Nehemiah 5:2
For there were that said, We, our sons, and our daughters, are many: therefore we take up corn for them, that we may eat, and live. For there were that said, We, our sons, and our daughters, are many: therefore we take up corn for them, that we may eat, and live.
The verse records the plea of poor families burdened with many sons and daughters who had to obtain corn in order to eat and stay alive, expressing the immediate hardship that drove their complaint. It belongs to the distress of the poorer Jews in Jerusalem while the wall was still unfinished, after the return from Babylon, as they appealed to Nehemiah for redress of their wrongs. Tillage had been neglected in the unsettled state of the country, and crop failures and famine followed because the selfish course and sins of the people caused the Lord's blessing not to rest on their land, leaving a scarcity of grain.
To feed their households the poor were obliged to buy corn on credit at exorbitant prices and to borrow money on interest to pay the heavy taxes and tribute imposed by the kings of Persia. The more wealthy Jews took advantage of their necessities to enrich themselves by lending at a high rate of interest directly contrary to God's commands and by taking mortgages on their lands. This debt and loss of property gradually reduced the debtors to the deepest poverty and drove families into bondage. Many were forced to sell their sons and daughters into servitude to get corn to eat and live, with no hope of improving their condition or redeeming their children or lands and no prospect but ever-increasing distress with perpetual want and bondage, even though oppressors and oppressed were of the same nation and children of the same covenant.
God had already made provision for such want through Moses by commanding a tithe every third year for the benefit of the poor and by suspending agricultural labor every seventh year, leaving the land fallow with its spontaneous products for those in need. Faithfulness in these offerings would keep before Israel that God owns all and that they were to be channels of blessing, training them to put away selfishness and grow in breadth and nobility of character. God had also forbidden acting as an usurer toward His poor people and charging usury on money, food, or anything lent. He had commanded not to harden the heart or shut the hand from a poor brother but to open the hand wide and lend sufficient for his need, because the poor would never cease from the land. In response to this appeal, Nehemiah stood boldly in defense of his downtrodden countrymen and caused the wrongdoers to remove the reproach that rested on them.