Commentaria in II Esdrae (Nehemiam)
Chapter 2. Synopsis of the Chapter
Nehemias obtains from Artaxerxes permission to return to Jerusalem and to restore its walls; he pursues this earnestly, the enemies trying in vain to hinder him.
1. And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of king Artaxerxes, that the wine was before him, and I took up the wine, and gave it to the king; and I was as one languishing before his face. 2. And the king said to me: Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou dost not appear to be sick? This is not without cause, but some evil, I know not what, is in thy heart. And I was seized with exceeding great fear; 3. and I said to the king: O king, live for ever; why should not my countenance be sad, seeing the city of the house of the sepulchres of my fathers is desolate, and the gates thereof are burned with fire? 4. And the king said to me: For what thing dost thou make request? And I prayed to the God of heaven, 5. and I said to the king: If it seem good to the king, and if thy servant be pleasing in thy sight, that thou wouldst send me into Judea, to the city of the sepulchre of my father, and I will build it. 6. And the king said to me, and the queen that sat by him: For how long shall thy journey be, and when wilt thou return? And it pleased the king, and he sent me: and I set him a time. 7. And I said to the king: If it please the king, let him give me letters to the governors of the country beyond the river, that they may convey me over, till I come into Judea: 8. and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to cover the gates of the tower of the house, and the walls of the city, and the house that I shall enter into. And the king gave me, according to the good hand of my God with me. 9. And I came to the governors of the country beyond the river, and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me captains of soldiers and horsemen. 10. And Sanaballat the Horonite, and Tobias the servant, the Ammonite, heard it: and they were grieved with a great affliction, that a man was come who sought the welfare of the children of Israel. 11. And I came to Jerusalem, and was there three days. 12. And I arose in the night, I and a few men with me, and I told no man what God had put in my heart to do in Jerusalem, and there was no beast with me, but the beast that I rode on. 13. And I went out by the gate of the valley in the night, and before the dragon’s fountain, and to the dung gate, and I viewed the wall of Jerusalem which was broken down, and the gates thereof which were consumed with fire. 14. And I passed on to the gate of the fountain, and to the king’s aqueduct, and there was no place for the beast to pass that I rode on. 15. And I went up by the torrent in the night, and viewed the wall, and coming back I came to the gate of the valley, and returned. 16. And the magistrates knew not whither I went, or what I did: for as yet I had told nothing to the Jews, nor to the priests, nor to the chief men, nor to the magistrates, nor to the rest that did the work. 17. And I said to them: You know the affliction we are in, that Jerusalem is desolate, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire: come, and let us build up the walls of Jerusalem, and let us be no longer a reproach. 18. And I told them how the hand of my God was good with me, and the king’s words which he spoke to me, and I said: Let us arise and build. And their hands were strengthened in good. 19. But Sanaballat the Horonite, and Tobias the servant, the Ammonite, and Gosem the Arabian, heard it, and they scoffed at us, and despised us, and said: What is this thing that you do? Do you rebel against the king? 20. And I answered them, and said to them: The God of heaven, he helpeth us, and we are his servants: let us arise and build: but you have no part, nor justice, nor memory in Jerusalem.
1. And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes—Longimanus; for it was he (and not his father Xerxes, to whom Josephus therefore wrongly ascribes this) who reigned thirty-two years and more, as is said in chapter 12, verse 6. So Julius Africanus, St. Jerome, Augustine, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Bede, Rupert and others whom Pereira cites, book 11 on Daniel, who therefore commonly begin Daniel’s seventy weeks, chapter 9, verse 25, from this twentieth year of Artaxerxes, in which he gave Nehemias permission to rebuild Jerusalem. See what is said there. For I have treated this passage at length in that place; so I shall not repeat it here.
his hand, that he might drink, as being his cupbearer. You will ask how Nehemias was raised so high that to Artaxerxes the monarch he was a familiar, indeed in charge of the cup, an office which is the chief one in a court and is entrusted only to the greatest and most faithful men. I answer: The first cause was the wisdom, virtue and grace of Nehemias, as I have said, by which he insinuated himself into the minds of princes, so as to win them over to himself and to his Jewish people.
The second cause was that many think Esther was the wife of this Artaxerxes, and she bound him to herself, to Nehemias and to the Jews. But this is to be examined in the book of Esther.
A third, more particular cause was that the kings of the Persians drank Syrian wine, or wine brought from Syria, as Suidas, book 15, and Athenaeus testify; and Judea is a part or appendage of Syria. Hence Artaxerxes wished the Jew Nehemias to be his cupbearer, so that, as one thoroughly skilled in the wines of his country, he might see to it that better wines were brought to him from Judea or Syria, and keep and manage them accurately with the art and method with which they were wont to be kept and managed in Syria, lest they acquire sourness or some other fault.
Hear Athenaeus, book 1, chapter 29: “The kings of the Persians,” he says, “drank only Chalibonian wine. Posidonius relates that it is produced in Damascus of Syria, the vines having been planted there by the Persians.” Moreover, concerning the water which they drank, the same Athenaeus writes thus, book 2, chapter 6: “Herodotus,” he says, book 1, “writes that water is carried for the king of the Persians from the river Choaspes flowing past Susa, and from that alone and no other he drinks.”
This was a wonderful superstition of kings, that they thought it unworthy of royal dignity to drink other water. Hear Aelian, book 12: While other supplies, full of magnificence and display, followed Xerxes, water from the Choaspes was carried along with them also. But when they were thirsty in a desert place, and no remedy for thirst was to be found, proclamation was made in the army that if anyone had water from the Choaspes, he should give it to the king is desolate—as if to say: I am sad because Jerusalem, in which my fathers are buried and where their sepulchres stand, is desolate. He calls sepulchres a “house,” because “house” among the Hebrews signifies any place, cave, case or coffin that encloses and contains a body; thus nests are called the houses of birds, and river and sea the houses of fishes.
to drink; and one was found who had a very little, and that foul. Xerxes therefore drank it, and held the man who had given it in the place of a benefactor.
Moreover, the ancients had great care and religious concern for the sepulchre of fathers and forefathers, that their bones should not be dug up, cast out or profaned, and
2. And the king said to me: Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou dost not appear to be sick? This is not without cause, but some evil is in thy heart—From Nehemias’s downcast countenance the king suspected that he had something which greatly afflicted him, or certainly that he was plotting some crime and perhaps contriving some snare against him. Hence he asks him the cause of his sadness, and speaks ambiguously, that Nehemias may declare the cause sincerely, and says: “Some evil, I know not what, is in thy heart.” “Evil” means affliction, pain, grief—as if to say: Thy countenance is sad; therefore there is some sadness in thy heart, for this shows and discloses itself in a sad countenance; or “evil” means malice, plotting—that perhaps thou art meditating some evil against me. Hence the Septuagint renders it: This is nothing but wickedness of heart. For the Hebrew ra, that is, evil, signifies wickedness and malice as well as sadness and affliction, as in Matthew 6: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” that is, its affliction; just as on the other hand “good” signifies both the goodness and honour of virtue and pleasantness and happiness, according to that: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” Psalm 132:1. The king seems to have feared that Nehemias would give him poison in his wine. For kings, who fear everything for themselves and their own, and above all poison in food and drink; for, as Seneca says in the Thyestes: “Poison is drunk from gold”; especially if Nehemias had refused to drink that very cup offered by the king, out of grief, which is not incredible. Hence Horace, in the Epode, Ode 16, fearing this, laments thus: “And the bones of Quirinus, which lack winds and suns (a sin to see), the insolent one shall scatter.” Wherefore Artaxerxes received this just and grave complaint of Nehemias with a favourable ear, mindful of what the Scythians had answered his grandfather Darius. The matter is told by Valerius Maximus, book 5, chapter 4: “When Darius,” he says, “was repeatedly attacking their regions with the forces of his whole kingdom, they gradually withdrew and arrived at the farthest solitudes of Asia. Being then asked by him through envoys what end of flight, or what beginning of fighting, they intended, they answered that they had neither cities nor cultivated fields for which they would fight. But, when he should have come to the monuments of their parents, he would learn how the Scythians were wont to fight.”