Bibelkommentare

The king and the queen, who was sitting near him ( שׁגל , Psalms 45:10), grant him permission to depart after he has, in answer to their inquiry, fixed the period of his absence. Nehemiah makes the result of the conversation, “And it pleased the king,” etc., follow immediately upon the question of the king and queen: For how long shall thy journey be, and when wilt thou return? before telling us what was his answer to this question, which is not brought in till afterwards, so that זמן לו ואתּנה must be understood as expressing: since I had determined the time.

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Nehemiah delivered the letter when he came to the governors on this side Euphrates. The king had also sent with him captains of the army and horsemen. The second half of Nehemiah 2:9 contains a supplementary remark, so that ויּשׁלח must be expressed by the pluperfect. Ezra had been ashamed to request a military escort from the Persian monarch ( Ezra 8:22); but the king gave to the high dignitary called Pecha a guard of soldiers, who certainly remained with him in Jerusalem also for his protection (Ezra 4:17). Besides these, there were in his retinue his brethren, i.e., either relations or fellow-countrymen, and servants, comp. Nehemiah 4:10; Nehemiah 5:10. That this retinue is not mentioned in the present verses, is owing to the fact that the journey itself is not further described, but only indirectly alluded to.

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When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite heard of his coming, it caused them great annoyance ( להם ירע is strengthened by גּדולה רעה , as in Jonah 4:1) that a man (as Nehemiah expresses himself ironically from their point of view) was come to seek the welfare of the children of Israel. Sanballat is called the Horonite either after his birthplace or place of residence, yet certainly not from Horonaim in Moab, as older expositors imagined (Isaiah 15:5; Jeremiah 48:34), since he would then have been called a Moabite, but from either the upper or nether Beth-horon, formerly belonging to the tribe of Ephraim (Joshua 16:3, Joshua 16:5; Joshua 18:13), and therefore in the time of Nehemiah certainly appertaining to the region of the Samaritans (Berth.). Tobiah the Ammonite is called העבד , the servant, probably as being a servant or official of the Persian king. These two individuals were undoubtedly influential chiefs of the neighbouring hostile nations of Samaritans and Ammonites, and sought by alliances with Jewish nobles (Nehemiah 6:17; Nehemiah 13:4, Nehemiah 13:28) to frustrate, whether by force or stratagem, the efforts of Ezra and Nehemiah for the internal and external security of Judah. Nehemiah mentions thus early their annoyance at his arrival, by way of hinting beforehand at their subsequent machinations to delay the fortifying of Jerusalem.

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“And I went out by night by the valley-gate, and towards the dragon-well, and to the dung-gate.” אל־פּני , in the direction towards. The dragon-well only occurs here by this name. Judging from its position between the valley-gate and the dung-gate, it is either identical with the well of Gihon (Robinson, Palestine, ii. p. 166), whose waters supply the upper and lower pools in the valley of Gihon, the present Birket el Mamilla and Birket es Sultan, or situate in its immediate neighbourhood. The valley-gate is the modern gate of the city leading to the valley of Gihon, and situated at or near the present Jaffa gate; see rem. on Nehemiah 3:13. The dung-gate ( האשׁפּת שׁער ), which in Nehemiah 3:13 also is placed next the valley-gate, and was a thousand cubits distant therefrom, must be sought for on the south-western side of Zion, where a road, to the south of Nebi Dâûd and the Zion gate, now descends into the valley of Hinnom, towards Sûr Baher. “And I viewed the walls of Jerusalem which lay broken down, and its gates which were consumed by fire.” The word שׁבר , which the lxx read, “I was breaking down,” gives no tolerable sense; for it cannot mean, I broke through the walls, or, I made a path through the ruins. Many MSS, however, and several editions, offer שׂבר ; and R. Norzi informs us that D. Kimchi and Aben Ezra read שׁבר . שׂבר , of which only the Piel occurs in Hebrew, answers to the Aramaean סבר , to look to something; and to the Arabic sbr , to investigate; and ב סבר means to look on, to consider, to direct the eyes and thoughts to some object. In the open מ of הם Hiller conjectures that there is a trace of another reading, perhaps מפרצים ; comp. Nehemiah 1:3.

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“And I went on to the fountain-gate, and to the king's pool, and there was no room for the beast to come through under me.” The very name of the fountain-or well-gate points to the foundation of Siloah (see rem. on Nehemiah 3:15); hence it lay on the eastern declivity of Zion, but not in the district or neighbourhood of the present Bâb el Mogharibeh, in which tradition finds the ancient dung-gate, but much farther south, in the neighbourhood of the pool of Siloah; see rem. on Nehemiah 3:15. The King's pool is probably the same which Josephus ( bell. Jud. v. 4. 2) calls Σολομῶνος κολυμβήθρα , and places east of the spring of Siloah, and which is supposed by Robinson ( Palestine, ii. pp. 149, 159) and Thenius ( das vorexil. Jerus., appendix to a commentary on the books of the Kings, p. 20) to be the present Fountain of the Virgin. Bertheau, however, on the other hand, rightly objects that the Fountain of the Virgin lying deep in the rock, and now reached by a descent of thirty steps, could not properly be designated a pool. He tries rather to identify the King's pool with the outlet of a canal investigated by Tobler ( Topogr. i. p. 91f.), which the latter regards as a conduit for rain-water, fluid impurities, or even the blood of sacrificed animals; but Bertheau as an aqueduct which, perhaps at the place where its entrance is now found, once filled a pool, of which, indeed, no trace has as yet been discovered. But apart from the difficulty of calling the outlet of a canal a pool (Arnold in Herzog's Realencycl. xviii. p. 656), the circumstance, that Tobler could find in neither of the above-described canals any trace of high antiquity, tells against this conjecture. Much more may be said in favour of the view of E. G. Schultz ( Jerusalem, p. 58f.), that the half-choked-up pool near Ain Silwan may be the King's pool and Solomon's pool; for travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention a piscina grandis foras and natatoria Siloë at the mouth of the fountain of Siloah (comp. Leyrer in Herzog's Realencycl. xvi. p. 372). See also rem. on Nehemiah 3:15. Here there was no room for the beast to get through, the road being choked up with the ruins of the walls that had been destroyed, so that Nehemiah was obliged to dismount.

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Then I (went on) ascending the valley and viewing the wall, and so entered by the valley-gate, and returned. ואהי with the participle expresses the continuance of an action, and hence in this place the continuous ascent of the valley and survey of the wall. The נחל which he ascended was doubtless the valley of Kidron ( קדרון נחל , 2 Samuel 20:23; 1 Kings 2:37, and elsewhere). ואבוא ואשׁוּב are connected, שׁוּב expressing merely the idea of repetition (Gesenius, heb. Gram. §142, 3): I came again into the valley-gate. Older expositors incorrectly explain these words to mean, I turned round, traversing again the road by which I had come; Bertheau: I turned to go farther in a westerly direction, and after making the circuit of the entire city, I re-entered by the valley-gate. This sense is correct as to fact, but inadmissible, as requiring too much to complete it. If we take אשׁוּב adverbially, these completions are unnecessary. Nehemiah does not give the particulars of the latter portion of his circuit, but merely tells us that after having ascended the valley of Kidron, he re-entered by the valley-gate, and returned to his residence, obviously assuming, that from the upper part of the vale of Kidron he could only return to the valley-gate at the west by passing along the northern part of the wall.

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To gain the favourable regard of the assembly for his design, he informs them how God had so far prospered his undertaking: I told them of the hand of my God, that it = that the hand my God had graciously provided for me, i.e., that God had so graciously arranged my journey to Jerusalem; and the king's words that he had spoken to me, sc. with respect to the building of the wall, of which we are told Nehemiah 2:8 only thus much, that the king gave orders to the keeper of the royal forest to give him wood for building. Encouraged by this information, the assembly exclaimed, “Let us arise and build;” and “they strengthened their hands for good,” i.e., they vigorously set about the good work.

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