And I said to the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, that they may set me forward till I come into Judah;

And our adversaries said, They shall not know, neither see, till we come into the midst of them and kill them, and put an end to the work.

And we laboured in the work; and half of them held the spears from the rising of the dawn till the stars appeared.

Now from the time when I was made ruler of the people in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year till the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes the king, for twelve years, I and my servants have never taken the food which was the right of the ruler.

And it cometh to pass, when it hath been heard by Sanballat, and Tobiah, and by Geshem the Arabian, and by the rest of our enemies, that I have builded the wall, and there hath not been left in it a breach, (also, till that time the doors I had not set up in the gates,)

And I said to them, Do not let the doors of Jerusalem be open till the sun is high; and while the watchmen are in their places, let the doors be shut and locked: and let the people of Jerusalem be put on watch, every one in his watch, opposite his house.

And the Tirshatha said unto them, that they should not eat of the most holy things, till there stood up a priest with Urim and Thummim.

So he read it before the plaza in front of the Water Gate from dawn till noon before the men and women and those children who could understand. All the people were eager to hear the book of the law.

All the people who had been prisoners and had come back, made tents and were living in them: for from the time of Jeshua, the son of Nun, till that day, the children of Israel had not done so. And there was very great joy.

And day by day, from the first day till the last, he was reading from the book of the law of God. And they kept the feast for seven days: and on the eighth day there was a holy meeting, as it is ordered in the law.

And now, our God, the great, the strong, the God who is to be feared, who keeps faith and mercy, let not all this trouble seem small to you, which has come on us, and on our kings and our rulers and on our priests and our prophets and our fathers and on all your people from the time of the kings of Assyria till this day.

The sons of Levi, heads of families, were recorded in the book of the histories, even till the days of Johanan, the son of Eliashib.

And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that they should not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should no burden be brought in on the sabbath day.