He hears the very children in the street talking a language he cannot understand.
So common has marriage with heathen foreigners become, that Nehemiah sees clearly that unless something is done to put a stop to it the next generation will grow up utterly un-Jewish in language, appearance, and dross, and worse still, heathen in their religion, kneeling down to idols of wood and stone, and carrying on in Jerusalem itself all the vile customs and abominations of the heathen.
'If the girls are pretty and nice, and if the men like them, why should not they please themselves ?' So the Jerusalem folk had talked in Nehemiah's absence.

They quite forgot to what it was all leading.

They shut their eyes to the danger of keeping bad company, they thought only of what was pleasant and of what they liked, they quite forgot to ask what was right, and what was the will of God.
Nehemiah, as governor of Jerusalem, summons into his presence, and commands to appear before him in his judicial court, every man in Jerusalem who had married a foreign heathen wife.
When all were assembled: (1) He contended with them, _i.e._ he rebuked and argued with them, as he had done with the rulers on the question of Sabbath observance.
(2) He cursed them, or as it is in the margin 'he reviled them.' Probably he pronounced, as governor of Jerusalem, speaking in the name of God, the judgments of God on those who broke his law.
(3) He smote certain of them.

That is, he had some of them publicly beaten.

Nehemiah called upon the officers of the court to make an example of some of the principal offenders by inflicting corporal punishment upon them.
(4) He plucked off their hair, _lit_., He made them bald.