Nehemiah 6:2 Commentary and Bible Study

The hand of friendship is now extended, and they want to meet. Of course, this is treated with immediate suspicion, naturally, because they haven’t been friendly up until this time; they've been vicious enemies, but now they change their tone entirely. It's the hand of friendship. ‘Come, let us meet together in some one of the villages in the plane of Ono.’ That was on the western side of Judaea. It was a coastal plain, some twenty-five to thirty miles from Jerusalem, not densely populated. Again, such a location would arouse suspicions. If Nehemiah has got to travel down there, then he is going to be away from protection, and all kinds of things might happen. So, of course, Nehemiah concludes, ‘They thought to do me mischief’, and the word here in our King James Version ‘mischief’ translates a Hebrew term which simply means ‘harm’, and is most often used for deadly harm – at the very least, assault, violence, maiming, but more likely death. Mischief is not a strong enough word today. You call little children, mischievous. It has been stripped of its venom. But the original is serious harm, implying death. And verse 2, there is the plot: presumably a plot to kill Nehemiah. I imagine they were astonished and amazed. Their predictions that this wall would never be rebuilt, that the Jews were incapable of doing that, that they would never be able to achieve anything; those predictions were not just empty insults, they reflected the viewpoint of those enemies. They really thought those insults. They had oppressed the Jews for so long, and the Israelites, that they thought they were weak, they were hopeless, they were downtrodden, they were divided within themselves. ‘They will never accomplish this. They haven’t had a generation in recent times that was capable of building anything. Surely if they started now it would fall down.’ The insults had been aimed to hurt, that we studied earlier, but they meant them. And so to see the breaches built up, and the wall pointed, and everything that was necessary being done to it, astonished them. And in so short a time! In just a matter of weeks – seven weeks or so – there it was already to be inaugurated and reopened formally. And they were very disturbed, because they had always thought, ‘These Jews! We are infinitely better than them, and more capable’, and now they see they've done something which they knew they would not have been able to do. They wouldn't have had the unity, the resources, the workers or anything to achieve such a thing as this. And so they were disturbed. What is going to happen? What are they up to? The judge according to themselves. Are they going to take military offensives? I expect they thought about that with this wall to run behind and defend themselves from. ‘How can we deal with this?’ Well, the one solution they had was to deal with Nehemiah, and to try to kill him. That's clearly the plot and it begins there in verse 2, and they are going to draw him out with friendship and bring him outside his own territory to a village for consultations, and negotiations, for talks. And all of a sudden they're very friendly.