Nehemiah נְחֶמְיָה

The book of Nehemiah is the Bible's great memoir — the only book of the Hebrew Bible told so largely in the first person, in the working voice of a man with a wall to build. Nehemiah son of Hacaliah is cupbearer to Artaxerxes in Shushan when word comes that Jerusalem's wall is rubble and its gates ash. What follows is prayer and audacity in equal measure: the king's leave and the king's timber; a night ride around the ruins; a roster of ordinary families each repairing opposite their own house; spears in one hand and trowels in the other; and in fifty-two days a wall that even the enemies concede 'was wrought of our God.' But the book's second half builds something harder than stone. Ezra reads the Torah aloud at the Water Gate to all who can hear with understanding; the people weep, then learn that 'the joy of Hashem is your strength'; Sukkot is kept as it had not been since Joshua; the longest prayer in the Bible confesses the whole national story; and a covenant is written, sealed, and signed by name. Chronologically the last historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, Nehemiah ends not in triumph but in maintenance — a second term spent forcing the reforms to hold — and its closing words are the whole book in five: 'Remember me, O my God, for good.'

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Six classical commentaries accompany the text — the commentary printed as Rashi (attributed), the commentary printed as Ibn Ezra (attributed to Moses Kimchi), the Metzudat David and Metzudat Zion, the Malbim, and the Ralbag — the fullest classical company this often-neglected book receives.