Nehemiah 2:11 Commentary and Bible Study

Just as we begin to think he took three day’s rest to get over the three-to-four-month journey from Persia, from Susa, we discover what he was beginning to doing during these three days. He got down to business immediately. ‘And I arose in the night,’ – it's obvious to us that this is something he is doing secretly – ‘I and some few men with me.’ There are only a few. They were among the party that came from Susa to Jerusalem with Nehemiah, and they could be trusted. He has got to be careful of others. ‘Neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem.’ There is a new governor. What is he here for? people would have asked. Nehemiah didn't make any fanfare or any announcements, until after his survey. ‘Neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.’ Presumably the men that accompanied him went on foot. That would be to keep this mission quiet. He didn't want the noise of animals, other than his own. So it's a secret survey in the night. And he describes the tour of the city, and we must try to imagine it from Nehemiah’s point of view. ‘I went out by night.’ He had heard all about the desolation in Jerusalem, and of course, the walls which had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar so many years earlier, but nothing has been done. ‘I went out by night by the gate of the valley,’ – the valley of Kidron, presumably – ‘even before the dragon well,’ – we don’t know where that was; it is not mentioned anywhere else – ‘;and to the dung port, and viewed the walls of Jerusalem.’ Now he saw for himself what he had been hearing about, and the walls were just ruins. In the darkness it would have seemed even more gloomy and depressing. The walls ‘were broken down and the gates thereof consumed with fire.’ Verse 14: ‘Then I went on to the gate of the fountain, and to the king's pool:’, which is probably the pool of Siloam, ‘but there was no place for the beast that was under me to pass’, which suggests that there was so much rubbish down there, that he couldn't examine it in any detail. Rubbish and rubble were piled everywhere. ‘Then went I up in the night by the brook, and viewed the wall’ – from another angle – ‘and turned back, and entered by the gate of the valley,’ – Kidron again – ‘and so returned.’