Why are we told that “their nobles would not stoop to serve their Lord”?

The term translated as nobles describes the elite, the leading men of town. The phrase stoop to serve recalls the unwillingness of oxen to put their heads down to receive the yoke. In modern idiom, Tekoa’s elite declined to put their shoulders to the work. In our translation the term Lord appears with an upper case “L" and so is a reference to the Lord God. As the Hebrew language does not use upper or lowercase, the reference could be to a human lord (see NASB, NIV), that is, the governor (Nehemiah). However the latter point may be, Nehemiah in this passage lets us know that the people’s willingness to reconstruct the wall was not unanimous. More specifically, here were leaders who set a different example than Eliashib the high priest had set.