Nehemiah 12:5 — Word Study

Context — The List of Priests Returning from Exilegenerated

Cross References

The Key Word — מִיָּמִן, mi.ya.Mingenerated

How Translations Differ — measured against the Berean Standard Biblegenerated

Sentence Structuregenerated

In plain words — the whole versegenerated

Frequently Asked Questionsgenerated

Reflection Questionsgenerated

1. Why do you think the names of these priests were important to the returning exiles?
2. What can we learn from the roles of Mijamin, Maadiah, and Bilgah in the restoration of worship?
3. How does understanding the priestly lineage help us appreciate the history of the Israelites?
4. In what ways can we honor our own spiritual heritage in our communities today?

The early church on this verse — how the Fathers read it

The earliest commentary on this verse comes from Ambrose of Milan, who discusses the implications of law and community in the context of the priestly roles.

Commentators on this verse — 1 expositors, verse by verse

Each of these wrote on Nehemiah 12:5 itself, not merely on the chapter around it.

Robert Jamieson1802–1880Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown's Commentary

Miamin, Maadiah, Bilgah, No JFB commentary on these verses.

Read Robert Jamieson on Nehemiah 12 →

The verse in English, compared — 17 translations, and where they part company

Every translation on this page is a decision someone had to make and commit to. Read down a column and you see one translator's judgement; read across a row and you see the range the Greek actually allows. The BSB is the wording the rest of this page is measured against, so it is listed first.

Counted from the translations carried on this site, not from a survey of every English Bible. A rendering shared by many versions is usually inherited rather than independently arrived at — the Tyndale line in particular runs through most of them.

The sentence as the grammar sees it — from the MACULA Hebrew treebank

This is not our own analysis: it is the scholarly syntax tree for the verse, showing how the clause actually holds together.

Boxes are the grammarian's groupings — clause, noun phrase, prepositional phrase.

The four witnesses to this verse — Masoretic, Septuagint, Samaritan, Qumran

The Masoretic Text lists the names as מִיָּמִן מַֽעַדְיָ֖ה בִּלְגָּֽה׃. The Septuagint matches these names, indicating agreement in the identification of these figures across traditions.

Four traditions, not one. “On the leather” means the letters physically survive on the scroll, as against letters an editor has supplied to fill a hole in it — a restoration is a scholar’s reading, not a reading of the manuscript. Words in [square brackets] are supplied; the notes count them apart from what survives.

The map of this verse — what each word keeps company with

This is a map of two things, both counted rather than judged. Company kept: which words stand within three words of each of these, anywhere in the Hebrew Bible — the thicker the line, the more often the pair meet compared with chance. Built from: the words a word is made out of, taken from its own Strong’s entry. It is not a map of meaning: nothing here claims two words mean the same thing. Click any circle to see the numbers behind it.

Lexicons — every word in Nehemiah 12:5

One dossier per word, with every reference work grouped by kind — Hebrew lexicons, morphology, Bible dictionaries, topical chains and the English of the translators themselves. The verse sits at the head of each block with the word under study lit, so you never lose your place. The panel above gives the short answer; this is the long one, and it is the part of the page worth indexing.

Every entry below is the lexicographer's own text. On the Hebrew: Brown-Driver-Briggs entire and its gloss set, Strong's Hebrew Dictionary, and Tyndale House's Translators Brief lexicon. Where a cell says a work has no entry, that work genuinely has none for this word.