Nehemiah Enumerates the Outstanding Features of his Beneficent Rule. The main points here are that Nehemiah and his subordinate officials had not taken advantage of their undoubted right of exacting provisions from the people (I and my brethren have not eaten the bread of the governor, i.e. the sustenance which he, as the governor, had a right to claim); secondly, he recalls how tenaciously he clung to his purpose of the rebuilding of the walls (Nehemiah 5:16); and thirdly, he reminds the people of the way in which he had supported the poor (Nehemiah 5:17 f.).
Nehemiah 5:14. from the twentieth. the king: i.e. 445- 433 B.C.; in the latter year he went back to Babylon for a short visit (Nehemiah 13:6 f.). It is said in Nehemiah 2:6 that Nehemiah gave the king a set time for leave of absence, and in view of the king's words (For how long shall thy journey be? and when wilt thou return?) a prolonged period of absence cannot have been comtemplated. Yet, according to the verse before us, Nehemiah was away for about twelve years! No doubt if more fragments of his memoirs had been preserved this difficulty would have been explained. Some new arrangement must have been made between Nehemiah and the king, according to which the former was granted an indefinite leave of absence owing to the serious condition of affairs in Judah, the full extent of which he realised only when he arrived there.