Nehemiah 13:24

Their children. If the marriages were contracted after Nehemiah’s departure, and he found born from those unions children who were able to talk, he must have been absent from Jerusalem for several years.

Half in the speech of Ashdod. Some expositors have thought that the children spoke a jargon half Hebrew and half foreign. It is more likely that the word “half” refers to the children born of these foreign women, who may in many instances have been second wives. Thus in some families half the children would not speak Hebrew correctly. “The speech of Ashdod” may have been, not the original Philistine language, but Aramaic, now widely spoken throughout the Persian Empire. Nehemiah, who, as a Persian official certainly knew Aramaic, was probably not opposed to a knowledge of that language, but was indignant at finding that some of the youth were not able to speak Hebrew properly. The Moabite and Ammonite languages were dialects closely related to Hebrew, but the difference was nevertheless noticeable, and Nehemiah was distressed to find these foreign dialects gaining a foothold in Judea.