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.

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.

Scholarship places the book within a narrow window. Nahum refers to the fall of the Egyptian city of Thebes — No-Amon — as an event already past; that sack occurred in 663 BCE. The destruction it anticipates, the fall of Nineveh to a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, 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.

The book has divided its readers. Some have heard in it little beyond nationalist triumph at an enemy’s ruin, a vengeance song with God enlisted on one side. Others have read it as a statement about justice in history — that no empire built on cruelty stands forever, and that the same divine patience celebrated in Jonah, where Nineveh is spared, has in Nahum reached its limit. The two books were copied side by side and have been set against each other ever since, one city twice judged. 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