Nehemiah 1 Bible study: Remember the word

The book opens, "The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah" (1:1), and at once Nehemiah is speaking: "as I was in Susa the palace" (1:1). The chapter gives its time only as "the month Chislev, in the twentieth year" (1:1). "Hanani, one of my brothers, came, he and certain men out of Judah; and I asked them about the Jews who had escaped, who were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem" (1:2) (tap escaped). He asks about the people first and the city second, and the answer comes in the same order. First the people: "The remnant who are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach" (1:3) (tap reproach). Then the city: "The wall of Jerusalem is also broken down, and its gates are burned with fire" (1:3) (tap wall).

Nehemiah 1:9→leads toJohn 11:52

Nehemiah asks God to remember his word to Moses: "though your outcasts were in the uttermost part of the heavens, yet I will gather them from there, and will bring them to the place that I have chosen, to cause my name to dwell there" (1:9). When a council met about Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas said "that one man should die for the people" (John 11:50). John writes, "he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation" (John 11:51), "and not for the nation only, but that he might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad" (John 11:52). John doesn't cite Nehemiah 1 or the word to Moses, and Nehemiah is written in Hebrew and John in Greek, so no link between their words is claimed; setting the two side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: God gathering those who are scattered. Some read in John 11:52 a gathering like the one Nehemiah asks God to remember, now of "the children of God", through the death John speaks of. Others read 1:9 in its own setting, a word for Israel's outcasts to be brought back "to the place that I have chosen" (1:9), and read John 11:52 on its own, without looking back to Nehemiah.

זָכַרzakharsay za-KHAR

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "remember". Strong's: "to mark (so as to be recognized), i.e. to remember". "Remember, I beg you, the word that you commanded your servant Moses" (1:8). It is the first of nine times the verb comes in the Hebrew of Nehemiah. Nehemiah uses it again to the people, "Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome" (Nehemiah 4:14), and in his short prayers, "Remember me, my God, for all the good that I have done for this people" (Nehemiah 5:19), down to the book's last words, "Remember me, my God, for good" (Nehemiah 13:31). Here, first, he asks God to remember a word God himself spoke. Moses prayed with the same verb: "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self" (Exodus 32:13).