Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Nehemiah · About this commentary
What Are These Feeble Jews Doing?
Nehemiah 4:1-9
1 But when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry, and was very indignant, and mocked the Jews. · WEB
The mockery is quoted at length and answered in prayer rather than in kind, and the chapter's method-verse pairs the prayer with a watch schedule.
What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they fortify themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, since they are burned?
Sanballat's speech is preserved in full, five questions long, delivered before his brothers and the army of Samaria — mockery as a public performance, with a garrison for an audience. And the questions are craftier than they sound: burned limestone really does crumble, and a rubble heap really is a poor quarry. The sneer is built on a true engineering problem, which is what gives it its sting.
Tobiah's contribution is the one history remembers: if a fox climbed up it, he would break down their stone wall. The image is chosen for lightness — not an army, a fox.
What answers the mockery is not a speech. It is a prayer, and it is not a gentle one: hear, our God, for we are despised. Turn back their reproach on their own head... don't cover their iniquity Nehemiah 4:4–5.
The prayer should be read for what it is: the builders' anger carried to God instead of across the valley. Nehemiah asks God not to forgive — and the request is left standing in the record, unrevised, like the psalms of the same temperature. What the prayer does not do is reach for a weapon or stop the work, and the next verse is the answer mockery actually received: so we built the wall; and all the wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.
The last clause is the chapter's quiet center. The people had a mind to work — morale, the one thing the mockery was engineered to destroy, held.
So the enemies escalate. Ridicule having failed, verse 7 assembles a coalition from every compass point — Samaria north, Ammon east, Arabians south, Ashdod west — and the plan turns physical: to come and fight against Jerusalem, and to cause confusion.
And verse 9 answers with the sentence that is the whole book's method: but we made our prayer to our God, and set a watch against them day and night because of them. One verse, two clauses, no tension between them. Prayer and sentries — the book never chooses, and never apologizes for refusing to.
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