Nehemiah 5 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
445 BC, during the wall project, within Nehemiah's first term as governor of Judah, which ran from 445 to 433 BC
Location
Jerusalem and the surrounding farming villages of the province of Judah
Audience
Jews in restored Jerusalem, a community in which wealthy families and poor farmers lived side by side
Situation
Poorer Judeans protest that famine and the Persian tax have forced them to mortgage fields and sell children into debt slavery to their own wealthier countrymen. Nehemiah confronts the nobles, makes them swear to return the property and cancel the interest, and refuses to draw the governor's food allowance himself.
Key Background
Debt slavery was legal and normal across the ancient world: a family that could not repay handed over land, then labor, then children, and the law of Moses limited the practice but never abolished it. Persia collected tribute in silver, which forced farmers to sell grain or borrow cash at exactly the wrong point in the season, so imperial taxation drove much of this crisis. Provincial governors were funded by levying food and money from the population they ruled, an entirely expected perk, which is why Nehemiah's decision to feed 150 officials at his own table without taking that allowance is presented as extraordinary rather than merely decent.
Now there was a huge from the common people and their wives against their fellow Jews.
Some were saying, "We have large families. We need grain just to eat and stay alive."
Others were saying, "We're mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our homes just to get grain during this famine."
Still others were saying, "We've had to borrow money against our fields and vineyards to pay the
flesh and blood is the same as countrymen's. children are the same as theirs. Yet here we are, and Some of have already been enslaved, and we're powerless to do anything because fields and vineyards belong to others now."
When I heard their outcry and these complaints, I was furious.
I thought it through carefully, and then I confronted the nobles and the officials. I told them, "You are to your own people!" And I called a large assembly to deal with them.
I said to them, "We've done everything we could to buy back our Jewish brothers and sisters who were sold to foreign nations. And now you're selling your own people, only for them to be sold back to us?" They were silent. They couldn't find a word to say.
Then I said, "What you're doing is not right. Shouldn't you live in for to avoid the mockery of enemies, the non-Jewish nations around us?
I and my brothers and my men have also been lending the people money and grain. But let's stop charging interest!
Give back to them right now—today—their fields, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their homes, and also the percentage you've been charging them on the money, the grain, the new wine, and the olive oil."
They said, "We'll give it back. We won't demand anything more from them. We'll do exactly what you say." Then I called the priests and made the nobles and officials take a to do what they had promised.
I also out the of my and said, "May God shake out every man from his house and his property who doesn't keep this promise — shaken out and emptied just like this!" The whole assembly said, "Yes! Let it be so!" And they And the people did as they promised.
Also, from the day King Artaxerxes appointed me as in the land of Judah — from the twentieth year to the thirty-second year, twelve years total — neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the
The governors before me had burdened the people heavily — they had taken food and wine from them, plus forty shekels of silver. Even their servants lorded it over the people. But I didn't do that, because I
I also devoted myself to working on this wall. We didn't buy any land. And all my servants were gathered there for the work.
At my table there were a hundred and fifty Jewish officials, plus those who came to us from the surrounding nations.
What was prepared daily at my expense: one ox, six choice sheep, and poultry, plus every ten days an abundant supply of all kinds of wine. Yet I never demanded the because the demands on these people were already heavy enough.
me my God, for everything I've done for this people."