Don't Go to Hakkephirim! - Meditations on Nehemiah 6

"Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, 'Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono.' But they intended to do me harm. And I sent messengers to them, saying, 'I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?' And they sent to me four times in this way, and I answered them in the same manner." (Nehemiah 6:2-4)

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As I sit here and type, there is a fly that keeps trying to land on my head. I keep swatting at it, but it doesn't give up. It's made up its mind that it wants to be there. I didn't think much about it at first, but since it keeps on trying it's become a nuisance. Sometimes I think that flies just believe it their responsibility to distract and annoy me.
 

I'm not sure if that's the way Nehemiah felt about Sanballat and Tobiah, but I wouldn't be surprised. Those guys just would not give up. They have ridiculed Nehemiah, attempted to entice the workers away from their task, and rounded up opposition. Now they're attempting a new scheme. Nehemiah must have been getting annoyed with these two flies.
 

Their latest attempt to foil Nehemiah's plans was to draw Nehemiah out of the city to a place called Hakkepherim. We don't know exactly where this place was; this is the only reference to it in the Bible. We are only told that it was in the plain of Ono (called the valley of craftsmen in Nehemiah 11:35), a town about 30 miles north-west of Jerusalem. They probably hoped to pass the invitation off as an attempt at a truce, meeting at a half-way point between Nehemiah's base of operations and their own.
 

I wonder if the name, Hakkepherim, tipped Nehemiah off to their real intentions. Sanballat certainly could have picked a place with a name that didn't carry the implications of this one. The word Hakkepherim is related two other Hebrew words. The first word means to cover or hide. It came to indicate the covering over of sin that was accomplished by the Jewish sacrifice. By extension, it referred to a ransom or the price of a life. The second word is usually translated "young lion."
 

If the name is any indication of what went on at Hakkepherim, we might assume that it was a place that had to do with sacrifice. Perhaps it was where the remains of sacrificial animals were discarded. Or perhaps it was a place that was inhabited by wild animals. In either case, it couldn't mirror more precisely what Sanballat and Tobiah had in mind for Nehemiah. They wanted to get him to a secluded place and quietly dispose of him. They were the wild animals; he was the sacrifice.
 

Four times Sanballat and Tobiah asked Nehemiah to meet them at their ambush and four times Nehemiah refused. It would have been easy for him to give in to their requests. He might have justified it by thinking that he could finally put an end to their pestering. But Nehemiah was a man committed to finishing his task. If he had stopped to confer with his opposition, he would have implied that what they had to say was more important that what God had said. Instead, he considered the task that God had entrusted to him more important than his personal convenience or safety. He concerned himself with his work and trusted God to deal with the lions prowling about in his back yard.
 

How do you respond when opposition is constant and unyielding? Most of us can withstand a few blows of opposition, but we soon buckle if the pressure refuses to let up. We need to remember that it doesn't matter what threats or enticements may be put before us, if we leave off what God has called us to do in order to pursue other things, those things may very well prove to be our Hakkephirim.