The Wall in Fifty-Two Days

Susa was a long way from Jerusalem — hundreds of miles east, in the country of Persia. In the palace there a Jewish man named Nehemiah was the king’s cupbearer: he carried in the wine and tasted it first, and a cupbearer is a man a king trusts. One winter his brother Hanani came with some men from Judah, and Nehemiah asked what he always wanted to know: how were the people who had come home from the captivity, and how was Jerusalem? “The ones who are left are in great trouble, and everybody looks down on them. And the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.” And Nehemiah sat down where he was and cried. For days he mourned. He would not eat, and he prayed to the God of heaven. “I beg you, Lord, God of heaven — the great and fearful God, who keeps his mercy for the people who love him. We have sinned against you; I have, and my father’s house has. But you told Moses that if we turned back to you, you would gather us from the end of the sky and bring us to the place you chose. Give your servant success today, and make this man kind to me.” The man he meant was the king.

It was four months before his chance came. In the month of Nisan he carried the wine in. There was nobody else in the room, and the king looked up at him and said, “Why is your face sad? You are not sick. This is nothing but a sadness of the heart.” Nehemiah was very greatly afraid — a cupbearer does not bring his troubles into that room. But he said, “May the king live forever. Why should my face not be sad, when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and fire has eaten its gates?” “What is it you are asking for?” And in the moment before he answered, Nehemiah prayed — a prayer nobody heard. Then he said, “If it please the king, send me to Judah, to the city where my fathers are buried, and I will build it again.” The king asked how long the journey would take; Nehemiah named a date, and the king said yes — and gave him letters for the governors beyond the River, and a letter to the keeper of the king’s forest for timber. Afterwards Nehemiah wrote down why: the good hand of my God was on me.

So he went, with the king’s letters and a troop of the king’s horsemen. And when Sanballat, a great man in Samaria, and Tobiah the Ammonite heard of it, it made them sick: somebody had come looking for good for the children of Israel. Nehemiah reached Jerusalem and did nothing at all for three days. He told nobody what God had put into his heart. Then, in the middle of the night, he got up and took a few men with him. There was one animal in the party, the one he was riding. They went out by the Valley Gate and down to the Dung Gate, and Nehemiah looked at the wall in the dark: broken along its whole length, its gates burned away to nothing. At the King’s Pool the fallen stone lay so deep the animal could not get through, so he went on up the ravine on foot and came back before it was light. Nobody knew where he had been — not the priests, not the nobles, not one of the men who would do the work.

In the morning he told them. “You see the trouble we are in. Jerusalem lies waste, and its gates have been given to the fire. Come — let us build the wall, and we will not be laughed at any more.” And he told them how the hand of God had been good to him, and what the king had said. Then: “Let us get up and build.” And their hands were made strong for the work. Then Sanballat heard, and Tobiah, and Geshem the Arab, and they came and laughed in their faces. “What is this thing you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?” “The God of heaven will give us success. We are his servants, and we will build. But you have no share in Jerusalem, and no right in it, and nothing in it with your name on.”

Then they built. Eliashib the high priest and his brothers began at the Sheep Gate and hung its doors. Next to them, the men of Jericho. The sons of Hassenaah built the Fish Gate and set up its doors and its bolts and its bars. And next to them, and next to them, and next to them, all the way around the city. One builder made perfume for a living, two were goldsmiths, and a man called Shallum repaired his piece with his daughters. And over and over it was the same small thing: he made repairs opposite his own house. Each family took the wall in front of their own door. In one town it went wrong: the people of Tekoa worked, and the nobles of Tekoa would not put their necks to it.

Sanballat was very angry when he saw the wall going up, and he made a joke about it in front of the army of Samaria. “Look at that. Is this the strength of Samaria — that these Jews are building their own city again?” And Tobiah, at his elbow, said, “If a fox went up on that wall of theirs, he would knock the stones down.” And Nehemiah prayed: “Hear us, our God. We have become a thing to sneer at. Turn their scorn back on their own heads.” And the wall went higher, and the gaps in it began to close up.

That was when it stopped being funny. Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites gathered to come and fight Jerusalem. So the builders prayed, and set watchmen day and night. And they were tired. The men of Judah said, “The strength of the carriers is broken, and there is too much rubble. We will never build this wall.” And the men who hated them were saying to each other, “They will not know and they will not see, until we are in among them and have stopped the work.” And the Jews living out near them kept coming in to say the attack was coming from every side.

So Nehemiah stationed people in the low ground behind the wall, family by family, with their swords and spears and bows. Then he stood up and said, “Do not be afraid of them. Remember our God, who is great and fearful, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your houses.” Their enemies heard that the plan was known and that God had broken it up, and everybody went back to the wall, each man to his own work. But not the way they had before. From that day half of them built and half stood ready with spears and shields and bows. The men carrying stone carried it with one hand and a weapon in the other, every builder laid his stones with a sword at his waist, and beside Nehemiah stood the man with the horn. “The work is wide and great, and we are spread out along the wall, far from each other. Wherever you hear the horn, come running to us. Our God will fight for us.” They worked from dawn until the stars came out, and the men who lived outside slept inside the city. In all that time not one of them took off his clothes.

And then the wall became the smaller of Nehemiah’s troubles, because a great outcry went up inside the city, from the people and their wives, against their own brothers the Jews. “We are putting up our fields and our vineyards and our houses to get grain, and we borrowed silver to pay the king’s tax. Our brothers are the same flesh as we are — and here we are handing over our own sons and daughters to be slaves. Some of our daughters are slaves already, and our fields belong to the nobles now.” Nehemiah was very angry. He thought hard about it first. Then he called a great assembly against the nobles and the officers, and said it in front of everybody: “Are you each of you charging your own brother for a loan? We have been buying our brothers the Jews back out of slavery from the nations — and you are selling your own brothers!” And they were silent. They could not find one word to answer. “What you are doing is not good. Give it back today — their fields, their vineyards, their olive trees, their houses — and the silver and the grain and the wine and the oil you have taken from them.” The nobles said they would give it back and ask nothing. He made them swear it in front of the priests. Then he shook out the fold of his robe, the way you shake out crumbs, and said, “So may God shake out every man who does not keep this word — out of his house and out of his work. Shaken out, and left with nothing.” And the whole assembly said, “Amen,” and praised the Lord. And the people did it. He was governor for twelve years and never took the food a governor was allowed to take from the people, because their load was heavy enough. He bought no land, and fed a hundred and fifty Jews at his own table every day. And in his own book he wrote, “Remember me, my God, for good, for everything I have done for this people.”

The wall was standing now; only the doors were not hung. And Sanballat and Geshem sent Nehemiah a very polite message. “Come, and let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain of Ono.” Ono was a long way off, out on the flat, with nobody about. They meant to do him harm. And Nehemiah sent back this answer: “I am doing a great work, and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” They sent the same invitation four times. They got the same answer four times. The fifth time the servant brought the letter open in his hand, unsealed so that anybody on the road could read it. It said everyone was saying Nehemiah meant to revolt and make himself king, and that the king of Persia would hear of it. “Nothing has happened like these words you are saying. You are making them up out of your own heart.” What they wanted was for the builders’ hands to go slack. And Nehemiah wrote: so I made my hands strong. Then a man named Shemaiah, shut up in his house, said to him, “Let us meet in the house of God, inside it, and shut the doors, because they are coming tonight to kill you.” “And who is the man like me who would go into the house of God to save his own life?” He saw it plainly: God had not sent Shemaiah. Tobiah and Sanballat had paid him, so that Nehemiah would be frightened and hide and sin, and give them something to sneer at. Others tried to frighten him too, a prophetess called Noadiah among them.

The wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul — fifty-two days. And when their enemies heard of it, and the nations round about looked at it, they were afraid and went down a long way in their own eyes; and they knew that this work had been done by our God. Nehemiah hung the doors in the gates and set the gatekeepers and the singers and the Levites in their places, and gave the city into the hands of two men he trusted, one of them his brother Hanani. Inside that wall the city was wide and large, with hardly any people in it, and most of the houses never built again. Jerusalem had a wall around it at last. What it did not have yet was almost everything else.