Nehemiah 5:5
Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vineyards.
The verse describes the condition of the poorer Jews after the return from Babylon while the wall of Jerusalem was still unfinished. It asserts that the poor and their children were the same flesh as their brethren, kin and fellow members of the covenant people who loved their children just as deeply, which made their bondage an unjust treatment by their own people who held power over them. It reports that parents were forced to bring their sons and daughters into servitude as servants, with some daughters already brought into bondage, and that they had no power to redeem their children or their lands because other men held their lands and vineyards.
Their distress came from an unsettled country where tillage had been neglected, and the selfish course of some who had returned had kept blessing from the land, so crops failed and grain was scarce. To get food for their families the poor had to buy food on credit at exorbitant prices and borrow on interest to pay the heavy taxes and tribute laid by the kings of Persia for the king. Wealthier Jews of their own nation and covenant took advantage of their necessity to enrich themselves by exacting high interest and taking mortgages on their lands and vineyards as security, and by this means the debtors were reduced to deepest poverty. Their poverty and bondage did not come from laziness or wastefulness.
This loss of children, lands, and power to redeem came by breaking what had been commanded for the poor through Moses: to raise every third year a tithe for their benefit, to let agricultural labor cease every seventh year with the land lying fallow and its spontaneous products left to those in need, to charge no usury on money or food or anything to a poor brother, and to open the hand wide to lend him sufficient for his need, since the poor would never cease out of the land. Faithfulness in these offerings would have kept fresh the truth of divine ownership of all and the opportunity to be channels of blessing, and their purpose was to train Israel to eradicate selfishness and develop breadth and nobility of character. The verse means they had no hope of improving their condition and no prospect but ever-increasing distress, perpetual want, and bondage. Its setting is the oppression of fellow Israelites, which Nehemiah confronted by defending the wronged and requiring the oppressors to remove the reproach.