1 Peter 4:12–16). So ridicule for faithfulness is something Scripture has prepared us for, and it measures neither the worth of the work nor God’s pleasure in it.

It also shows us where the scorn can be taken. Nehemiah carried it to God, said honestly that it hurt, left the judging to him, and went back to the wall. God heard, and the wall rose. He is the same God now, and he sees every contemptuous word spoken against his people.

And it shows what God does with a willing heart. The builders were as weak as Sanballat said, and the wall was half built anyway. Paul’s words stand over all such labour: be steadfast and always abounding in the work of the Lord, because that labour is never in vain in him (1 Corinthians 15:58), and “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9). Jesus has told us where our peace lies when opposition comes: in him, who has overcome the world (John 16:33).