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The close of Nehemiah’s divine warrior hymn marks a transition from praise to prophecy. The first eight verses are hymns, and the rest of the book is a pronouncement.
In most bibles, Nahum precedes Habakkuk and follows Micah. This placing makes thematic and chronological sense. Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah emphasize God’s punishment of godless empires, and they stack neatly together. The Septuagint places Nahum after Jonah, creating a dichotomous theme about God’s interaction with the Ninevites, who either received his mercy or provoked his anger. In Jonah, it was the sparing of Nineveh that best displayed God’s mercy. In Nahum, God’s power is displayed through Nineveh’s destruction.
Jonah versus Nahum
About 150 years separate the life of Jonah from the life of Nahum, Jonah being the earlier of the two. If you read the prophets with no awareness of their relative chronology, it would be easy to assume that Nahum preceded Jonah and that his prediction of Nineveh’s fall was the oracle eventually delivered by Jonah. Worse yet, reading Jonah and Nahum in tandem makes it appear that their messages contradict each other. Was Nineveh pardoned for their wickedness after they repented? Did God forgive the Ninevites and then change his mind?
Nahum is the sequel to Jonah. In Jonah, the wickedness of Nineveh came up before Yahweh and he determined to destroy the great city (Jonah 1:1). In response to Jonah’s warning, the whole of the people and their king repented. Their repentance was so sincere that Yahweh relented and withdrew his punishing hand. The Ninevites’ repentance is one of two instances in the Minor Prophets in which the people responded with a genuine change of heart on a national scale after hearing a prophet’s words.
Based on everything we know about Assyria from 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, Nineveh’s revival did not last beyond a generation. Not only did they return to their violent and evil ways, but they also crossed a red line in 722 BCE by conquering the Kingdom of Israel, ravaging the land, slaughtering the Israelites, and scattering the survivors throughout the Assyrian Empire. They terrorized all the towns of Judah and only failed in their attempted takeover of Jerusalem. By Nahum’s day, the Assyrian Empire had exhausted the limits of God’s mercies.
No wonder Nahum stated at the outset, “The Lord will not clear the guilty” (1:3). As the prophet Jeremiah said, God cannot “let the way of the guilty prosper” (Jer. 12:1). Repentant hearts delayed Nineveh’s punishment during Jonah’s day, but God’s forgiveness of the Ninevites was not eternal or unconditional. As Nahum pronounced, “No adversary will rise up twice” (1:9).
In Jonah, Yahweh had spoken gently to the rebellious prophet, like a patient teacher asking rhetorical questions to nudge the student to the correct answer. In Nahum, Yahweh rode on the clouds, melting mountains and shaking the earth’s foundations with each step. It was not Yahweh whose fundamental character had changed from one book to the next, but the hearts of the Ninevites. “For I the Lord do not change,” wrote Malachi. According to Nahum, the kingdoms of men were capable of evil. At the top of the list were the Assyrians, whom God judged as “utterly deceitful” (3:1).
Direct address
Nahum asked, “Why do you plot against the Lord?” (1:9) The subject of his address is uncertain from the pronoun “you.” Nahum addresses the mysterious “you” again when he declares, “from you one has gone out who plots evil against the Lord, one who counsels wickedness” (1:11). The prophet would reveal the identity of the accused in the next chapter (2:9). Nahum, a clever writer, was intentionally building suspense.
Nahum switched to a word of comfort delivered directly to Judah. Yahweh acknowledged he allowed for Judah’s affliction in the past, as he used Assyria as the “rod of his anger” (Isa. 10:5). We know from the earlier prophecies of Isaiah and Micah why Judah was deserving of judgment, but Nahum did not spend any time describing Judah’s sins or rebellion, only her coming relief from the bonds of Assyrian oppression (1:13).
With Assyria’s fall, God expected his people to return to their religious calendar of feasts and festivals, worshiping him freely (1:15). After the locust invasion had devastated the land in Joel, his foremost desire was to renew sacrificial worship at the temple. We do not know why temple sacrifice paused during the lifetime of Nahum while the temple stood. One theory is that the Assyrians demanded such a high tribute that there was no financial reserve for the Jews to maintain their sacrificial system.
To further console Judah, Nahum wrote, “Behold, on the mountains, the feet of him who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace!” (1:15). This proclamation is an example of how prophetic texts often mirrored each other. Isaiah used this exact phraseology and imagery at an earlier time: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings” (Isa. 52:7).
The context of Nahum and Isaiah was different. Isaiah addressed a Judah experiencing the beginning of the Assyrian rise to power, while Nahum envisioned the empire’s end. Still, in the Bible, revelation builds on revelation, and there is symbiosis among the prophetic revelations. Even the apostle Paul repurposed the messenger imagery of Nahum and Isaiah in his letter to the congregation in Rome: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!” (Rom. 10:15).
The last two chapters of Nahum provide a rough outline of the sequence of events that led to Nineveh’s takeover. During the life of the prophet, Assyrian power seemed impenetrable. The battle scenes he vividly describes were unthinkable to his audience, which was so accustomed to Assyria’s domination.
Nahum warned Nineveh that a mighty being would come up against them (2:1). In the Revised Standard Version, the being is called a “shatterer.” The New King James translates it as “he who scatters.” In the New International Version, it is rendered “attacker.” Despite the translation discrepancies, the scatterer or shatterer, or attacker, was a cryptic reference to Yahweh. Yahweh would take justice into his hands.
Nahum exalted the name of Yahweh, keeping his focus on the power of Yahweh to minimize the actual agents of his revenge. In the earthly version of events, an alliance of Babylonians and Medes destroyed Nineveh, but Yahweh was orchestrating that destruction.
War and floods
Nahum’s poetry effectively communicated the chaos of war, blurring the distinctions between the actions of the attackers and those of the defenders. He described chariots rambling about in the streets of Nineveh. The chariots could represent the Babylonians who entered through a break in the wall or the Assyrians who fought to defend the city.
In Nahum’s vision, the attacking army plundered the city. Nahum wrote, “There is no end of treasure, or wealth of every desirable prize” (2:9). For centuries, the Assyrian Empire had a policy of wealth through warfare. They had conquered every land within reach and stripped territories bare of material possession. Writing ironically, Nahum flipped the script, and the biggest perpetrator of theft became the victim.
Nahum’s account of Nineveh’s fall also hinted at a watery ruin for the city. Nahum wrote, “the river gates are opened, the palace trembles” (2:6). He continued, “Nineveh is like a pool whose waters run away” (2:8). Interestingly, the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote a historical account of the fall of Nineveh, centuries after it occurred. According to his version of events, an abundance of rainfall overwhelmed Nineveh’s canals and reservoirs. The floods weakened a portion of the city’s protective wall and destabilized the palace. The Babylonians and Medes were clever opportunists, taking advantage of the eroded walls to launch their attack. Until that moment, nations had not even dreamed of penetrating Nineveh’s fortifications. To be sure, the Greek historian may have embellished the story. The Babylonian annals that describe Nineveh’s last days do not mention rain or report the method of their attack.
Nahum’s description of Nineveh as a pool with open river gates could have been literal, and this would collaborate with the Greek historical account. Alternatively, it may have been a figurative description of the fleeing Assyrian refugees.
Nahum often alluded to the symbols of Assyria in his prophetic taunts. Assyrian art and reliefs depicted Assyrian royalty with lions. In the annals of King Ashurbanipal (668-627), the king bragged about his successes in lion hunts, even claiming that he killed lions with his bare hands. Nahum, using Assyrian symbology against them, painted an image of lion cubs and lionesses hunting. Even when they were successful at the hunt, however, they had no lair to devour their prey (2:11-12). The lion represented the king and the lionesses his wives and concubines. For centuries, the Assyrians roamed the lands taking whatever they desired, but Nahum’s metaphor described the total ruin of their empire: not even a single cave would remain as their refuge. Their destruction would be total.
Nahum 3
Nahum may be the only biblical book explicitly focused on the rise and fall of one ancient empire, Assyria. However, there was a prophetic obsession with Assyria in the Bible that went far beyond Nahum. In the book, The World Around the Old Testament, bible scholars summarize the Bible’s Assyria obsession: “Assyria took on a literary and ideological role as the second nation, alongside Egypt, to represent the prototypical foreign imperial power that is judged by God.”[1]
Prophetic obsession with Assyria
At its high point, the Assyrian Empire covered northern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey. Assyria’s expansionist policies and aggressive military tactics built the first huge empire in the Middle East. Historians know more about Assyria in the seventh century BCE than they know about Europe in the Middle Ages. That is mostly thanks to Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s library. In the mid-1800s, archaeologists excavating the ruins of Nineveh discovered 30,000 clay tablets revealing all the ins and outs of Assyrian rule, bureaucracy, culture, literature, and religion.
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria during the reign of Sennacherib (704-681 BCE). By Nahum’s day, it had become the largest city in the world. The city’s fortifications, combined with its beauty and size, created an imperial standard in the region that subsequent empires, such as the Babylonians, aspired to attain.
Assyria funded their army’s exploits and the kings’ ambitious building projects by imposing heavy tax burdens on their vassal states and by plundering their victims. Assyria’s military was its greatest asset. The Assyrian tablets and the preserved iconography in their estate buildings reveal they had a well-earned reputation for brutality. Beheading prisoners, gouging out the eyes of the elites, and burning captured monarchs alive are examples of the gratuitous violence that made them infamous.
Mass deportation was the Assyrian method of preventing organized uprisings. Their deportation policy is well-known because of the fate of Israel’s 10 “lost” tribes. Historians believe the Assyrians conducted at least 150 other deportations.
Besides the prophetic books, Chronicles and Kings reveal the national mood in Judah and Israel while living under Assyrian domination. The Northern and Southern Kingdoms had different philosophies, as reflected in their international policies towards Assyrian oppression. The Kingdom of Israel opposed the Assyrians by both withholding tribute and building an anti-Assyrian alliance. Failure to pay tribute would have been enough grounds for Assyria to attack, but Israel’s attempt to organize a resistance against Assyrian oppression sealed her fate.
From 734 to 731 BCE, King Tiglath-Pileser III led a campaign westward against Israel and her allies, killing Israel’s King Pekah and replacing him with Hoshea as a puppet leader. King Hoshea also eventually withheld tribute from Assyria and reached out to Egypt to build a coalition against Assyria. As payback for their betrayal, Assyria sacked Israel in 722 BCE.
At first, Judah did not oppose the Assyrian taxes and therefore outlasted Israel. Only during the heavy-handed reign of Assyrian King Sennacherib did Judah put up any resistance. In response, Sennacherib led a campaign throughout Judah, destroying every city except Jerusalem. In Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh, he celebrated his conquering of Judah’s second most important city, Lachish, by commissioning detailed reliefs of the Lachish siege. The capital of Jerusalem was not conquered, allowing Judah to continue as a nation.
During the reign of Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian Empire began to show signs of weakening. Anti-Assyrian feelings were spreading across the empire, and rebellions popped up everywhere. The Assyrians had overextended their reach internationally, ignoring the internal discord and civil unrest back home until it was too late. It is unclear whether Ashurbanipal died of natural causes or whether an enemy assassinated him, but immediately after his death, the subjugated vassal states exploited the power vacuum to regain their independence. Amidst the chaos, the Medes and Babylonians captured Nineveh, an accomplishment once believed to be impossible.
The Assyrian tablets provide a curated version of the history of battles and victories from the Assyrian perspective. The book of Nahum offers us another version of the story, telling of Assyria’s reputation among its many victims. Nahum called Assyria a murderous, deceptive nation. According to the prophet, Nineveh was nothing more than a “city of bloodshed” (3:1). Nahum began his third chapter as a woe oracle, a type of speech used in funeral rituals. However, he did so ironically, because not a single nation would mourn Assyria’s passing. He wrote a woe speech with no woes.
Nahum’s last chapter is like his second chapter, with snapshots of battle scenes that evoked the sounds of war: cracking whips, rumbling chariot wheels, and galloping horses (3:1). Corpses were piled up high in the streets. In his writing, Nahum taunted that Nineveh’s skirts would be lifted over their faces (3:5).
Nahum then asked rhetorically, “Are you better than Thebes?” (3:8). His audience knew about Thebes’ fall to the Assyrian army. Thebes had been a mighty, ancient Egyptian city along the Nile, and its defeat was a huge point of pride for Assyria. Egypt was their strongest enemy, and Thebes was Egypt’s most important and populous city. However, Nahum turned the Thebes event into an omen for Nineveh’s own fate. Both Nineveh and Thebes possessed fortifications like no others, and they both used their adjacent rivers as part of their defense system. What Assyria did to Egypt, Babylon would do to Nineveh. Nahum’s account is graphic. The Babylonians would smash Nineveh’s babies to pieces, bind Nineveh’s elite in chains, and exile the captives. The Assyrians were known for cruelty and violence toward their conquered people, and now they would get a taste of their own medicine.
Nahum predicted that overcoming Nineveh’s defenses would be as easy as shaking ripe figs down from a tree (3:12), classic prophetic hyperbole. Nahum described the war preparations of Nineveh as they drew water and strengthened their defenses. They did it all in vain because the enemy had already entered through the open gates. The New International Version translates Nahum’s slur in 3:13 as “Look at your troops – they are all weaklings.” This was an intentional attempt by the translators to soften the insensitivity of the prophet’s original language, which should translate: “Look at your troops: they are women in your midst” (3:13). I do not love ancient insensitivities either, but I do not want a translation filtering the language for me. Nahum told Assyria, “You fight like a girl.” (Considering that today the Israel Defense Forces are one of the few armies in the world that have a mandatory draft for women, and 18% of the IDF’s combat soldiers are women, the insult does not carry the same weight in today’s Judah as it did in Nahum’s day.)
Nahum 3 ends with an almost giddy tone. The nations would revel in Assyria’s ruin. Nahum wrote, “All who hear the news about you, clap their hands over you.” Nahum’s last words are a rhetorical question addressing Assyria, “For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” (3:19).
Only two books in the whole Bible end with rhetorical questions: Nahum and Jonah. The book of Jonah ends with God asking the rebellious prophet, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city?” (Jonah 4:11). The book of Jonah’s last question reveals God’s willingness to hold back his punishment of Nineveh if they repented and reformed. Nahum’s question showed the limits of God’s patience for the wickedness of the Ninevites. Nineveh had provoked the extreme ends of God’s character—his mercy and his wrath—at different points in the city’s history.
What we learn from both Jonah and Nahum is that Yahweh cannot allow wickedness to persist forever. As Nahum wrote, “no adversary will rise up twice” (1:9). The prophet Habakkuk fleshes out this point further in trying to understand God’s interaction with all of humanity.
History of application
Nahum, in its original intent, provided comfort to the people of Judah, who had been living under Assyrian oppression for two centuries. God’s promise of coming judgment for Nineveh expressed his continued care for the Jewish people. Indeed, every word spoken by Nahum came true. In short order, Nineveh was destroyed by 612 BCE.
Even though Nineveh was the target of Nahum’s oracle, as he noted explicitly in the superscription, the prophet repeatedly held back from identifying Nineveh in the text. This allowed Nahum’s message to expand past one historical target. The message of Yahweh’s superiority over evil human empires applies throughout the ages. In an application reading, Nineveh is allegorical for anything or anyone opposing Yahweh. The chilling pronouncement, “Behold, I am against you,” given twice in Nahum to Nineveh, can extend to anyone or anything that opposes Yahweh’s will (2:13).
Nahum’s introduction cryptically points to the Assyrian King as the wicked counselor (1:1). By Nahum’s conclusion, the Assyrian king was his focal point. However, Nahum refused to name the king. Making the king anonymous extends the universality of Nahum’s message throughout the ages. Nahum also did not recognize the king of Judah or address him at all, but his prophecies likely took place during the reign of King Manasseh in Jerusalem. Nahum had no desire to give Manasseh any credit for Assyria’s fall; he was just as evil as the Assyrians. This was not Manasseh’s battle. The victory belonged to Yahweh, the divine warrior king.
Jewish communities living centuries after the fall of Nineveh took Nahum’s promises and applied his message to their own situations. The Essenes—the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls—often projected their story onto prophetic passages. With Nahum, the Essenes saw clear parallels between the people of Judah living under Assyrian oppression and their own tribulations while living in an isolated community in the Judean wilderness during the first century CE. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pesher Nahum, is an Essene commentary on Nahum. The Essenes had a propensity for interpreting prophetic texts in the light of their own experiences.
In the Pesher Nahum, Assyrian brutality points to the violence of the Hasmonean rulers who opposed the Essene sect. The Essenes considered the fall of Nineveh as a prediction of the fall of Rome and the fall of their Jewish rivals who were living in Jerusalem. They interpreted Nahum’s chosen people to refer to those of their own sect who were living at Qumran and whom they believed God had selected to save and maintain.
Early Christians also interpreted Nahum as an image of their own reality during the Roman Empire. The darkness of the widespread cultural influence of Assyria felt like the darkness surrounding them as part of the Roman Empire. They read Nahum’s prophecies of Nineveh’s fall alongside Revelation 17’s foretelling of the fall of godless empires. Both used the language of prostitution to describe the empires’ abominations. Christians connected the second coming of Jesus to the avenging God of Nahum; both were determined to overcome the evil forces of the day.
Even today, if you hear Nahum preached in sermons, the application often follows these lines: Yahweh can defeat even the greatest of enemies to protect those that he calls as his own.
In Bible Fiber, I try to resist the urge to put modern-day application on any of the prophets. I believe they have so much to offer on their own terms. However, Nahum has such a rich history of application that I felt it was important to share how Jewish and Christian believers through the centuries approached the text.
On the surface, Nahum is about Nineveh, but under the surface, Nahum is about Yahweh’s faithfulness. For this reason, for centuries, believers living in challenging times have extrapolated hope from the prophet whose name means comfort. The Lord is sovereign over all. Deliverance comes by him and through him.
[1] Christopher B. Hays and Peter Machinist, “Assyria and the Assyrians,” in The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East, ed. Bill T. Arnold and Brent A. Strawn (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 103.