When did Nehemiah rebuild the walls of Jerusalem?

Question

Accepted Answer

In 445 BC, the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I of Persia, who had come to the throne in 465. Nehemiah heard of the ruin of the walls in the month Chislev, in the winter, at Susa, 1,230 km from Jerusalem in a straight line; he asked leave in Nisan, in the spring, and the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth of Elul, at the start of autumn, after fifty-two days of work. Josephus, telling the story, allows two years and four months instead. Nehemiah governed Judah for twelve years, went back to the king in 433 and returned again. The walls had lain broken since the Babylonians razed them in 587 or 586 BC, nearly a century and a half before, though an attempt to rebuild them earlier in Artaxerxes' reign had been stopped. The book opens “in the month Chisleu, in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the palace”, with the news that “the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire”. It was “in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king” that Nehemiah won his leave. In Jerusalem he rode out by night “by the gate of the valley, even before the dragon well, and to the dung port, and viewed the walls”, and told the rulers, “come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach”. The high priest Eliashib and the priests “builded the sheep gate”, and the work went round the city gate by gate, until “the wall was finished in the twenty and fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty and two days”. Yet “the city was large and great: but the people were few therein, and the houses were not builded”. The year is firmer than most in the Old Testament: a letter from the Jews of Elephantine in Egypt, written in 407 BC, names the sons of Sanballat, Nehemiah's enemy, as grown men, so Nehemiah's Artaxerxes is the first of that name, not the second. The course of the wall is read from the gates of Nehemiah 3 and from Kathleen Kenyon's digs of 1961–1967, which found a wall on the crest of the eastern ridge above the ruined slope and gave it to Nehemiah: the Persian city was confined to the City of David and the Temple Mount, far smaller than before the exile, with a few hundred to a few thousand people. Israel Finkelstein has doubted that any wall of Nehemiah's can be found; others keep Kenyon's.