Nehemiah 2:9 Commentary and Bible Study

These were the satraps, or provincial governors, of the regions of the Persian empire to the west of the river Euphrates. Nehemiah had been sent by Artaxerxes, and he did not hide what he had come to do but presented the letters provided to authorise his work. ‘Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me.’ Ezra didn't have that escort; but Nehemiah does. But one of these regional governors, Sanballat, was very displeased at the arrival of Nehemiah. Sanballat is a Babylonian name. Horonaim was a city or town in Moab. So you could read there, ‘Sanballat, the Moabite – that is, the traditional enemies of Israel. He was the governor, the Persian governor, of Samaria. ‘And Tobiah the servant’ – that is interesting. Why is he called that? ‘Tobiah the servant.’ You could say, the slave, because although he wasn’t a slave now, that is how he started. He was a slave or servant. Tobiah was obviously very clever, and he'd gone up in the world, and now he was either the governor on behalf of the Persian empire of the area east of Jordan, or he was the chief administrator and secretary to Sanballat. It is a bit difficult to read which he was, as the text goes on. But he held high office, and he was a great hater of the children of Israel. ‘When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah, the servant, the Ammonite,’ – Ammon was another traditional enemy of Israel – ‘heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly that there was common man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel.’ Of course it grieved them! During the exile they had had their way: the rulers of the Samaritan neighbours. They wanted Judah and Jerusalem to be downtrodden and chaotic, and the people dismayed, disconsolate, and utterly depressed. They wanted poverty there. They wanted an income from that region; they were running a great protection racket. They had got in their service many of the princes, the wealthy princes of Judah and the leaders, and they made a lot of money out of the people by lending money to them in their poverty, and Sanballat and Tobiah and others no doubt got a huge cut out of this. They made money out of these desperate people. They would constantly send marauding bands in to attack them and wound them and bring them down. They certainly didn’t want Jerusalem to be strong again and asserting itself in the region. So there were enemies from the beginning. Nehemiah knew who they were and he was very conscious that there were enemies everywhere to his mission.