Remember Me, O My God

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Nehemiah, Book of,” “Ezra-Nehemiah, Books of,” “Esdras, First Book of,” “Jerusalem (Persian period),” “Tobiah,” “Levites,” “Nethinim.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “Ezra and Nehemiah, Books of,” “Lists,” “Priests and Levites,” “Sabbath,” “Marriage and Divorce.”
• NIDOTTE — זָכַר, תּוֹדָה, עָזַב, נָכְרִי, גּוֹרָל.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on the Sabbath controversies in Luke, and on Acts’ use of Second-Temple institutional vocabulary.

Nehemiah is one of the messier books to cite, and the whole of the mess is in chapters 3–10. This page’s passage is clean. The table below was derived for this page by counting the corpora on disk — the Masoretic text, the CATSS Greek of 2 Esdras, and the English verse shape — not copied from a printed concordance.

The three seams, stated exactly:

1. Chapters 3 and 4. The Hebrew closes chapter 3 six verses later than the English does. MT 3:33–38 = ESV 4:1–6, and MT 4:1–17 = ESV 4:7–23. So “Nehemiah 4:9” is we prayed to our God and set a guard in English and something else entirely in Hebrew.

2. Chapter 7, and this one is a missing verse rather than a shifted number. ESV 7:68 — they had 736 horses, 245 mules — has no verse of its own in the Masoretic text as this edition prints it. The Hebrew runs from the servants and singers of 7:67 straight to the camels and donkeys. The Greek does have it, at 2 Esdras 17:68. That single verse is the entire difference between the Masoretic 405 and the English 406.

3. Chapters 9 and 10. MT 10:1 = ESV 9:38 — the sentence about the sealed covenant. Everything after it runs one behind in English: MT 10:2–40 = ESV 10:1–39. This page cites the covenant clause we will not forsake the house of our God as ESV 10:39 = MT 10:40, with both numbers, for exactly this reason.

4. And the passage on this page has no offset at all. Chapters 11, 12 and 13 run 36 / 47 / 31 in the Hebrew, in the Greek and in the English. Every reference on this page is the same number in all three columns.

The Greek chapter number is a different matter and never goes away: Nehemiah n = 2 Esdras n + 10. Rahlfs prints Ezra and Nehemiah as one book of twenty-three chapters. A commentary citing “2 Esdras 23” is citing Nehemiah 13.

Jerusalem in 11:1 is a walled city that nobody wants to live in. Chapter 7:4 had said it plainly — the city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt. Farmland was outside; a house inside the wall meant leaving the land that fed you. So the leaders are already there, and the rest הִפִּילוּ גוֹרָלוֹת, cast lots, to move one household in ten.

And then verse 2 does something the rest of the ancient Near East’s resettlement records do not. It says the people blessed the men הַמִּתְנַדְּבִים — the ones who volunteered — τοὺς ἑκουσιαζομένους in the Greek, the same participle used for freewill offerings. A draft with a volunteer clause attached, and a public thank-you.

Two-thirds of this passage is names, and readers skip it. Under Persian administration a register was the instrument by which a person or a household was, or was not, part of the community — entitled to a share of the tithe, to a place in the priestly rota, to a house inside the wall. Ezra 2:62 shows the other side of it: priests whose registration could not be found among those enrolled in the genealogies were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.

So the lists in Nehemiah 11–12 and the expulsions in Nehemiah 13 are the same instrument used twice. The register says who is in; chapter 13 acts on who is not. That is why the book puts them next to each other, and why the page treats them as one unit.

The dedication in 12:27–43 is the one piece of pure ceremony in the book. Levites are hunted down out of the villages; the priests purify themselves, then the people, and then the gates and the wall — stonework treated as something that can be made clean. Then two תּוֹדֹת are set on top of the wall and sent in opposite directions.

The word for the choirs is the word for a sacrifice, and both columns show it.

The Greek screen lands the wall-dedication choirs in Leviticus 7 by an exact phrase — the law of the thank-offering — and the Hebrew lands there by the same noun in a different form. תּוֹדָה means both thanksgiving and the sacrifice you bring when you give it, and the Greek row carries the sacrificial phrase. The men walking the wall are not described as a choir singing thanks; they are described as a thank-offering, moving. The page does not say why the Greek reads as it does.

Scope: the Hebrew figure is over the whole 39-book Masoretic corpus held here. The Greek figure is over the 30,348 verse units a run screen sees — 64 CATSS files minus the Odes, which are excluded because Ode 9 is Luke 1 and Ode 13 is Luke 2 copied into a Greek Old Testament manuscript, and ten further Odes are second copies of passages already counted in Exodus, Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, Habakkuk, Isaiah, Jonah and Daniel. Counting them would count the same verse twice.

Nehemiah 13:4–9 is the sharpest scene in the book and it turns on real estate. Eliashib the priest, who was appointed over the chambers of the house of our God, is related by marriage to Tobiah the Ammonite — the man who in chapter 4 had said that a fox going up on their wall would break it down. Eliashib clears out a storeroom and gives it to him.

The storeroom was where the tithe was kept. 13:5 lists what came out to make room: the grain offering, the frankincense, the vessels, the tithes of grain and wine and oil which were given by commandment to the Levites, singers and gatekeepers. Verse 10 is the consequence, and the two verses are cause and effect: the Levites had not been given their portions, so they had gone back to their fields. The temple staff went home because a room was rented out.

Nehemiah’s response is one verse long and physical: I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber (13:8). Then he has the rooms purified and the vessels brought back. The Greek keeps the whole scene, verse for verse; chapter 13 is the only chapter of this passage the Greek has in full.

This is the measurement the page is named for, and it is worth seeing at full width.

The company Nehemiah keeps in that first list is worth reading slowly. Joseph asking the cupbearer to remember him when things go well — and being forgotten for two years. Samson, blind, asking God to remember him once more. Jeremiah under persecution. A psalmist asking God to remember him and not his sins. ⚠️ Tobit is on this list as a measurement partner, not as Scripture, and the page labels it every time it appears.

What the screen cannot do: it counts word FORMS, not lemmas and not parsings. The Hebrew figure of nine for זכרה includes Lamentations 1:7 and 1:9, where the identical consonants are a third-person perfect — Jerusalem remembers — and not an imperative at all. The page prints nine and then tells you that two of the nine are a different word wearing the same letters. The same caution applies to למואל at 12:38, which is Lemuel in Proverbs 31 and leftward here.

The two chapters are read together in every commentary. This is what the overlap actually measures, verse by verse, over consonantal word forms.

The parallel is alive for twenty-five verses and then it is not. Nehemiah 11:11 and 1 Chronicles 9:11 share ten consecutive word forms, and screened against the whole Masoretic corpus that ten-word chain has a tie band of one — 1 Chronicles 9:11 is the only other verse in the Hebrew Bible that carries it. 11:15 reaches nine, again with a tie band of one. Then from 11:25 the shared wording thins to a single word. 11:26–30 and 11:32–35 share nothing at all with 1 Chronicles 9; the two verses that still reach anything, 11:31 and 11:36, reach one word and two.

The page states the shape and refuses the causal story. Nothing here says Nehemiah copied Chronicles, or Chronicles copied Nehemiah, or that both drew on a temple archive. What is measured is that the Jerusalem register is shared and the village list is not.

Screened against every other verse in the Hebrew Bible, eight verses of Nehemiah 11 share no two consecutive words with anything. 11:26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35 — the village lists of Judah and of Benjamin. Screened over 23,168 other Masoretic verse units. ⚠️ A zero here means shares no two consecutive words, not shares no word — run with the single-word fallback switched on, the same chapter has no zeros at all; every verse shares at least one word with something. Both passes were also run on the ketiv as well as the qere, and the same eight verses came out both times.

And six of those eight are also among the nine verses of Nehemiah 11 the Greek does not have. Greek-absent, nine: 11:16, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35. No-two-word-contact, eight: 11:26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35. The two sets share six members: 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35. Two screens run for different reasons on different corpora, and six of the eight fall inside the nine. The page reports the overlap and offers no account of it whatever — the three Greek absences that fall inside the living part of the Chronicles parallel (11:16, 20, 21) are enough to show it is not a simple rule.

⚠️ NOW THE COUNTER-EXAMPLE, BECAUSE EIGHT IS NOT A REMARKABLE NUMBER. The same screen run on Nehemiah 12 returns nineteen such verses out of forty-seven — 12:2–6, 9, 13–21, 25, 33, 41, 42. Nehemiah 12 is more than twice as “unique” as Nehemiah 11 by this measure, and nobody would call chapter 12 remarkable. What the number is measuring is name-lists: strings of personal and place names shared by no other verse because no other verse lists those particular people. Nehemiah 13, which has no lists, returns zero such verses out of thirty-one. Across the whole passage: 27 of 114 verses, and all 27 of them in chapters 11 and 12.

Which is the honest way round to put it. The eight silent verses in chapter 11 are not evidence of anything special about chapter 11. They are evidence that a register is a kind of writing that cannot be quoted — and that the same chapter also holds the longest quotable chain on the page, at verse 11, fifteen verses before the silence starts.

Three verses of Nehemiah 13:15–22 have their single deepest contact in the entire Hebrew Bible in one chapter of Jeremiah, and each of the three has a tie band of one.

Jeremiah 17:19–27 is the oracle in which the prophet is told to stand in the gate of the people and say: bear no burden on the Sabbath day. Nehemiah 13:19 is a man standing in the gate of Jerusalem, shutting the doors so that no burden comes in on the Sabbath day. The vocabulary of the two is the same vocabulary, and outside these two places the Hebrew Bible does not use it.

⚠️ The page does not say who read whom. It does not say Nehemiah is enacting Jeremiah, or that Jeremiah 17:19–27 was composed with Nehemiah in view, or which is prior. The measurement is that three verses of one paragraph have band-one contact with one chapter, and that is a strong result and not an argument. Contrast the row directly above it in the same paragraph: 13:18 also reaches four, and its tie band is seven — all this great evil is a formula shared with 1 Samuel, 1 Kings, Jeremiah, Job, Daniel and 2 Chronicles. Same run length, and it means nothing.

All 102 CATSS rows of 2 Esdras 21–23 screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament. Distribution: 88 of the 102 rows reach two, 52 reach three, 14 reach four, 1 reaches five, and nothing reaches six. Two rows reach zero — 2 Esdras 22:2 and 22:3, the priestly name-list of Nehemiah 12:2–3, which share no word at all with the Greek New Testament. (Greek-side screens use the single-word fallback, so a zero here really does mean no word in common.)

⚠️ READ THE TOP ROW AND THE BOTTOM ROW TOGETHER. THIS IS THE POINT OF THE WHOLE PAGE.

The deepest measured contact between these three chapters and the New Testament is five words, tie band one — the highest and most distinctive number on the page — and it means and in those days. It joins the verse about mixed marriages in Nehemiah 13 to a verse in Revelation about men seeking death and not finding it. There is no relationship between them. It is a date formula.

Meanwhile the row this page is named for, Nehemiah 13:31, has a deepest run of three on the phrase and in the, with a tie band of twelve. The screen never surfaces this verse at all. The thing that actually connects it to the New Testament — μνήσθητί μου, which occurs once in the whole Greek New Testament — measures two, and a run of two is beneath notice on any distribution table ever printed on this shelf.

So the numbers and the meaning point in opposite directions, and both get printed. This is the standing rule here: the measurement finds verbatim contact, not allusion, and the number never makes the judgement. The five-word run at 13:23 is the page’s own counter-example, printed at full strength, so that the two-word one at 13:31 is not read as more than it is.

The strongest connection in chapter 13 is not to another book. It is to five chapters earlier in this one.

Same root in the Hebrew — עזב, active then passive — and the Greek keeps the pairing with ἐγκαταλείπω. These are the only two places in Nehemiah where the verb takes the house of God. The covenant that was signed and sealed in chapter 10 is being read back to the officials who signed it, in the form of a question.

The Greek διὰ τί ἐγκατελείφθη is the only passive of this verb in 2 Esdras. Its four active second-person forms are all in the great prayer of chapter 9 — 2 Esdras 19:17, 19, 28 and 31 — and three of the four are negated, you did not forsake them. The fourth is not: 2 Esdras 19:28 (Nehemiah 9:28) reads and you gave them into the hands of their enemies. The book uses one verb in chapter 9 for God’s keeping and for his handing over, for the people’s promise in chapter 10, and for their failure in chapter 13. The page notes the pattern and does not build a doctrine on a Greek verb-stem.

Every figure on this page came from four text files and nothing else. The Masoretic corpus (Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah, 23,204 verse units, 39 books), the CATSS digitisation of Rahlfs’ Septuaginta (64 files, 30,637 verse units held, 30,348 seen by a run screen once the Odes are excluded), the SBL Greek New Testament via MorphGNT (7,927 verses), and the ESV. No commentary produced any number here.

⚠️ No critical apparatus was consulted, for either language, and that matters more for this passage than for most. The nine absences in Greek Nehemiah 11 and the three in Nehemiah 12 are reported as properties of the CATSS file as it stands on this disk. Whether Rahlfs’ printed text marks them, whether they are present in Vaticanus or Alexandrinus or Sinaiticus, and whether the digitisation dropped anything, were not checked. The same caution applies to the missing horses-and-mules verse at 7:68: this page says it is absent from the Masoretic edition used here, and does not claim it is absent from every Hebrew witness. It is not.

⚠️ 1 Esdras is a real gap in this page. 1 Esdras is held here and is screened as part of the 30,348 — but 1 Esdras stops before Nehemiah, ending in the middle of the Ezra 10 / Nehemiah 8 material, and this page did not investigate what that implies about how Ezra-Nehemiah circulated. Josephus’ retelling in Antiquities XI, which does cover Nehemiah, was not consulted at all.

⚠️ The Jeremiah 17 result is a run screen, not a source-critical argument. Three band-one contacts in one paragraph is a strong number. It is not a demonstration that either text knew the other. A shared institutional vocabulary — the way people who administer a Sabbath gate actually talk — would produce the same measurement, and the page cannot distinguish the two. Direction of influence is not asserted anywhere on this page.

No Qumran material — and there is very little for Nehemiah, which is itself worth knowing and was not investigated here. No Targum, no Syriac, no Vulgate, no Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No Elephantine papyri, which are the closest contemporary documentary evidence for a Persian-period Jewish community and would bear directly on the intermarriage and Sabbath sections. No Persian administrative sources. No archaeology of Persian-period Jerusalem, which is where the argument about the city’s size and population actually lives.

And one thing this page deliberately does not do. Nehemiah 13:23–27 is a scene in which a governor curses men, beats some of them, pulls out their hair and makes them swear an oath, over marriages. The page reports what the text says and measures its vocabulary. It does not offer an ethical adjudication of the episode, and it does not use the measured link to Solomon as a way of making the scene comfortable. The connection the text itself draws is to Solomon, and the reader can hold the two together without help.

One more honest limit: the ESV footprint of the Deep Research shelf is tracked by a tool that keys off a second English line-list which was removed from every builder on 30 August 2026. The automated report therefore returns zero and is currently uninformative — a tooling regression, not a licensing clearance. Counted instead off the builders themselves on 30 August 2026: this page prints fifteen verses of Nehemiah in its codex and quotes fragments of eight more in its prose — 4:9, 7:4, 7:68, 10:39, 12:30, 12:43, 13:4 and 13:8. Across the whole shelf the codex rows come to 56 of the book’s 406 verses — fourteen per cent, with prose fragments on top of that, and comfortably inside Crossway’s half-a-book limit either way. Most rows quote a clause rather than a whole verse, so a whole-verse count overstates what is reproduced.

• H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah (Word Biblical Commentary 16).
• Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah: A Commentary (Old Testament Library).
• Jacob L. Wright, Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and its Earliest Readers.
• Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, vol. 1.
• Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem — on Persian-period population.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

Two-thirds of this passage is names, and the names are borrowed. Ten consecutive words of Nehemiah 11:11 stand in 1 Chronicles 9:11 and nowhere else; nine of 11:15 stand in 1 Chronicles 9:14 and nowhere else. Whoever assembled this register was working from the same material somebody else had already worked from. That is what a register is for.

And then the register stops and a voice starts. From 12:31 the text is I. By chapter 13 the man’s name has disappeared from his own book — seven times in the Hebrew, and the last of them at 12:47 — and what stands in its place is אֱלֹהַי, my God, five times in thirty-one verses.

The imperative he uses four times in that chapter is not a common biblical idiom. Measured: זָכְרָה stands nine times in the whole Hebrew Bible and six of them are his; the Greek μνήσθητί μου ὁ θεός stands four times in 30,348 Greek Old Testament verse units and all four are his. The only other man in Scripture who says זָכְרָה to God is Solomon, dedicating the temple (2 Chronicles 6:42) — and the only king of Israel Nehemiah 13 names is Solomon.

Nehemiah does not end with the wall. The wall is finished in chapter 6 and dedicated in chapter 12 with two choirs on top of it and the joy of Jerusalem heard from a distance. One chapter later the storeroom is a guest room, the Levites are back in their fields, and the wine presses are working on the Sabbath. The book ends with the reform half-done and the reformer asking to be remembered. Not reward me. זָכְרָה־לִּי אֱלֹהַי לְטוֹבָה — remember me, my God, for good — four words, and the only other verse in the Hebrew Bible that carries them is Nehemiah 5:19, which is the same man saying it earlier.

Two centuries later, the one Second-Temple book that praises him picks the same root. Sirach 49:13: καὶ Νεεμιου ἐπὶ πολὺ τὸ μνημόσυνον — and of Nehemiah the remembrance is great. Sirach is a witness on this shelf and not Scripture, and the page notes the vocabulary and asserts nothing about dependence. But the man asked three times not to be forgotten — and once, at 13:29, asked God to remember somebody else — and the sentence that survives him is about his memory.

This page closes chapters 11, 12 and 13. With 1:1–4:23, 5:1–7:73 and 8:1–13:31, the book is covered end to end — and it sits beside Ezra 1–6 and Ezra 7–10, which in the Greek are the same scroll.