Nahum: The Other Book About Nineveh

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nahum the Elkoshite, from Elkosh, a village whose location is unknown.

When: Between 663 BC, when Assyria sacked the Egyptian city of Thebes, which the book mentions, and 612 BC, when Nineveh fell.

Where it fits: In the last years of Assyria’s power, while Manasseh or Josiah ruled Judah (2 Kings 21–23), between sixty and a hundred years after Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: It has three. Read Nahum 1 and 3, then read Jonah 4 again.

Words to Know

Nineveh — the capital of Assyria, destroyed in 612 BC by the Babylonians and Medes.

Thebes — the great city of Egypt, called No-amon in Hebrew, sacked by Assyria in 663 BC.

Avenging — paying back wrong for wrong.

The Book in Brief

Nahum is a poem in three chapters about the fall of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. The heading calls it the vision of Nahum of Elkosh.

Chapter 1 opens with a hymn to the LORD as a jealous God who takes vengeance, slow to anger but great in power, a God before whom the mountains quake. He is a stronghold for those who trust him and a flood to his enemies. Then the poem speaks by turns to Nineveh and to Judah. The enemy will be cut off, and Judah’s yoke will be broken. A messenger comes over the mountains with good news.

Chapter 2 describes the attack as if it were happening: red shields, chariots racing through the streets, the river gates thrown open, the palace melting away, the treasure carried off. The lions’ den, where Assyria fed on its prey, stands empty.

Chapter 3 pronounces woe on the bloody city. Nineveh will be shamed like Thebes in Egypt, which fell in spite of its rivers and its allies. Its fortresses will drop like ripe figs, and its officials will vanish like locusts. The book ends by telling the king of Assyria that his wound is fatal, and that everyone who hears the news claps.

Jonah ends with God asking, Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city …?

A few pages later on the same scroll, Nahum answers with three chapters of joy that Nineveh is gone.

Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery. The prey doesn’t depart (Nahum 3:1). The poet describes the attack on the city as if he is watching it: The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of wheels, prancing horses, and bounding chariots, the horseman mounting, and the flashing sword, the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses (Nahum 3:2–3).

Why people cheered

You have to understand what Assyria was.

For two centuries, Assyria had crushed the peoples around it. It destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered its people. It besieged Jerusalem. Its kings boasted, in their own inscriptions, of skinning rebels alive and stacking their heads in piles. Their palace walls showed it in stone.¹

When Nineveh fell in 612 BC, the whole region celebrated. Nahum ends with a question, just as Jonah does, but a very different one:

All who hear the report of you clap their hands over you; for who hasn’t felt your endless cruelty? (Nahum 3:19).

Go deeperHow Nineveh fell

The fall of Nineveh is told in a Babylonian record, a clay tablet now in the British Museum, known as the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle and first published in 1923. In 612 BC, it says, the king of Babylon, Nabopolassar, joined forces with Cyaxares, king of the Medes, a people from the mountains of what is now Iran. They besieged Nineveh for three months, through the heat of summer, and then took it. They carried off a great amount of plunder and turned the city into a heap of ruins. The Assyrian king, Sin-shar-ishkun, died. The survivors crowned a new king far to the west, in the city of Harran, and within a few years the last of the empire was gone.²

Greek writers told the story another way. Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court around 400 BC, wrote that an oracle had promised Nineveh would never fall until the river itself became its enemy. In the third year of the siege, he said, the river rose in flood and broke down part of the wall, and the last king burned himself in his palace with his women and his treasure. His account survives in the history written by Diodorus of Sicily.³ Nahum has water too: The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved (Nahum 2:6). Scholars still argue whether he is describing a real flood or painting a picture.

The ground adds its own evidence. In 1989 a team from the University of California, Berkeley, led by David Stronach, dug the Halzi Gate in the south of the city. The defenders had narrowed the gateway with new brickwork to hold the attackers back. In the passage lay the bones of men who had died fighting there.⁴

The same verse, cut in half

Here is something remarkable. Jonah and Nahum both quote the same passage about God, from Exodus. They lean on different halves of it.

The passage says God is a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth … who will by no means clear the guilty (Exodus 34:6–7).

Jonah quotes the first half, angrily: God is a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness (Jonah 4:2). That is why Jonah ran.

Nahum keeps slow to anger, then turns to the second half: The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished (Nahum 1:3).

My people put both books on the same scroll. A God who spares the enemy who repents, and a God who brings down the empire that does not. They kept both halves of the verse.

Good news on the mountains

In the middle of the gloating there is one beautiful line: Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace! (Nahum 1:15). Isaiah has nearly the same words (Isaiah 52:7).

For the people Assyria had crushed, the fall of the empire was good news. The messenger running over the hills with the report meant they could breathe.

The village of Nahum

When I left Nazareth, I made my home in a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee called Capernaum (Matthew 4:13). In Hebrew it is Kefar Nahum, the village of Nahum.

Nobody knows whether it was named after this prophet. One early Christian scholar thought Nahum’s home, Elkosh, was in Galilee.⁵ It is possible that the prophet who celebrated the fall of Nineveh came from my lake.

What I make of Nahum

I understand Nahum. People who have been crushed by an empire are allowed to rejoice when it falls. The book of Revelation does the same over Rome.

But I did not preach Nahum. I told people to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44). And I told them that the people of Nineveh, who repented at Jonah’s preaching, would rise at the judgment and condemn my own generation (Luke 11:32).

When I chose which of the two books about Nineveh to point to, I chose Jonah.

Go deeperNahum in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a commentary on Nahum, copied in the century before I was born. Its writers went through the old prophecy line by line and explained each line as if it were about their own day. Scholars call this kind of writing a pesher, which means an interpretation.⁶

The Nahum commentary is unusual, because it names real people. It speaks of a Demetrius, king of Greece, who tried to enter Jerusalem on the advice of a group it calls the seekers after smooth things, and of the Greek kings from Antiochus until the coming of the rulers of the Kittim, its code name for the Romans. Then it comes to Nahum’s picture of Assyria as a lion that tears its prey and fills its den with the kill (Nahum 2:11–12). The lion, it says, is the Lion of Wrath, who hangs men alive.⁶

Most scholars connect this with events told by Josephus. About 88 BC, Jewish opponents of the king and high priest Alexander Jannaeus called in a Greek king, Demetrius III, to fight him. When Jannaeus came out on top, he had eight hundred of his enemies crucified in Jerusalem. While they hung there, he had their wives and children killed before their eyes, and he watched as he feasted with his concubines.⁷ The seekers after smooth things are usually taken to be the Pharisees, who were among his chief opponents.⁶

So a few generations before me, readers of Nahum found in it the cruelty of their own rulers, and the cross. Rome would use the same punishment on me.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Exodus 34:6–7, then Jonah 4:2 and Nahum 1:2–3.

You will find: one passage about God, with Jonah leaning on one half and Nahum on the other.

Then compare the last verse of Jonah with the last verse of Nahum.

The Short Version

• Nahum celebrates the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, the capital of Assyria, the empire that crushed Israel.
• In Jonah, God spares Nineveh. Nahum cheers its destruction. Both are on the same scroll.
• They lean on opposite halves of the same passage from Exodus 34.
• My home base, Capernaum, means the village of Nahum.
• When I pointed to Nineveh, I pointed to Jonah.