In the month Nisan. The fourth month after Chisleu, corresponding nearly to our April. How it came about that Nehemiah did not put the king's favour to the proof until more than three months had gone by we can only conjecture.
Perhaps the court had been absent from Susa, passing the winter at Babylon, as it sometimes did, and he had not accompanied it. Perhaps, though present at the court, he had not been called on to discharge his office, his turn not having arrived.
Possibly, though performing his duties from time to time, he had found no opportunity of unbosoming himself, the king not having noticed his grief. He. may even have done his best to conceal it, for Persian subjects were expected to be perfectly happy in the presence of their king.
He had probably formed no plan, but waited in the confident hope that God's providence would so order events, that some occasion would arise whereof he might take advantage. In the twentieth year of Artaxerxes.
Like Daniel, Zechariah, Haggai, and Ezra, Nehemiah dates events by the regnal year of the existing Persian king. His Artaxerxes is, by common consent, the same as Ezra's, and can scarcely be supposed to be any monarch but Longimanus, who reigned from b.
c. 465 to b.c. 425. Now I had not been beforetime sad in his presence. Other renderings have been proposed, but this is probably the true meaning. Hitherto I had always worn a cheerful countenance before him—now it was otherwise—my sorrow showed itself in spite of me.