Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Nehemiah · About this commentary
Ready to Pardon
Nehemiah 9:16-31
16 “But they and our fathers behaved proudly, hardened their neck, didn’t listen to your commandments, · WEB
The history turns into a cycle told four times over, and the prayer's hinge is a description of God quoted from Sinai itself.
But they and our fathers behaved proudly, hardened their neck, didn't listen to your commandments.
The turn comes exactly where the history requires it, and the prayer's honesty is structural: the generation that saw the wonders is the generation that appointed a captain to return to their bondage — nostalgic for Egypt with the sea barely behind them.
And then the hinge on which the entire prayer swings: but you are a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and didn't forsake them Nehemiah 9:17.
That is Sinai's own self-description — the words proclaimed to Moses in the cleft of the rock — quoted back to their speaker by the descendants of every generation that tested them. The phrase ready to pardon is this prayer's own addition to the formula: pardon not as concession but as readiness, God leaning toward the verdict before it is asked for. Even the golden calf — this is your God who brought you up out of Egypt, quoted in full — could not cancel the pillar of cloud, the Spirit given to instruct, the manna, the water. The prayer's accounting of the wilderness ends in a line of astonishing tenderness: forty years you sustained them... their clothes didn't grow old, and their feet didn't swell.
Then the land — cities taken, houses full, cisterns dug by other hands, so they ate, were filled, became fat — and the cycle the judges' era ran on, told in a single breathless loop: disobedience, cast your law behind their back, prophets killed; deliverance into enemies' hands; a cry; you heard from heaven; saviors sent. But after they had rest, they did evil again — and the loop runs again, many times, the prayer says, declining to count.
The summary verdict on centuries of prophetic ministry is one clause: yet they would not listen. And the exile follows as the cycle's last turn: you gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands.
But the paragraph will not end there, because the history did not: nevertheless in your manifold mercies you didn't make a full end of them, nor forsake them; for you are a gracious and merciful God Nehemiah 9:31.
The formula returns at the close. Between its two occurrences stands the whole national record — and the prayer's argument is that the formula outlasted the record.
settled What this mark means