As if there weren’t enough problems with discouragement about the enormity of the task, the people trying of the lands trying to kill them, now Nehemiah finds there is internal opportunists taking advantage of their fellow Israelites during a famine. Because what else does one need during these times but a famine and people taking advantage of it.
The bottom line was that to get enough food, the Israelites ‘have-nots’ were having to borrow money from the ‘haves,’ as in those who had enough. The people with food took advantage of it by charging their fellow Israelites high interest. It was bad enough that the hungry people didn’t have enough to pay it off. So they had to send off their sons and even their daughters to go work for their fellow Israelites to help pay the debt.
This was wrong on so many levels.
- It was morally wrong to take advantage of their fellow countrymen in a time of great distress, the famine, instead of helping them get through this difficult hour.
- It was a direct violation of Scriptures that says not to charge a fellow Israelite interest: “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest” (Deut 23:19).
- It was wrong because they were literally ransoming and paying money to foreign nations and peoples to “buy back” Israelites who had been taken into captivity and slavery. And yet here they were making the sons and daughters literal slaves again by making them live and work as slaves to pay back the loan. “We have done our best to buy back our Jewish countrymen who were sold to foreigners, but now you sell your own countrymen, and we have to buy them back” (Neh 5:8).
Nehemiah was “extremely angry” (Neh 5:6). So Nehemiah gathered the nobles and officials, the leaders of Israel, and spoke to them plainly.
“What you are doing isn’t right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God and not invite the reproach of our foreign enemies? Even I, as well as my brothers and my servants, have been lending them money and grain” (Neh 5:9-10).
They promised to return the people, their fields, their vineyards and the interest charged. Just to be handle it with the seriousness it deserved, Nehemiah summoned the priests and made them take an oath. Then he prayed that if they didn’t follow through, that God would bring judgment upon them (Neh 5:12-13).
He then reminded them of his own life. In the 12 years that King Artaxerxes made him governor of the land, he had not taken the governer’s allotment of food and resources that he could have rightfully claimed as his own. Instead, so as not to be a burden to the people, he only took from them what was needed.
“I didn’t demand the food allotted to the governor, because the burden on the people was so heavy” (Neh 5:18).
Why was he doing all this?
Because he feared the Lord and sought to do what was right.
“Remember me favorably, my God, for all that I have done for this people” (Neh 5:19).
