Introduction to Nahum

Title and authorship

Nahum the Elkoshite is named once and never again in Scripture, and Elkosh is a place the Bible locates nowhere. Nothing is known of him beyond the seven chapters' worth of poetry he left, which is unusually concentrated even among the prophets.

The name means comfort, and it is the book's first irony. Ninety-nine of its verses are directed at Nineveh  in language of unrelieved violence, yet the comfort is real and precisely aimed: it is addressed to Judah, who had lived under Assyrian terror for a century. The book calls itself both a revelation about Nineveh and the book of the vision of Nahum — the only prophetic book to describe itself as a book, which suits a work of such deliberate literary construction.

Date

This book dates itself more narrowly than most, and it does so from its own contents. Nahum taunts Nineveh by pointing at Egypt : are you better than No-Amon, which fell despite her waters and her allies Nahum 3:8–10? The Egyptian capital's fall is spoken of as accomplished and recent enough to sting. Nineveh's own fall, meanwhile, is still ahead throughout.

So the book belongs between those two events — after Thebes fell to Assyria in 663 before Christ, and before Nineveh fell in 612. Scripture supplies the first date's fact but not its year, and the second is the event the book exists to announce.

Backgrounds

Assyria had been the terror of the region for a century and a half. It carried the northern kingdom into exile 2 Kings 17:6, stripped Judah's fortified cities, and sent an army to Jerusalem's walls with a speech mocking the God of Israel 2 Kings 18:33–35. Its own royal records are frank about the method, and Scripture calls the capital simply the bloody city Nahum 3:1.

One earlier prophet had already been sent there. Under Jonah the city repented and was spared Jonah 3:10 — perhaps a century and a half before Nahum, which means the generation Nahum addresses is not the generation that fasted in sackcloth. The reprieve had run out. Nineveh fell in 612 to a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, was never rebuilt, and passed so completely out of memory that its site was disputed until excavation settled it.

Theology and purpose

The book's foundation is a creed quoted in fragments, and identifying it settles what Nahum is doing. When God proclaimed his own name to Moses he said he was merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in lovingkindness — and, in the same breath, that he would by no means clear the guilty Exodus 34:6–7.

Jonah quoted the first half of that creed, and quoted it in anger, as his reason for fleeing a mission that might succeed Jonah 4:2. Nahum quotes the second half about the same city: slow to anger, and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished Nahum 1:3. One creed, one city, both halves true — and the two books together are the fullest treatment Scripture gives of what patience is and is not. Slowness to anger is not the absence of anger; it is the space in which repentance is possible, and Nineveh had used that space once.

The purpose is comfort for the oppressed, not gloating over the oppressor. The book's center of gravity is a single verse dropped into the middle of the storm — Yahweh is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and he knows those who take refuge in him Nahum 1:7. Everything else in the book is what that verse costs when the trouble is an empire.

Additional notes

Note — the alphabetic pattern in chapter 1. The opening hymn is often described as an acrostic, and the description needs qualifying. Measured against the text as it stands, the verse-initial letters of Nahum 1:2–10 run aleph, yod, gimel, he, lamed, tet, vav, mem, kaph — the right letters, in the wrong order, with four of the first thirteen missing entirely. The alphabetic letters do stand at the head of clauses within the poem, so something patterned is certainly there; but it does not fall at the verse divisions and cannot be laid out as a scheme a reader could follow. No structure is published here for that reason. Where a shape cannot be demonstrated from the text, showing one would be an interpretation dressed as a fact.

Outline

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