EXPOSITION
COMPLETION OF THE WORK, AND ARRANGEMENTS FOR GUARDING THE GATES (Nehemiah 7:1-5). The wall and gate-towers being completed, nothing remained but to hang the doors in the gateways, and to arrange for the guard of the gates and the general security of the fortress. Nehemiah speaks here of his having set up the doors (verse 1); but it appears from Nehemiah 3:1-32. that the actual work of so doing was intrusted, like the repairs of the wall, to the various working parties. Eliashib, with his brethren the priests, set up the doors of the sheep gate (Nehemiah 3:1); the sons of Hassenaah those of the fish gate (ibid. Nehemiah 3:3), etc. Nehemiah had only the general superintendence, and saw that all was properly executed. But the entire work being at length accomplished, it devolved upon him to make the necessary arrangements for the security of what had now become a first-rate fortress. Accordingly, he seems himself to have assigned the guard of the gates to certain bodies of Levites (verse 1), as being experienced in the business of keeping watch; after which he committed the task of appointing other guards to his brother Hanani, and to a certain Hananiah, already the commandant of the Birah, or temple tower (verse 2). They devised a system by which the adult male inhabitants were made to partition the watch of the wall among themselves, each on the part which was nearest to his own house (verse 3). At the same time, it was ordered, for greater precaution, that all the gates should be closed at night, and none of them opened "until the sun was hot" (ibid.), i.e. until some hours after sunrise. The city was thus made as secure as the circumstances admitted; but in the course of the arrangements it became clear, at any rate to Nehemiah, that the population of the city was too scanty for its size (verse 4), and that some steps ought to be taken to augment the number of inhabitants. As a first step, a necessary preliminary before he could lay any definite proposal before the "rulers," the governor thought it necessary to make a census of the entire people (verse 5). It seems to have been in the course of his preparations for this purpose that he "found a register of the genealogy of them which came up at the first." The list in verses 7-69 has been regarded as the result of his own census; but reasons have been already given against this view in the comment upon Ezra; and it would seem to be most probable that we have the actual result of Nehemiah's census, so far as he thought fit to give it to us, in Nehemiah 11:3-36.