Catholic Commentary
Opposition Mocked and Answered with Faith
19But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite servant, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they ridiculed us and despised us, and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Will you rebel against the king?”20Then I answered them, and said to them, “The God of heaven will prosper us. Therefore we, his servants, will arise and build; but you have no portion, nor right, nor memorial in Jerusalem.”
Nehemiah 2:19–20 describes how three foreign enemies—Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem—mock Nehemiah's wall-building project and accuse him of rebellion against the Persian king. Nehemiah responds by placing his trust entirely in God's provision and declaring that these opponents have no part in the covenant community of Jerusalem.
When God commissions sacred work, the proper answer to mockery is not self-defense but unshakeable confidence in divine providence—the wall belongs to heaven, not to the crowd.
Typological Sense
At the typological level, Jerusalem's wall prefigures the Church. The Fathers read Nehemiah's rebuilding as a figure of the restoration of the human soul and of the ecclesial community shattered by sin. The three opponents — ridicule, political threat, and false accusation — are the perennial weapons of the world against the Church's constructive mission. Nehemiah's response anticipates the apostolic boldness (parresia) of Peter and John before the Sanhedrin: "Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge" (Acts 4:19).
Catholic tradition reads this passage through the lens of the Church's own experience of opposition and her unwavering confidence in divine providence.
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the posture of God's servants before hostile powers, notes that holy boldness (parresia) is not arrogance but the fruit of humility — the servant who knows his mission comes from God fears no human tribunal. Nehemiah's "The God of heaven will prosper us" exemplifies this: it is not boasting but attestation.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2nd Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium §8) teaches that the Church, like Christ, carries out her mission "through suffering and death" before arriving at resurrection glory. The wall of Jerusalem, built in the face of mockery and political threat, is a figura of the Church's own pilgrim construction through history — always opposed, never overcome.
Nehemiah's exclusion of opponents from "portion, right, and memorial" resonates with the Catholic theology of ecclesial membership and the communion of saints. The zikkaron (memorial) particularly illuminates the Church's teaching on the Book of Life (Catechism §1021, §1038): belonging to God's city is ultimately a matter of divine record, not human politics.
The phrase "The God of heaven will prosper us" also anticipates the theology of grace in St. Augustine: no good work is accomplished by the creature's power alone. God is the primary agent; human cooperation (synergeia) follows from divine initiative. This is precisely why Nehemiah attributes success to God before a single stone is moved — an implicit acknowledgment of what Augustine would later systematize as gratia praeveniens, prevenient grace.
Contemporary Catholics engaged in any constructive work for the Church — building parishes, founding schools, initiating evangelization programs, restoring communities damaged by scandal — will recognize Nehemiah's situation with uncomfortable familiarity. Opposition frequently comes not as outright persecution but as the quieter weapons his enemies employed: ridicule ("Who do you think you are?"), institutional skepticism ("This will never get approval"), and insinuation about motives ("You just want power/money/relevance").
Nehemiah's response offers a concrete spiritual practice: redirect the question from "Can we answer our critics?" to "Is God the source of this work?" If the mission genuinely originates in prayer and divine commission (as Nehemiah's did — see his four months of fasting prayer in ch. 1), then the answer to mockers is not defensiveness but a serene re-anchoring in God's sufficiency. This is not naïve — Nehemiah was also strategically wise. But strategy follows from faith; it does not replace it. Catholics today are also reminded that not everyone who claims a share in sacred work has a rightful one — discerning authentic belonging to the community of builders is itself an act of pastoral responsibility, not exclusion for its own sake.
Commentary
Nehemiah 2:19 — The Three Adversaries and Their Weapons
Nehemiah's opponents are named with deliberate precision. Sanballat the Horonite was a powerful Samaritan governor whose name and lineage mark him as a representative of the syncretistic community that had filled the vacuum left by the Assyrian deportations of the northern kingdom. "Horonite" likely connects him to Beth-Horon, a town northwest of Jerusalem — placing him geographically close but covenantally outside Israel's restoration. Tobiah the Ammonite is called a "servant" (Hebrew: eved), possibly indicating his status as a Persian administrative subordinate, though the term is laced with irony since Nehemiah himself uses eved proudly as a title before God (see 1:6). Geshem the Arabian rounds out the coalition, representing the tribal confederacies to the south and east. Together, these three figures encircle Jerusalem geographically and symbolically — north, east, and south — as though the city were besieged before a single stone had been laid.
Their attack is twofold: ridicule (wayyilʿagu) and despising (wayyivʾuhu), and then a political accusation — "Will you rebel against the king?" This charge is not innocent banter. To accuse a subject people of sedition against Persia was to invoke potentially lethal imperial consequences. The enemies know that Nehemiah cannot rebuild Jerusalem if he appears to be fortifying a rebel stronghold. The charge is essentially the same slander used against Jesus before Pilate: "We found this man perverting our nation... and saying that he himself is Christ, a King" (Luke 23:2). In both cases, the accusation weaponizes earthly authority against a divinely commissioned work.
Nehemiah 2:20 — Faith as Political Theology
Nehemiah's response is striking for what it omits: he does not produce Artaxerxes' letter again (as he did in 2:7–9), does not marshal legal arguments, and does not threaten his opponents. He speaks theologically. "The God of heaven will prosper us" — the Hebrew yatzliach lanu ("will cause us to succeed") places all agency with God. This title, "God of heaven" (Elohei hashamayim), appears repeatedly in Ezra and Nehemiah and in the Persian-period texts as the great trans-imperial name for Israel's God — a name even pagan kings used (Ezra 1:2). Nehemiah subtly inverts the imperial logic: the very God acknowledged by Persia as sovereign of the heavens is the one who commissions this work. To oppose the wall is to oppose the God of heaven.
Then comes the exclusion: "you have no portion, nor right, nor memorial in Jerusalem." Each of these three terms — (portion/share), (rightful claim), (memorial/remembrance) — is loaded with covenantal weight. A "portion" in Israel was land-inheritance tied to covenant belonging. A "rightful claim" invokes juridical standing in the community. A "memorial" () is presence in the book of life, the record before God. Nehemiah is not merely expelling political rivals; he is making a theological declaration about who belongs to the covenant community gathered around the holy city. The wall is not merely a military structure — it is a boundary of sacred identity.