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There are no biographical details about Nahum other than the name of his hometown Elkosh. Fourth-century Christian theologian Saint Jerome claimed Elkosh was a village in northern Galilee. With no additional archaeological discoveries, Jerome’s tradition has endured.
Dating
Nahum does not give an explicit date in his superscription, nor does he name a king that would help with dating. In fact, no other biblical text, apart from Nahum’s own book, mentions Nahum. Based on a few textual clues, Nahum likely ministered around the middle of the seventh century BCE. He mentions the fall of the Egyptian city of Thebes as a historical fact (3:8), and historians know Thebes fell in 663 BCE, so the prophet had to have written after that major historical event.
The way Nahum describes the great strength of Assyria suggests the empire was still a powerhouse in the prophet’s day. To the shock of the ancient world, however, in 612 BCE, an alliance of Babylonians and Medes overtook Nineveh, Assyria’s capital. Nahum likely predicted Nineveh’s fall before the event. The fall of Thebes and Nineveh establish the parameters for dating Nahum sometime between 663 and 612 BCE.
Critical biblical scholars who reject the notion of prophets receiving supernatural visions disagree with dating Nahum before Nineveh’s fall. They assume Nahum and the other prophets could only interpret the political and military events contemporary with themselves. Adherents of this view believe Nahum was probably written right before Nineveh’s destruction, when signs of her downfall were surfacing, or after 612 BCE. If that were the case, the prophet would have tweaked his oracle to make it appear that he had been predicting Nineveh’s fall, all along.
The date of Nahum’s composition depends on whether the prophet was writing predictively about Assyria’s fall or retrospectively. However, the predictive nature of his prophecy is important to his purpose, so the earlier date is more consistent with the content of the book. Nahum’s message of hope, by predicting Assyria’s defeat, would have seemed impossible to the people of Judah. Only God’s divine intervention in history could upend the world order. Nahum’s short but inspired text was, of course, included in the scriptural canon.
Nineveh’s ruin
Though exquisitely written, the message of Nahum is focused, as reflected in its title: “An oracle concerning Nineveh.” Although the book is written to the people of Judah, Nahum had one foreign nation in his crosshairs: the Assyrian Empire. Nineveh, as the capital of Assyria, was synonymous with the whole empire. Nahum did not waste a single prophetic breath on chastising the people of Judah or any other foreign nation. (Obadiah had the same laser focus with the Edomites.) To the people of God, Nahum had only a message of comfort, not correction. In fact, the name Nahum, in Hebrew, means “comfort.”
Nahum offered comfort to God’s people by delivering his prophecy of judgment on Assyria with a tone of expectant triumphalism. At no point did he address the Ninevites. His intended audience was the hurting people of Judah, beaten and scaled down to a small fraction of their former nation. Living in an overcrowded Jerusalem, they were reeling over the memory of Assyria’s destruction of the Northern Kingdom. Assyria had ruled her vassal states through fear and deterrence. The Assyrian Empire had to conquer new lands to pay their mercenaries, stoke chaos in the realm, and decentralize any potential opposition. Judah had suffered the heavy hand of their occupation for two centuries by the time of Nahum’s prophecy.
Scholars considering the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible all exalt Nahum as one of the most distinguished prophetic writers. His use of staccato repetition matches the content of his message. The drumbeat of his poetry foreshadows the abrupt and determinative nature of Nineveh’s destruction. Nahum was also a master in the language of the taunt. Other prophets tended to list the offenses of foreign nations. All the prophets were experts with strongly worded language and sarcasm. Nahum upped the ante of both categories, skillfully taunting and insulting Assyria as an enemy of God.
Most of the other prophetic books give off the aura that the prophet vocalized them as sermons or lectures before committing them to paper. In a society committed to orally transmitted teachings and traditions, the prophetic texts often originated as hymns, liturgies, or speeches before being converted to written compositions.
Nahum’s preamble identifies itself as a book, or rather a scroll, right at the outset: “The book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh” (1:1). No other prophetic text self-identifies as a written composition. Some scholars propose that Nahum circulated his written prophecy among the people of Jerusalem to give them courage during the most intense periods of Assyrian persecution.
Divine warrior hymn
Except for the first eight verses, Nahum is not a theological text. Nahum’s opening is a divine warrior hymn, praising Yahweh as a powerful fighter who would bring victory for his people over the Assyrian enemy. Highlighting the jealousy and vengeance of God, the hymn begins, “a jealous and avenging God is the Lord, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and rages against his enemies” (1:2). Some English translations prefer zealous over jealous. Jealous has a negative connotation in English, usually associated with loss of control over one’s emotions. However, jealousy in reference to God’s character is a covenant term, showing the exclusivity of the relationship between God and his people.
I understand that the focus on God’s wrath can be off-putting for us as modern readers. It is natural to prefer texts focusing on God’s love, compassion, and mercy. Yet, the way Nahum built the Judeans’ confidence in Assyria’s fall was by promising them God’s vengeance over their enemies. They witnessed the Assyrian Empire commit brutal acts in the name of expansion, but instead of experiencing the setbacks of God’s judgment, Assyria only continued to grow in strength and to accrue more success. What God’s people could not see was the long-term plans of Yahweh and his ultimate plan for administering justice.
The divine warrior hymn rolls out as a series of theophanies (1:4-5). Yahweh rides in on the clouds. With a word, he rebukes the sea. With a step, the mountains quake, hills melt, and the earth heaves. His wrath pours out like fire. Nahum repeatedly uses the divine name as the ultimate exaltation. The repetition and thematic emphasis come through in our English translations of the hymn. However, another feature of the hymn’s literary structure is only visible in Hebrew. The author may have intended the hymn to be a partial acrostic.
Acrostic
In 1865, the Hebrew scholar Frohnmeyer noticed that Nahum’s divine warrior hymn formed a partial alphabetic acrostic. Each couplet starts with a successive letter in the Hebrew alphabet, but some letters are skipped. Aleph begins the second verse, Bet starts the third verse, and Gimel starts the fourth. Nahum omitted dalet. Heh starts the fifth verse. Why is the whole alphabet not part of the acrostic? It’s possible that the acrostic is disturbed because the hymn lost some lines over time. Another possibility is that a partial acrostic is merely a coincidence.
Alphabetic acrostics are a well-known phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible. They were an interesting Hebrew poetic device, used for beautification and to help with memorization of hymns. Psalm 119 is the most developed of all the acrostic Psalms; every line starts with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. But other Psalms and even sections of Proverbs and Lamentations also feature acrostics.
Textual critics argue that Nahum’s first hymn is too different in style and content from the rest of the book and therefore must have been a late addition to the text as an effort to give the nationalistic prophecies of Nahum a more theological basis. However, that argument has lost ground as biblical studies have progressed. Scholars make an equal case that the hymn is the ideal preamble to Nahum’s pronouncement. Yahweh’s sovereignty is highlighted in the opening of Nahum as proof that his wrath is only stirred when it is just, while the rest of Nahum focuses on the punishment of Nineveh.
Some scholars believe Nahum designed the hymn to stand on its own, like a Psalm. Indeed, there are similarities between Nahum’s hymn and the battle hymns in Psalms 7, 91, and 98. The Israelites used these Psalms as aspirational prayers before battles or celebration hymns after victories. Nahum uses a style parallel to those Psalms, but he celebrates a victory over Israel’s enemies still in the future.
Nahum’s hymn calls the reader back to Mount Sinai at the moment God revealed to Moses the fullness of his character (1:3). As Yahweh passed in front of Moses, he proclaimed himself as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin (Ex. 34:6). The prophetic books consistently affirm these attributes (Joel 2:13, Micah 7:18; Jonah 4:2, Isa. 12:4). What John 3:16 is to Christians, Exodus 34:6 is to Jews.
However, also at this critical moment of revelation at Sinai, Yahweh had told Moses that despite his compassion, he would not “leave the guilty unpunished.” Biblical history played out in a manner that sometimes evoked the compassion of Yahweh and sometimes called for his vengeance. Jonah knew that the compassion and mercies of God would spare Nineveh of her deserved punishment. Nahum drew the opposite conclusion. Once Yahweh’s grace had been exhausted, his righteousness had to be expressed through his abounding power.
The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is often viewed as wrathful, while the God of the New Testament is seen as loving. The Yahweh of the Old and New Testaments should not be separated. All of scripture is the account of God constantly and progressively extending himself to humanity.
Paul understood that God’s character was continuous from creation to revelation:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse (Rom. 1:18-20).
As with the Assyrians, we have no excuse. The universal standard, for holy living and humility before our creator, remains.