Going on to the Fish Gate, Nehemiah finds that a colony of heathen Tyrians have come to live there, in order that they may hold a fish-market close to the gate.  The fish was caught by their fellow-countrymen in Tyre and Sidon, and was sent down to Jerusalem slightly salted, in order to preserve it from corruption.  Nehemiah finds that these Tyrians are doing a grand traffic in salted fish, especially on the Sabbath day.  The Jews loved fish, and always have loved it.  How they enjoyed it in Egypt, how they longed for it in the wilderness!

‘We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely.’

So they sighed, and murmured, as they thought of their lost luxuries.

There was nothing a Jew liked so well for his Sabbath dinner as a piece of fish; and, therefore, on the Sabbath, the Tyrians found they did more business than on any other day.

As Nehemiah leaves the city by the Fish Gate, he meets donkeys and mules bringing in sheaves of corn, or laden with paniers containing figs, and grapes, and melons; he meets men laden with all kinds of burdens, and women bringing in the country produce that they may sell it in the streets of Jerusalem.

Then, passing on into the fields, he notices that work is going on as usual.  They are tilling the ground, gathering in the corn, pruning the vines, and standing bare-footed in the winepresses to tread out the juice of the grapes.

So the promise about the Sabbath has been kept no better than the other promise; the covenant has been totally disregarded.

Turning homewards, Nehemiah discovers that the remaining article of the agreement has also been broken.  For, as he passes through the streets, and listens to the children at play, he finds that some of the little ones are talking a language he cannot understand.  Here and there he catches a Jewish word, but most of their talk is entirely unintelligible to him.  On inquiring into the reason of this, he is told that these children have Jewish fathers but Philistine mothers, and that they are being brought up to talk the language and learn the religion of their heathen parent.  They are making for themselves a strange dialect, a mixture of the two languages they have spoken; it is half Jewish, half Philistine.

’Their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people,’ xiii. 24.

Poor Nehemiah must have been filled with sorrow and bitter disappointment, as he found Jerusalem and its people in such a disgraceful condition.  He had left the holy city like the garden of the Lord, he comes back to find the trail of the serpent all over his paradise.  They did so well whilst he was there, they wandered to the right hand and the left so soon as he was parted from them.

Nor is Nehemiah the only one who has had this bitter disappointment; many a parent, many a teacher, many a friend can enter into his feelings, for they have gone through the same.