s mission, and, apparently,
the sentiments of rigid orthodoxy professed by him from the beginning,
provoked the resentment of the neighbouring potentates against him:
Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, chief of the Samaritans,
and Geshem the Bedawin did their best to thwart him in the execution of
his plans. He baffled their intrigues by his promptitude in rebuilding
the walls, and when once he had rendered himself safe from any sudden
attack, he proceeded with the reforms which he deemed urgent. His tenure
of office lasted twelve years--from 384 to 373 B.C.--and during the
whole of that time he refused to accept any of the dues to which he was
entitled, and which his predecessors had received without scruple. Ever
since their return from exile, the common people had been impoverished
and paralysed by usury. The poor had been compelled to mortgage their
fields and their vineyards in order to pay the king's taxes; then, when
their land was gone, they had pledged their sons and their daughters;
the moneyed classes of the new Israel thus absorbed the property of
their poorer brethren, and reduced the latter to slavery. Nehemiah
called the usurers before him and severely rebuking them for their
covetousness, bade them surrender the interest and capital of existing
debts, and restore the properties which had fallen into their hands
owing to their shameful abuse of wealth, and release all those of their
co-religionists whom they had enslaved in default of payment of their
debts.* His high place in the royal favour doubtless had its effect
on those whose cupidity suffered from his zeal, and prevented external
enemies from too openly interfering in the affairs of the community:
by the time he returned to the court, in 372 B.C., after an absence of
twelve years, Jerusalem and its environs had to some extent regained
the material prosperity of former days. The part played by Nehemiah was,
however, mainly political, and the religious problem remained in very
much the same state as before. The high priests, who alone possessed the
power of solving it, had fallen in with the current that was carrying
away the people, and--latterly, at any rate--had become disqualified
through intermarriage with aliens: what was wanted was a scribe deeply
versed in sacred things to direct them in the right way, and such a man
could be found only in Babylonia, the one country in which the study of
the ancient traditions still flourished. A cer