Nehemiah Rebuilds the Walls of Jerusalem
445 BC, estimated dateEstimated date
Nehemiah, cupbearer to the Persian king, is sent to Judah as governor and rebuilds the ruined walls of Jerusalem in fifty-two days against the opposition of Sanballat of Samaria. He then reforms the city’s debts, Sabbath and temple.
Nehemiah was cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I at Susa. In the king’s twentieth year his brother Hanani brought word from Judah that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down and its gates burned. Some months later the king noticed his sadness, heard his request and sent him to rebuild the city, with letters to the governors west of the Euphrates, an order for timber and a mounted escort (Nehemiah 1:1–3, 11) (Nehemiah 2:1–9).
Three days after he arrived Nehemiah rode round the ruined walls by night. Then he put his plan to the leaders, and they agreed to build (Nehemiah 2:11–18). The high priest Eliashib and the priests began at the Sheep Gate, and the work was shared out section by section (Nehemiah 3:1–5). Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arab mocked the builders and then planned an attack. From then on half of Nehemiah’s men stood guard while the others worked, and the builders wore their swords (Nehemiah 2:19) (Nehemiah 4:1–18). Sanballat tried four times to draw Nehemiah out to a meeting and then sent an open letter accusing him of planning to make himself king (Nehemiah 6:1–9). The wall was finished in fifty-two days and dedicated with music and sacrifices (Nehemiah 6:15) (Nehemiah 12:27–30, 43).
Nehemiah was governor for twelve years. When the poor complained that they were losing their fields and children to creditors, he made the nobles give back the land and stop charging interest, and he himself did not draw the governor’s food allowance (Nehemiah 5:1–18). After a visit to the king in the thirty-second year he returned to find a storeroom of the temple given over to Tobiah, the Levites unpaid, trade going on in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and Jews married to women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. He dealt with each, and drove out a grandson of the high priest who had married Sanballat’s daughter (Nehemiah 13:4–31).
Most of this is told in the first person, in what reads as Nehemiah’s own report. A papyrus from Egypt names two of the people in it. In 407 BC the Jewish garrison at Elephantine wrote to the governor of Judah for help in rebuilding its temple. The letter mentions Johanan the high priest in Jerusalem and says that the writers had also appealed to the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria (Elephantine petition to Bagohi recto 1; verso 1, 12–13).
About 180 BC Ben Sira praised Nehemiah as the one “who raised up for us the walls that were fallen” (Sirach 49:13). Jerusalem was again a walled city with a governor of its own, and the book sets the public reading of the law in the month after the wall was finished (Nehemiah 8:1–2).
How this is dated
Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.
Nehemiah dates his journey to the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes and his term as governor from the twentieth year to the thirty-second (Nehemiah 2:1; 5:14; 13:6). Three Persian kings bore that name. A letter written from Elephantine in Egypt in the seventeenth year of Darius II, 407 BC, shows which is meant. By then the Jews of Elephantine were writing to the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, and the high priest in Jerusalem was Johanan (Elephantine petition to Bagohi recto 1; verso 1, 12–13), whom the book of Nehemiah lists after Eliashib, the high priest of Nehemiah’s own day, and Eliashib’s son Joiada (Nehemiah 3:1; 12:10–11, 22). Nehemiah therefore served Artaxerxes I (465–424 BC), whose twentieth year ran from the spring of 445 BC. The wall was finished on the twenty-fifth of Elul (Nehemiah 6:15), early October 445 BC by the tables of R. A. Parker and W. H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 75 (1956).
One detail is unsettled. The book puts the month Chislev of the twentieth year before Nisan of the same year (Nehemiah 1:1; 2:1), which fits a year counted from the autumn but not the Persian year that began in spring. The news from Jerusalem may therefore have reached Nehemiah late in 446 or late in 445 BC, and the building may belong to 444; see H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah (Word Biblical Commentary, 1985). Josephus, writing five centuries later, places Nehemiah under Xerxes and says that the wall took two years and four months (Josephus, Antiquities 11.159, 168, 179).
Primary sources
Scripture
In context
Grows out of
- 458 BC, estimated date
Leads to
- about 435 BC, estimated date