Nehemiah 9:6: the prayer that starts at the sky and works down
6You yourself alone, O Lord, made heaven, and the heaven of the heavens, and all their host, the earth and all things that are in it, the seas and all things that are in them. And you gave life to all these things. And the host of heaven adores you.
Everything in the sentence is finished except the last verb. The making is done; the adoring is still going on while the prayer is being said.
Short answer
Nehemiah 9:6 opens the longest prayer in the Old Testament. It says God alone made the heavens, the earth, the seas and everything in them, that he gave life to all of it, and that the host of heaven adores him — the only thing in the sentence still happening.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The prayer beginning here will run through the whole chapter, retelling the story of the people from Abraham to the exile. It is the longest national summary in the Hebrew Bible, and it does not begin with Abraham.
It begins before any people exists at all. The choice says something about how that community understood its own history: as a late chapter of something much larger.
Where this verse appears
The scene is an assembly. On the twenty-fourth day of the month the people gather in fasting, in sackcloth and with soil on them, spend part of the day reading the law and another part confessing.
The Levites call for praise at verse 5, and the prayer grows out of that call. It is not one person’s initiative: it is the answer to an instruction shouted at a crowd.
From verse 7 the prayer comes down to particulars — Abram called out, the affliction in Egypt, the sea, the wilderness. Verse 6 is the only part that speaks of the world before it speaks of the nation.
What it says
In this edition the word alone is fastened to the making, not to the being. The claim is not that no other god exists but that nobody else built any of it — a statement about authorship rather than about a census of gods, and a harder one to argue with.
The inventory has a logic of breath. It climbs to the heaven of heavens, comes down to the earth, and keeps going down to the seas, covering the high, the middle and the deep. It is the old way of saying everything without using the word.
Then the tenses part company. The making and the giving of life are reported as done; only the adoring is in the present. Whatever else the verse describes belongs to the past, and the one thing under way as the prayer is spoken is worship.
The word for the stars is a military one. Heaven has an army, and the last thing the sentence does is say what that army is doing. The force that might have been a threat appears in the posture of a congregation.
What to do with it today
It is especially useful on a day when your own problem has taken up the whole horizon. Reading a sentence that begins at the heaven of heavens does not solve the problem, but it gives it back its actual size.
There is a practical use as an opening. Before listing what you need, say one sentence about what God made and what he keeps. That is the order chosen by the people praying here, and the list of requests does arrive — later in the same chapter.
A prayer to carry with you
Lord, you made what I cannot see the ends of, and you gave life to the small thing I am. Let me begin the day remembering that proportion. Amen.