Nehemiah 5:7-9

EasyEnglish Bible

⁷ I thought carefully about what they had said. Then I said to the Jewish leaders and officers, ‘You are cheating your own people! You are taking back more money than you have lent to them.’

I told the Jews to come together for a big meeting. ⁸ I said to them all, ‘When our own Jewish people have become slaves of foreign people, we have tried hard to buy them back. But now you are making your own people sell their children to you. And you want us to pay you to buy them back again!’ The Jewish leaders kept quiet. They had nothing to say.

⁹ Then I said to them, ‘You are doing something that is completely wrong. Instead, you should obey God and live in a good way. Then the foreign people who are our enemies will not have a chance to insult us.