Nehemiah

This is the biblical figure Nehemiah. For the canonical book of the Old Testament, see Book of Nehemiah.

Nehemiah was a Jewish cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I of Persia who obtained the king’s commission to rebuild Jerusalem’s ruined walls, served as the city’s governor, and led a series of reforms recorded in the Book of Nehemiah that bears his name.

Life and ministry

Nehemiah’s position as royal cupbearer placed him close to the Persian king’s own person, a post of real trust that explains both his access to Artaxerxes and the king’s willingness to grant him leave, safe conduct, and timber for the work he requested (Neh. 1:11-2:8). On hearing from his brother Hanani that Jerusalem’s walls lay broken and its gates burned nearly a century after the first exiles had returned under Cyrus, Nehemiah wept, fasted, and prayed for his people before petitioning the king (Neh. 1:1-11). Once in Jerusalem, in the king’s twentieth year, usually dated to 446 BC, Nehemiah organized the people by family to rebuild the wall, faced down mockery, conspiracy, and the threat of armed attack from Sanballat, Tobiah, and their allies, and completed the work in fifty-two days (Neh. 2:11-6:15). As governor he also confronted usury practiced by wealthier Jews against their poorer countrymen, halting it by his own example and by public rebuke, and later, after a return to the Persian court, came back to correct abuses including Sabbath-breaking and renewed intermarriage that had crept back in his absence (Neh. 5:1-13; 13:4-31).

A model of prayerful grief for God’s honor

Thomas Watson pointed to Nehemiah’s reaction on hearing of Jerusalem’s ruin as a pattern of true zeal for God’s name: though he held one of the most comfortable posts in the ancient world, cupbearer to an emperor, Nehemiah’s “complexion begins to alter, and he looks sad” the moment he learns that God’s own honor suffers alongside his people’s.¹ Watson read Nehemiah’s grief as proof that a believer’s sorrow over the church’s low estate is itself a way of “honouring and sanctifying” God’s name, since it shows a heart that values God’s glory above personal comfort: “What sad when the Kings Cupbearer, and Wine so near? O but it fared ill with the Church of God… therefore Nehemiah grows weary of the Court, he leaves his Wine, and mingles his Drink with weeping.”¹

Related Doctrines

• Book of Nehemiah
• Ezra
• Prayer
• Providence of God
• Jerusalem

References

1. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 424-880: “Nehemiah layes to heart the miseries of Sion, his complexion begins to alter, and he looks sad; Neh. 2.3. Why is thy countenance sad? What sad when the Kings Cupbearer, and Wine so near? O but it fared ill with the Church of God, and Religion seemed to lose ground, and Gods name suffered, therefore Nehemiah grows weary of the Court, he leaves his Wine, and mingles his Drink with weeping.” ↩ ↩²