נחמיה

Nechemiah — Nehemiah, Nechemiah ben Chachalyah — was one of the leaders of the Jewish people in the days of Shivat Tzion, the return to Zion at the start of the Second Temple period, in the fifth century BCE. By the tradition of Chazal he was a member of the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly. His deeds are set out in Sefer Nechemiah, which for the most part he wrote himself, in the first person.

He served as cupbearer to the Persian king Artachshasta, Artaxerxes I, a post given only to a man the king trusted greatly. In the twentieth year of that king’s reign, around 445 BCE, he heard that the remnant in Yehudah was in distress and the walls of Yerushalayim lay broken; he asked leave to go and rebuild the city, and the king appointed him pechah (governor) over the province of Yehudah. This was some thirteen years after Ezra had come up to Yerushalayim. In several places in Tanach he is called “HaTirshata,” and Chazal explain the title as “heter shtiya”: he was permitted to drink yayin nesech (wine of non-Jews, which is forbidden to drink), since he poured the king’s wine. His name carries the sense of nechamah, comfort.

Tanach does not state which tribe Nechemiah came from, and his name does not appear explicitly in any other sefer of Tanach. Some commentators identify him with the Nechemiah named at the head of the list of those who went up with Zerubavel, in the second perek of Ezra. Rabbi Yeshayah di Trani held that he was descended from the kohanim, since he heads the list of kohanim who signed the amanah, the covenant. One opinion in the Talmud identifies Nechemiah ben Chachalyah with Zerubavel ben Shealtiel, of the line of the kings of Yehudah.

By tradition Nechemiah was niftar on the ninth of Tevet, the same day on which Ezra passed away.

ביוגרפיה © 2026 TorahSages · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · torahsages.com/he/sages/nechemiah · זכויות יוצרים ורישוי