Nehemiah 9:36 Commentary and Bible Study

The implication of confessing the sins of the nation and of their fathers is that they are telling the Lord that they will not live any longer this way. If they do, they know that they will receive no answer to their prayer.It is a prayer to God about the fact that they are still in trouble. They have returned to the holy land, or at least a remnant of them have returned. They are no longer in captivity; they are back where they longed to be. But they still have to pay taxes and homage to their Persian overlord, and these were evidently very considerable, so that they were in great pain on account of it. ‘Behold, we are servants [literally, slaves] this day.’ They are not slaves; they are technically free, and yet they have got that onerous homage to pay. They were having to pay homage to a foreign power while living in the land which the Lord had given to them. They were not free in their own land.‘It yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins.’ We are impoverished, and we slaving away to support our families, but the best of our produce has to go as homage to our overlords, and ‘they have dominion over our bodies, over our cattle, at their pleasure.’ We are not really a free people because we have to serve more for them than for ourselves. They can take and impose a roundup of goods from us whenever they like, ‘and we are in great distress.’