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brethren have not eaten the bread of the governor,” that Nehemiah wrote the account of his labours in Judah from memory after the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes. When we compare with this the manner in which he speaks quite incidentally (Neh 13:6.) of his absence from Jerusalem and his journey to the court, in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes, and connects the account of the chamber vacated for Tobiah in the fore-court of the temple (Neh 13:4) with the previous narrative of the public reading of the law and the severance of the strangers from Israel by the formula מזּה ולפני, “and before this,” making it appear as though this public reading of the law and severance of strangers had followed his return from the court; and further, consider that the public reading of the law mentioned, Neh 13:1, is combined with the section, Neh 12:44, and this section again (Neh 12:44) with the account of the dedication of the wall by the formula, “at that time;” it is undoubtedly obvious that Nehemiah did not write his whole work till the evening of his days, and after he had accomplished all that was most important in the labours he undertook for Jerusalem and his fellow-countrymen, and that he makes no decided distinction between his labours during his second sojourn at Jerusalem and those of his former stay of twelve years.
If, then, these circumstances indisputably show that the work composed by Nehemiah himself did not bear the form of a diary, the admission into it of the list of those who returned from Babylon with Zerubbabel and Joshua (Neh 7:6-73) makes it manifest that it was not his intention to give an unbroken narrative, of his efforts and their results in Jerusalem. This list, moreover, which he found when occupied with his plan for increasing the population of Jerusalem, is shown by the words, “I found therein written,” to have been admitted by himself into his work, and inserted in his account of what God had put it into his heart to do with respect to the peopling of Jerusalem (Neh 7:5), and of the manner in which he had carried out his resolution (Neh 11:1-2), as a valuable document with respect to the history of the community, although the continuous thread of the