Theopedia

Book of Nahum

“The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.”

— Nahum 1:3

Overview

Nahum is one of the twelve Minor Prophets, a short oracle titled “the burden of Nineveh” and directed in its entirety against the capital of the Assyrian empire.1 Its message reads as a counterpoint to the book of Jonah: where Jonah proclaimed judgment on Nineveh and saw the city repent and be spared, Nahum announces that same city’s final overthrow, an overthrow that came, on the evidence of Scripture’s own chronology, in the time of Josiah, king of Judah.2 The book’s three chapters move from a description of God’s power and justice in general to the specific manner and completeness of Nineveh’s coming ruin.3

Author and Date

Nahum is called “the Elkoshite,” a name traditionally tied to the village of Elkosh, though the exact location was already uncertain in antiquity: Jerome reported it shown to him in Galilee, while a later tradition placed it near ancient Nineveh itself on no good evidence.3 Nothing else of his personal history is recorded. The prophecy itself supplies the clearest evidence for its date: when Nahum wrote, Nineveh was still at the height of its power, oppressing the nations and purposing the conquest of Judah, and Assyria had already afflicted Judah and laid its yoke upon her (Nah. 1:9, 11-13; 3:1, 4). These particulars point to the reign of Hezekiah as the probable date of the book, though some have placed it somewhat later.3 Stephen Charnock locates the prophecy after Assyria’s forces had already conquered Samaria and deported the ten tribes, about six years after Hezekiah came to Judah’s throne.1

Historical and Literary Context

Nahum wrote to a Judah still living under the shadow of Assyrian power. The empire that had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and carried it into exile was, in Nahum’s day, still strong enough to threaten Judah’s own conquest.3 The prophecy’s opening description of divine wrath and its closing description of Nineveh’s desolation frame a single message: God who is patient with sinners generally is not therefore indifferent to persistent, violent oppression, and the empire that had made itself the instrument of his judgment on others would not itself escape judgment.1

Nahum’s poetry is marked by its vividness and force. Elijah Porter Barrows contrasts Nahum’s description of divine wrath (Nah. 1:5-8) with David’s description of divine favor in Psalm 23, calling the one “like a pent-up mountain stream leaping from precipice to precipice” against the other’s quiet, meadow-bound calm, an example of how the same Hebrew poetic craft bends to entirely different themes in different hands.4

Structure

The book divides into three chapters, each carrying forward a single announcement of judgment:3

  • Chapter 1 opens with a description of God’s awful majesty and power, which nothing created can withstand, directed toward the utter and perpetual overthrow of Nineveh and the deliverance of God’s afflicted people.
  • Chapter 2 describes the process of that destruction: the invasion of Nineveh by foreign armies.
  • Chapter 3 continues the account of Nineveh’s desolation at the hands of her foes, condemning her for her innumerable sins and comparing her coming humiliation to that already suffered by Thebes (No-amon), the fallen capital of upper Egypt.

Major Themes

God’s justice against a cruel, unrepentant oppressor

Nahum’s judgment on Nineveh answers the character of the empire it condemns. Nineveh had made itself an instrument of God’s judgment on Israel, but its own violence went unanswered by any turn toward God; Charnock observes that “the victories of persecutors secure them not from being the triumphs of others,” since the Assyrians who conquered and captured Israel were themselves conquered and captured by the Medes when God had finished using them: “God burns the rod when it hath done the work he appointed it for.”1 The prophecy holds the empire to account for its own cruelty, condemning Nineveh for “her innumerable sins” and declaring that “all that hear the report of thee shall clap their hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?” (Nah. 3:19).3

Slow to anger, yet by no means clearing the guilty

Nahum names God’s own character as the ground of Nineveh’s judgment: “The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty” (Nah. 1:3). Charnock takes this verse as his text for treating divine patience, and reads it as no contradiction: God’s forbearance toward sinners generally does not mean sin goes forever unanswered, and Nineveh’s long, unrepented cruelty finally met the justice its patience had delayed.1 John Calvin cites the same verse alongside Exodus 34:7 and Deuteronomy 32:22 to describe the righteousness of the God before whose judgment seat “not even angels are equal,” a righteousness “so far… from making the guilty innocent” that no sinner can answer for himself before it apart from Christ.5

Comfort for God’s people under oppression

Nahum’s own name means “Comforter,” and Charnock observes that though the substance of the prophecy is dreadful to Nineveh, it is comfortable to the people of God, resting on the promise of Nahum 1:7: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.”1 For Judah, fearful of an enemy whose ambitions they could not measure, the announced ruin of that enemy is itself the comfort: “the destruction of the church’s enemies is the comfort of the church. By that God is glorified in his justice, and the church secured in its worship.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XIV: On God’s Patience,” 472. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Charnock, 1:345. ↩

  3. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 341-342. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. Barrows, 272. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 12, sec. 1, 61. ↩

  6. Charnock, 2:473. ↩