Groups of men were stationed around the city, as the project of rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem was begun, and there were at least thirty-nine teams of workers stationed at various points. Each of these teams were responsible for a specific portion of the rebuilding project. Moreover, laborers had to be sent to the king’s forest and to stone quarries to obtain building materials, or businessmen in those areas had to deliver the necessary supplies to the Jewish laborers stationed around Jerusalem. Additionally, work had ceased from time to time for various reasons. Sometimes it was due to the harassment by enemies round about Judah (cp. Nehemiah 4:11).
Therefore, the project had to be defended (Nehemiah 4:12-14), so that half the company labored on the wall, and the other half guarded the project with swords and spears (Nehemiah 4:16-17). So, if the project was under attack, obviously, the labor had to stop, while it was defended. Finally, there were parts of the city that were so full of debris (Nehemiah 4:10), that work had to be stopped, while the laborers cleared the area. In other words, to claim Nehemiah and company rebuilt the city walls in a mere fifty-two days (Nehemiah 6:15) is simply ridiculous to say the very least.
It seems probable that not all of the walls surrounding Jerusalem were completely destroyed, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and carried the Jews to Babylon about a century earlier. Certainly, the wall to the north was completely destroyed or very nearly so. Of the thirty-nine teams mentioned only four are actually said to build both the gates and the wall (Nehemiah 3:1-3). The officiating high priest, Eliashib, together with a group of priests built the sheep gate and rebuilt the wall from the sheep gate to the tower of Hananeel. Two other teams rebuilt the wall from the tower of Hananeel to the Fish Gate, which, itself, was rebuilt by the sons of Hassenaah. From this point onward, down the west side of the city to the Dung Gate at its southern point, then northward along the eastern wall of Jerusalem to the Sheep Gate, where Eliashib and a team of priests were building the northern wall, thirty-five other teams of laborers repaired the wall, which seems to imply a difference between building or rebuilding the wall and repairing the wall, concluding that not all of the wall was destroyed completely!
The thirty-nine teams, vis-à-vis what the text mentions (there may have been more), had specific responsibilities and were stationed at various locations around the limits of the city proper. There, they executed their responsibilities by building (Nehemiah 3:1-3) or repairing (Nehemiah 3:4-32) the city gates and walls. They were especially concerned with insuring there were no breaches in the wall (cp. Nehemiah 4:7), because once they were completely shut, the walls could be rebuilt to their original height with less danger of trouble from their enemies, due to the defense inherent in having a wall whose height kept men and their spears and swords from being a danger to the laborers.
The gates of the city needed to be rebuilt entirely (Nehemiah 3:1, 3, 6, 13, 14, 15; cp. Nehemiah 2:13) or repaired (Nehemiah 3:26, 28, 29, 31, 32). It seems the gates along the northern wall of the city were completely destroyed, as were the gates along the western wall and the two southern gates, the Dung Gate and the Fountain Gate. However, the three gates along the eastern wall, the Horse Gate, the East Gate and the Miphkad Gate seems to have had less damage. So, depending upon the location along the walls of the city, the work was either great or at least not so great a labor.
Perhaps Nehemiah surveyed only the southern parts of Jerusalem’s wall, because those were the only sections still standing.
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