Who Wrote the Book of Nehemiah?

In the Hebrew Bible the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are treated as a single book (“Ezra-Nehemiah”), spanning nearly a century of history. The latter part, separated as a distinct book in the English Bible (“Nehemiah”), contains the “Nehemiah memoirs” which purport to be the first-person writings of Nehemiah, the two-term governor of Judea in the fifth century BC. Some of the material contained in the book (particularly most of chap. 7, which is a near-exact repetition of the earlier writing of Ezr 2) is obviously drawn from other sources, which the author/editor chose to include in the text. This commentary adopts the traditional view that Nehemiah is the author/editor of the book bearing his name.