Nehemiah 11:26

Study note

Setting — Nehemiah records a resettlement list for Jerusalem and its surrounding villages after the Babylonian exile. The narrator documents which families occupied specific southern Judah settlements to restore the community's geographic structure.

The words — The text lists Jeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ, ye.Shu.a'), Moladah (מוֹלָדָה, mo.la.Dah), and Beth-pelet (בֵּית פֶּלֶט, Veit Pa.la.t). These Hebrew proper nouns function as place names identifying distinct villages within the tribal allotment.

The thread — Moladah appears in Joshua 15:26 and Joshua 19:2 as a town within the inheritance of Judah and Simeon. The recurrence of these names confirms the post-exilic community's reoccupation of the land boundaries recorded during the conquest.

Why it lands — The verse requires the reader to recognize the administrative precision of the returned exiles as they reoccupied ancestral territories. It demands an acknowledgment that the community systematically restored the tribal and geographic structure of Judah.

Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.