Well it’s time to move back into Jerusalem, but not everyone is terribly excited about moving into a rundown city. Its like someone asked you to move back to Berlin after WW2. Not many people are excited about it, but it needs to be done for the continuance of the nation. Nehemiah is smart enough to realize that a slow phase in of the population will be less miserable then everyone at once. This is probably because there is very little infrastructure, housing, etc. People probably wanted to stay in their villages cause they had already set up home there and there was definitely more business outside the vacant city.
One thing that I didn’t realize until this chapter is that this population of Jews was only comprised of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. This is because the northern kingdom of Israel was so dispersed by the Assyrians that they never really returned in significant numbers to their homeland. So when we are talking only about the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, along with the Levites who were dispersed amongst all the tribes so that they could lead worship throughout the nation (see Joshua 21). I read that the estimated population of Jerusalem was only about 4800 to 8000.
It is interesting to think that there were very few significant figures from this point on for the other tribes of Israel. If you think about the two biggest figures from the New Testament they are Jesus who is from the tribe of Judah and Paul who is from the tribe of Benjamin. I wonder which tribes the disciples were all from…I’ll have to check into all this.