Book of Nahum

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The Book of Nahum is one of the shortest books of the Hebrew Bible, three chapters belonging to the collection later Jewish and Christian tradition gathered as the Twelve Minor Prophets. Its subject is single and unrelenting: the coming destruction of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the power that had dominated the ancient Near East and that had, within living memory, crushed the northern kingdom of Israel. The book is headed an oracle concerning that city, ascribed to Nahum of Elkosh — a place no longer identifiable with any confidence.

John Martin, “The Fall of Nineveh” (large mezzotint, c. 1829-30), a Romantic vision of the destruction the Book of Nahum foretells — John Martin (1789-1854), via Wikimedia Commons (PD-art)

What the text delivers is less prophecy in the sense of prediction than a sustained poem of reckoning. It opens with a hymn to a God slow to anger and great in power, who will by no means clear the guilty, and then turns that power against Nineveh directly: the charge of the chariots, the crack of the whip, the heaps of the slain, the city stripped and mocked as a harlot whose allure has run out. The language is among the most vivid and violent in the prophetic corpus, and commentators have long noted its craft — the opening verses preserve traces of an alphabetic acrostic, and the battle scenes move in quick, hammering strokes.

The name and the heading

The superscription names the book twice over: first as a burden, an oracle weighing on Nineveh, then as the book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. The prophet’s name carries its own irony against the matter at hand. Nahum, from the Hebrew root for comfort, means consolation; the consolation is for Judah, and it takes the form of an enemy’s ruin. Of the man behind the name nothing further survives — no genealogy, no reign-date, no incident — only the gentilic that ties him to Elkosh. The location of Elkosh has been disputed since antiquity. A Galilean site was already proposed in the time of Jerome, in the late fourth century; later readers connected the place with Capernaum, whose own name (Kfar Nahum, village of Nahum) seemed to preserve it; a rival tradition, not traceable before the sixteenth century, fixed it at Alqosh on the Tigris, north of the ruins of Nineveh itself. None of these can be confirmed, and the heading remains the whole of what is known of the prophet. The book and the man are distinct subjects; the figure has his own profile, while what follows here is the text he is said to have left.

A poem in three movements

For all its brevity the book is tightly built. The first chapter is dominated by a hymn of theophany — God coming in storm, the mountains quaking, the sea drying at his rebuke, the earth heaving up before his face. Within this hymn many readers have found the remains of an alphabetic acrostic, each line opening with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The pattern is clear enough at the start and frays before the end: it runs cleanly only partway through the alphabet, fading somewhere around the middle letters, and no reconstruction recovers a complete sequence. Whether the original poet wrote a full acrostic later damaged in transmission, or only ever wrote a partial one, has occupied a long line of critics; Michael Floyd called the supposed full pattern a chimerical acrostic, while Klaas Spronk argued that acrostic and quasi-acrostic devices reach further into the book than the opening lines alone. The dispute is not idle. On its outcome turns the question of whether chapter one was composed for this book or adapted into it — and with that, the unity of the whole.

The hymn’s opening turn is its most studied line. The poet describes a God slow to anger and great in power, who will not at all acquit the wicked — language lifted almost verbatim from the great self-revelation of God at Sinai in the Book of Exodus, where the formula runs slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Nahum keeps the patience and the refusal to clear the guilty, but where Exodus says abounding in love he says great in power. The substitution is the book in miniature: the same divine character that spared again and again is here turned, its mercy not denied but spent, its power loosed on a city whose account has finally come due.

The second chapter abandons hymn for assault. It reports the storming of Nineveh as if from inside the breached walls — the shield of the attackers reddened, the chariots flashing in the streets, the river-gates thrown open, the palace dissolving, the spoil carried off, faces drained of color. The imagery turns on the self-image of Assyria: the lion. Assyrian kings styled themselves lions and lined their palace walls with carved lion-hunts; the prophet asks where now is the den of lions, the place where the lion brought his prey, and answers with silence.

Lion-hunt relief from the North Palace of Nineveh, c. 645-635 BCE (British Museum) — Assyrian kings styled themselves lions, the self-image Nahum turns against the city — Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The third chapter opens on a cry — “Woe to the bloody city!” in the older English of the King James rendering — against a place full of lies and plunder, and builds to the figure of Nineveh as a beautiful, faithless woman — “the wellfavoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms” — now exposed and pelted with filth before the watching peoples. It closes by setting Nineveh beside Thebes, the great Egyptian capital on the Nile that Assyria itself had sacked: was Nineveh better than that city, moated by the river, ringed by allies, and yet carried into exile? The unspoken answer seals the book. What was done to Thebes will be done to Nineveh.

The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, in the ruins of ancient Thebes (No-Amon) on the Nile — Nahum invokes the Assyrian sack of this city as the precedent for Nineveh’s fall — Mohammed Moussa, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Reckoning, not prediction

Nahum’s relation to time is unusual among the prophets. The fall of Thebes — the city the Hebrew text calls No-Amon — lies already in the past; that sack, by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, occurred in 663 BCE, and the poem cites it as a known precedent. The fall of Nineveh, to the coalition of Medes and Babylonians under their kings, came in 612 BCE. The oracle therefore sits somewhere between those dates, the work of a writer watching Assyria’s grip loosen and reading its end as deserved. Whether the poem precedes the fall by years or anticipates it on the eve, it speaks not as a forecast hazarded into the dark but as a verdict already rendered, awaiting only its execution. The decree is fixed; the description of the city’s overthrow has the certainty of something seen rather than guessed.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire, 824-671 BCE, with Nineveh on the upper Tigris — the dominant power whose fall in 612 BCE the book anticipates — Ningyou, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This is what distinguishes Nahum from the books around it in the scroll of the Twelve. In the Hebrew arrangement of the Tanakh it stands seventh, between Micah and Habakkuk; the Greek Septuagint reorders the first half of the collection and so brings it closer to Jonah, the other book of the Twelve fixed on Nineveh. Its near neighbor Zephaniah, set a generation later under Josiah, names Nineveh’s coming desolation in a single verse and moves on; Nahum makes that desolation the whole of its concern. Where prophets such as Hosea or Joel hold out a turning, a way back, a remnant spared, Nahum holds out nothing to its target. There is no call to repent addressed to Nineveh, because repentance is no longer on offer. The book belongs to the literature of judgment on the nations — the genre that runs through the oracles against foreign powers in the larger prophets and through Obadiah’s sentence on Edom — but it sharpens that genre to a single point and holds it there for three chapters. As prophecy it is unusual precisely for what it withholds: the door, standing open in so many of the prophets, is here already shut.

Nahum and Jonah: one city, two judgments

No book of the Twelve is read against Nahum more often than Jonah, and the pairing is ancient. Both are fixed on Nineveh; both turn on whether the great Assyrian city will be destroyed. In Jonah the city repents at the prophet’s reluctant word and is spared, to the prophet’s own dismay — a story whose point is the breadth of divine mercy, extending even to the cruelest of empires. In Nahum the mercy has run out and the destruction comes. Tradition set the two side by side as one city twice judged: Nineveh reprieved in the eighth century, Nineveh condemned in the seventh, the same patience celebrated in the one book reaching its limit in the other. The early Christian commentators who read Nahum — a smaller company than for most of the Twelve, including Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Jerome — almost always read it through Jonah, treating the two as a single argument about justice deferred and justice arrived. The juxtaposition also exposes the discomfort the book has always carried: read alone, Nahum can sound like nationalist triumph at an enemy’s ruin; read against Jonah, it becomes a statement about justice in history — that no empire built on cruelty stands forever, and that mercy long extended is not mercy without end.

Afterlives

The book’s most striking afterlife is also its oldest surviving interpretation. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran in 1952 was a continuous commentary on Nahum, the Pesher Nahum (designated 4QpNah, or 4Q169), which quotes the prophet verse by verse and reads each line as a cipher for the writer’s own first-century-BCE present. Nineveh and Thebes become masks for contemporary powers; the lion of wrath of the commentary is most often identified with the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, and the document recalls his crucifixion of opponents and the faction it calls the seekers after smooth things. Unusually among the scrolls, it names actual Greek monarchs — Demetrius and Antiochus — making it a rare anchor between the sectarian library and datable political history. The pesher takes Nahum’s poem of past judgment and reuses it as a key to a later crisis, the first in a long line of readers to hear in Nineveh’s fall the pattern of every doomed power.

In the synagogue and the church the book has had a quieter career, its violent poetry less quoted in liturgy than the consolation oracles of the larger prophets, its theological weight resting on the single grand line about the God slow to anger. Critical study, by contrast, has returned to it repeatedly, drawn by exactly the features that make it hard: the broken acrostic, the question of the hymn’s origin, the relation of the chapters to one another. Where Lamentations sings the grief of a fallen city from within its ashes, Nahum sings the fall of a city from without, in the voice of those it had crushed; the two are the same art turned to opposite ends of the sword.

The Mashki Gate in the walls of Nineveh, near modern Mosul, Iraq — the ruins of the city whose fall the book makes its sole subject — Fredarch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Text and scholarship

The textual problems are concentrated in the first chapter, where the acrostic-or-not question shapes nearly everything else. The Hebrew of the hymn is in places disordered, and the labor of the last century and a half has been to decide whether the disorder conceals a once-complete alphabetic poem or is simply the rough surface of a partial one. The reading that the chapter contains an acrostic at all goes back to nineteenth-century critics; the modern argument over how far it runs and what that implies for the book’s growth was sharpened by Klaas Spronk, whose study Acrostics in the Book of Nahum holds that the alphabetic principle reaches beyond the obvious opening lines, and by Michael Floyd’s form-critical treatment, which presses the case that no full acrostic can be recovered and that the supposed pattern is in part the construction of its reconstructors. The single most studied verse, the slow-to- anger line of 1:3, is the hinge of a much larger discussion of how Israel’s prophets reworked the Sinai formula; the modification from abounding in love to great in power, traced in detail by students of inner-biblical allusion, is read as a deliberate redirection of a mercy text toward judgment.

The standard critical commentaries are J.J.M. Roberts in the Old Testament Library, Klaas Spronk in the Historical Commentary on the Old Testament, Michael Floyd’s volume in the Forms of the Old Testament Literature series, and Duane Christensen’s Anchor Yale Bible Nahum, the last devoted to a prosodic reading that treats the book as a unified liturgical composition. They divide chiefly over unity: whether the book is the work of a single hand, hymn and battle-poem and dirge composed together, or a core oracle later framed by an editor who prefixed the acrostic theophany. The poem’s most consequential later reader, the Qumran community, left the fragmentary commentary preserved as the Pesher Nahum, edited and studied in turn by Shani Berrin and Gregory Doudna; it remains the earliest window onto how the book was used rather than merely copied. The poetry’s quality is not in dispute even among those who divide its authorship — its compression, its sound-play, its switchbacks of attention are the reason the book holds its place.

Nahum names no remedy and offers no call to repentance. It records only that the reckoning has come.

→ Related: Book Of Jonah · Book Of Hosea · Lamentations · Nahum · Assyria · Babylon · Tanakh · Old Testament · Prophecy · Book Of Micah · Book Of Habakkuk · Book Of Zephaniah · Book Of Joel