If you're actually following my posts on Read Through The Bible in one year -- in alphabetical order -- you'll notice that Nahum is out of order. My last post was Hosea and I am reading Isaiah. So, why an "N" entry?
I was so taken with Habakkuk a few weeks ago that I decided to use it for a Sunday School lesson. As I prepared the lesson, I realized that Zephaniah and Habakkuk were contemporaneous, and decided to teach Zephaniah the following week. Then I realized that Nahum was written perhaps half a century earlier, but still under the same set of circumstances. I needed three lessons for May-June, and voila -- three minor prophets all writing about the same time. You, dear reader, probably don't really care about all that. I'm just saying there's a reason for jumping out of alphabetical sequence.
Nahum (and I like to pronounce it NAH chum, with the ch as it's pronounced in Bach) means "comfort." The prophet wrote about 635 BC, not too long before the conquest of Judah, the southern kingdom.
The book is an oracle against Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria. This is the same Nineveh mentioned in Jonah. That prophet was instructed to go preach to Nineveh and he did everything he could not to. Why? Because he just hated the Assyrians for their military brutality and their pagan religion. Surprisingly, after Jonah gave up and obeyed God, his terse message ("Repent or else") brought results. The people of Nineveh did repent. But apparently not for long.
Flash forward to Nahum, maybe 100 years after Jonah. He, too, delivers a rant against Nineveh. The three chapters of Nahum make it clear that God will destroy Nineveh as punishment for their wickedness.
What I really like about the book of Nahum is the poetic language. It is crammed with vivid images and interesting literary devices, such as repetition, staccato phrasing, and compelling metaphors.
Although Nahum seems to be addressing the city of Nineveh, it was probably intended for the people of Judah. I bet the Judahites loved the poetic rant as much as I do. Perhaps it was the 7th century B.C. version of Rush Limbaugh.
The Judahites may have seen Nahum's prophecy as Good News: Those awful, evil Ninevites are going to get it! After all, God is righteous and just, and cannot tolerate wickedness and disobedience.
I wonder if they recognized Nahum's words as also bad news -- for them. If God would destroy the Ninevites for their gross wickedness as a way of demonstrating His righteousness, justice and sovereignty, then would not God also be prepared to punish Judah for their disobedience? After all, that was the fate of the northern kingdom, Israel, in 722, only about 65 years earlier.
History shows that the people of Judah did not mend their ways by whole-heartedly trusting and obeying God. Within a few years, Habakkuk and Zephaniah had to deliver their own dire prophecies that Judah would fall at the hands of the wicked Babylonians (who by then would have overthrown the Assyrians).
To be perfectly honest, I didn't glean very much out of Nahum. It did, however, move me to brush up on the history of the time. For my Sunday School lesson on Nahum, we spent most of the time studying what I like to call "Ancient Near Eastern Geopolitical Pac-Man." That is, Syria was gobbled up by Assyria, which was gobbled up by Babylonia, which was gobbled up by Persia.
Through reading Nahum, I also gained a better understanding of how the messages of these three prophets tied together.
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