Then the king said to me, "What is your request?" So I prayed to the God of the heavens.

I got up during the night, I and a few men with me. I did not tell anybody what my God put in my heart to do for Jerusalem. No animal [was] with me except the animal that I was riding on.

The prefects did not know where I had gone and what I was doing. I had not yet told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the prefects, and the rest of the workers.

But Sanballat the Horonite, the Ammonite servant Tobiah, and Geshem the Arab heard it, and they mocked and despised us, saying, "What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?"

Then he said before his brothers and the army of Samaria, "What are the feeble Jews doing? Will they restore [these things] for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish it in a day? Will they revive the stones from the piles of rubble--even those burned up?"

Now what was prepared each day for me was one ox, six choice sheep, and birds. And every ten days all [kinds of] wine were made. But for this I did not demand the food [allowance] of the governor because the slavery was too heavy on this people.

And what the rest of the people gave was twenty thousand darics of gold, and two thousand silver minas, and sixty-seven priestly tunics.

So I quarreled with the nobles of Judah and said to them, "What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the day of the Sabbath?