Nehemiah 5 Bible study: Against their brothers

In chapter 4 the enemies were outside the wall: "they all conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem" (Nehemiah 4:8). Chapter 5 opens with a different trouble: "Then there arose a great cry of the people and of their wives against their brothers the Jews" (5:1) (tap cry). The cry isn't against Sanballat or Tobiah. It is against their own brothers. Three groups speak. Some have many mouths to feed: "We, our sons and our daughters, are many. Let us get grain, that we may eat and live" (5:2). Some are "mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses" for grain, "because of the famine" (5:3) (tap mortgaging). Some "have borrowed money for the king’s tribute using our fields and our vineyards as collateral" (5:4). And then the hardest words: "we bring our sons and our daughters into bondage to be servants, and some of our daughters have been brought into bondage" (5:5) (tap bondage). They can't help it, "because other men have our fields and our vineyards" (5:5).

Nehemiah 5:8→leads toMatthew 18:33

Nehemiah tells the nobles and rulers, "You exact usury, everyone of his brother" (5:7), and asks, "We, after our ability, have redeemed our brothers the Jews that were sold to the nations; and would you even sell your brothers, and should they be sold to us?" (5:8). When Peter asked, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" (Matthew 18:21), Jesus told of a servant who couldn’t pay, whose lord "commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had" (Matthew 18:25). His lord forgave him the debt (Matthew 18:27), but he seized a fellow servant who owed him and "cast him into prison until he should pay back that which was due" (Matthew 18:30). His lord said, "I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?" (Matthew 18:32-33). Jesus doesn’t cite Nehemiah 5, so setting the two side by side is a reading. It rests on what happens in both, not on a shared word: a debt that could end in a man and his children being sold (5:5, 5:8; Matthew 18:25), and a question that sets what was done for someone ("have redeemed our brothers", 5:8; "I had mercy on you", Matthew 18:33) against what the hearer is doing to his own. Some hear in the lord’s question what Nehemiah asks the nobles. Others read the parable as Jesus ends it, "if you don’t each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds" (Matthew 18:35), as teaching about forgiving sins, and read 5:8 on its own, about real fields, grain and children, without looking from one to the other.

מַשָּׁאmashsha'say mash-SHA

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "lending on interest, or usury". Strong's: "a loan; by implication, interest on a debt". "You exact usury, everyone of his brother" (5:7); "Please let us stop this usury" (5:10). The word comes only three times in the Hebrew Bible, all in Nehemiah: twice in this chapter, and once more when the people's covenant promises to "forego the seventh year crops and the exaction of every debt" (Nehemiah 10:31), where this is the Hebrew word in "the exaction of every debt". The Law's word for interest, neshekh (Exodus 22:25; Deuteronomy 23:19), isn't the word used in this chapter.