Bible Book of the Month: Nahum

There are three important factors concerning the date of Nahum’s prophecy. First, in 3:8–10, the fall of the Egyptian city of No-amon (i.e. Thebes) to the Assyrians is spoken of as a past event, having taken place in 663 B.C. Second, the main subject of the prophecy is the fall of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, but that event has not yet taken place (Nineveh fell in 612 B.C.). Third, Nahum alone, among all the Old Testament prophets, has no strictures to pass upon the religious and moral life of his own people. If that silence is really significant then the only period between 663 and 612 when a prophet of Jahweh might conceivably have been hopeful of Judah would have been 622–621 B.C., when King Josiah’s religious reforms were in full swing (cf. 1:15 with 2 Kings 23:21).

Now, a few years before Nineveh fell, the writing was on the wall so far as Assyria was concerned. As early as 614 B.C., the city of Asshur fell to the Medes; and it might well have been that event, heralding the end of the hated Assyrian hegemony, that marked Nahum’s being seized with divine inspiration to write this triumphant hymn of acclamation.

BACKGROUND

If, then, we place Nahum’s prophecy towards the end of the period 621–612 B.C., he would be a contemporary of Zephaniah (c. 627), Habakkuk (c. 614), and Jeremiah (625–582, or thereabouts). One of the main events in this period was Josiah’s reforms, which took place about 35 years before the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. Probably Jeremiah was a warm supporter of the Josianic reformation in its early stages, and he may even have undertaken a preaching campaign in the towns of Judah on behalf of the new religious movement (cf. Jer. 11:2–6). However, Jeremiah’s enthusiasm for the new reforms began to wane when it occurred to him that the very reforms he was supporting were only helping to confirm Judah in some of her already long-cherished illusions, in particular, the notion that the externals of religion were sufficient to reinstate her in God’s favor in spite of the fact that no change of heart had taken place.

While, therefore, Josiah’s religious reforms were in progress, Jeremiah felt it necessary to warn Judah of the tragedy that was soon to overtake her (4:4; 8:9–13). But it appears that he was practically the only person who had any real insight into the prevailing situation. The other responsible leaders in Judah’s religious and political life treated Jeremiah’s warnings with an easy optimism which communicated itself to the people. And as long as Josiah ruled in Judah, this state of affairs continued. Indeed, the circumstances that allowed Josiah to initiate and pursue his religious reforms, and through them to extend his political influence, seemed to support those leaders in Judah who argued that Jeremiah was unduly pessimistic, if not completely mistaken, in his reading of the situation. Did not the impending fall of Assyria to the advancing Medes and Babylonians confirm those in Judah who persisted in an optimistic interpretation of the existing international situation?

Now, it was within the context of this mood of easy optimism that Nahum prophesied in terse, vivid language the doom that overtook Nineveh in 612 B.C.

CONTENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS

The prophecy of Nahum consists of two poems which take their place among the most accomplished, and most finished poetry in the sacred literature of the Hebrews. Because it deals with only one event in particular, the prophecy is characterized by a unity and a cohesion which distinguishes it from the writings of the other Old Testament prophets. Chapter one proclaims certain moral attributes of God, and the effects which the moral judgment of God has upon the world of nature, and upon the enemies of Judah. In chapter two Nahum, with vivid strokes, paints in quick succession the seige, the capture, and the final overthrow of Nineveh, and the resulting desolation. In chapter three the prophet, fascinated by the main theme of his work, returns to the fall of Nineveh, and supplies more details of the city’s doom, and dwells on the shame which she will experience in the same lavish measure which she had so cruelly meted out to her foes for so long. Nahum makes special mention of there being none to console her.

There are two points to be made which help us to place Nahum’s cry of exultation over Nineveh’s doom in proper perspective. First, Nineveh was the capital of one of the richest, most powerful, and most flagrantly wicked empires that the world had ever seen. The story of this splendid Assyrian tyranny and social corruption, which has been told and retold, has been culled from the monuments and tablets dug up long after Nineveh was dead and forgotten. And this resurrection of Nineveh only confirms the story of her shame, and proves that Nahum, with all his passion, was not guilty of exaggeration at any point. And his shout of fierce triumph not only expressed the sentiment of the Jews who had suffered so terribly at the hands of the stricken Assyrians, but also that of all the other nations of the Near East upon whose necks the Assyrian yoke had lain for so long. When Nineveh finally plunged to her doom, the minds of men must have been convinced that a great curse was being removed from off the face of the earth.

Second, a few years before Nineveh fell the Near East was divided into two camps; on the one hand Assyria and Egypt, and on the other the Medes and the Babylonians. Each was struggling for the hegemony of the Middle East. In 612 B.C. Nineveh fell to the Medeo-Babylonian alliance, as also did the city of Harran, the new Assyrian capital, two years later. The issue of this life and death struggle remained inconclusive until five years later (605 B.C.) when at the battle of Carchemish the Egypto-Assyrian alliance was effectively crushed by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. Babylonian domination was then established throughout the Near East.

Against this background Nahum’s exultant prediction of Nineveh’s (i.e. Assyria’s) downfall suggests that he had high hopes for the future of his native Judah once the Assyrian yoke was struck from her neck. Jeremiah, Nahum’s contemporary, on the other hand, realized that Babylon’s victory over Assyria meant simply that Judah was exchanging masters; and that the pro-Babylonian party in Judaean politics was indulging in idle daydreaming when it assumed that Assyria’s downfall would bring political independence to Judah. Probably, then, Nahum shared these sentiments, whereas Jeremiah, with authentic prophetic insight, realized that Judah’s deliverance could not come about through a shift in the balance of power in international politics, nor through a transference to a new sphere of political influence, but through a change of heart manifesting itself in confession, repentance, contrition, faith, and obedience. That, said Jeremiah, is the highway to true freedom, not faith in this or that concentration of military might, or in this or that political alliance.

TEACHING

It is in chapter one of Nahum’s prophecy that his main teaching is found. What the prophet is preoccupied with there is the character of the God of Israel, and especially with the attribute of ‘jealousy.’ Nahum 1:2 f. might well be taken as the preacher’s text, where Jahweh’s jealousy manifests itself particularly as wrath. But in common with the rest of the Old Testament Nahum speaks of divine wrath in connection with the covenantal name Jahweh; which means that God’s anger must be viewed in the light of his complete sovereignty and omnipotence.

In Nahum’s prophecy divine wrath as God’s jealousy in action is the reaction within the divine nature against sin; but whereas the rest of the Old Testament prophets see God’s jealousy going out in anger against the sins of the covenant people, Nahum sees it in action against only the Gentiles. But that ‘fortuitous’ difference apart, Nahum, in common with the rest of the prophets, relates divine anger to divine holiness, and is therefore free from the taint of sinfulness, and is moral through and through both in its nature and its purpose. And related to his jealousy, God’s wrath is a manifestation of his refusal to give his glory to another.

In such a world as this, therefore, the moral attribute of jealousy makes divine vengeance a necessity. The world, says Nahum, is governed by a righteous God; and his prophetic indignation against tyranny, and his passionate demand for vengeance upon all who outrage the moral principles that operate in the world, is really the voice of divine justice, which will be vindicated in God’s time.

We have already hinted at the main difference between Nahum’s outcry and the preaching of the other Old Testament prophets. The latter constantly affirm that divine jealousy manifested itself as indignation especially against the covenant community of Israel. While they did not fail to apply to Gentile nations the searching standard of God’s demands in terms of righteousness, yet they were concerned most of all to apply that criterion of judgment to the ethics of their own people. This Nahum does not do.

His intent was to judge only the Gentile nations by the yardstick which other prophets had applied to Israel. So far as one may judge from his oracles, Nahum’s preoccupation with Nineveh’s iniquities and impending judgment seems to have made him oblivious to the sins of Judah. In this Nahum is alone among the other prophets. Probably it was his inability to appreciate the real spiritual condition of Judah that enabled Nahum to indulge in such passionate hatred concerning the sins of the doomed Assyrians.

For Nahum the fate of Assyria establishes the fact of the moral government of the world, the eternal principle of the government of God in history, and that, therefore, if a nation is to survive it must exalt righteousness in its system of government, in its legal and educational systems, and in its ethical standards in every department of national life. It is this truth taught by Nahum that makes his prophecy relevant to our own age.

The limitations of Nahum’s outlook must not blind us to his importance. This is a reminder that the teaching of the prophets has to be freed from its limitations before it can be truly interpreted for our day. But the recognition of Nahum’s limitations, for example, does not in any way detract from his message for our generation. In any case, it is possible that Nahum felt so bitterly about Nineveh, not only because she was Judah’s inveterate enemy, but because she was the embodiment of that evil power which is still in deadly conflict with the Church of our Lord today.

Conversely, there may have been in Nahum’s mind the thought that Judah was the earthly representative of that power for good that labors to establish God’s kingly rule among men. Nahum may have viewed Judah as the ideal community elected by God to be his instrument in history. If that is so then he would not be preoccupied with her moral shortcomings but with her ultimate triumph over evil which was personified in Assyria.

It might also explain Nahum’s silence regarding another theme which is so common in the rest of the Old Testament prophetic literature—that an evil world power such as Assyria (or Egypt, or Babylon) was God’s instrument by which he chastises his own people. This Nahum seems to have forgotten; and consequently his exultation over the doom of Assyria far outweighs his condemnation of the sins of Judah.

It was this attitude that produced the absolute contrast between Jew and Gentile in a later age. In Judaism privilege was the portion of the former, and judgment was the fate of the latter. What one has constantly to remember is that truth must be seen steadily and seen as a whole. One aspect of truth must not be divorced from the whole of truth to which it belongs. Nahum “makes particular applications of universal truths, which is to say, he fails to apply to himself and his people the standards by which he measures others” (Abingdon Bible Commentary, p. 799). Nahum does not make clear that the moral ends towards which God is working may be frustrated by the sins of His own people. Far from Judah’s time of deliverance, her time of correction under the stern discipline of divine love was just beginning.

However, as Sir G. A. Smith points out, Assyria, by crushing so ruthlessly all the nations to a common level of despair, and by exciting such universal pity through her cruelties, in fact contributed to the development in Israel of the idea of a common humanity. In a sense Nahum is voicing the outraged conscience of humanity, not merely the national passions of poor, downtrodden Judah.

Nahum is the prophet of universal humanity as well as of Jewish patriotism, because he shows that the laws of God made Nineveh’s downfall inevitable; and through her humiliation she became the most conspicuous example in ancient history of the outworking of those laws of divine righteousness which strike down the proud and exalt the meek. How terribly relevant is Nahum’s message for the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Of the many excellent commentaries on Nahum, the following will be found to combine sound scholarship with a spirit of devotion: Calvin, Minor Prophets, Vol. 3 (Eerdmans); Keil & Delitzsch, Minor Prophets, Vol. 2 (Eerdmans); Kleinert & Ellicott, Lange’s Commentary (Zondervan).

J. G. S. S. THOMSON

Professor of Old Testament

Columbia Theological Seminary

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