5 Then I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor with you, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my ancestors’ graves, so that I may rebuild it.”
6 The king said to me (the queen also was sitting beside him), “How long will you be gone, and when will you return?” So it pleased the king to send me, and I set him a date.
7 Then I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, let letters be given me to the governors of the province Beyond the River, that they may grant me passage until I arrive in Judah,
8 and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, directing him to give me timber to make beams for the gates of the temple fortress and for the wall of the city and for the house that I shall occupy.” And the king granted me what I asked, for the gracious hand of my God was upon me.
17 Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer disgrace.”
18 I told them that the hand of my God had been gracious upon me and also the words that the king had spoken to me. Then they said, “Let us start building!” So they committed themselves to the common good.
19 But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they mocked and ridiculed us, saying, “What is this that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?”
1 Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he mocked the Jews.
2 He said in the presence of his associates and of the army of Samaria, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it by themselves? Will they offer sacrifice? Will they finish it in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish—burned ones at that?”
3 Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, “That stone wall they are building—any fox going up on it would break it down!”
33 I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!”
