God’s Just Anger (1:2–6)

Jealous … avenging … vengeance (1:2). Nahum’s prophecy opens with a general declaration of the aspect of the character of Israel’s God that is central to his message. The Lord will not allow any human power to challenge his position, name, or reputation, for which he is jealous. He will take vengeance on those who try to equal or supplant him; he will not leave the guilty unpunished. The Lord’s attitude is comparable with the positions attributed by ancient writers to other deities concerned with protecting their own reputations. In the Sumerian Curse of Agade, the god Enlil, furious at a presumptuous king who had attacked the god’s temple, decreed his downfall and the invasion of the land by a barbarian tribe. To salvage the rest of the land, the other leading gods pronounced a great curse on the king’s capital city, Agade, that it should never be inhabited again.6

Curse of Agade

Musée du Louvre, Autorisation de photographer et de filmer; © Dr. James C. Martin

His way (1:3). The description of God’s power echoes many biblical passages, from the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea (“sea … dries up,” v. 4), to the theophany at Mount Sinai (“mountains quake … rocks are shattered,” vv. 5–6), and the crossing of the Jordan (“rivers run dry,” v. 4). Similar phrases occur in many poems (cf. “Bashan and Carmel wither,” v. 4, with Amos 1:2), and some can be found in poems of the thirteenth century B.C. from Ugarit in northern Syria applied to the god Baal.

Sumerian poetry describes gods and goddesses as roaring like thunder, riding on the storm, and stirring up the dust.7 In the Babylonian Creation Epic, when Marduk, the hero of the gods, advanced to face their enemy, Tiamat, “he mounted the terrible chariot, the unopposable Storm Demon.” At Ugarit, the god Baal is described as “rider on the clouds.”8 In another epic poem, the fire-god Ishum attacks the land of Babylon’s enemies in a mountainous region: “He raised his hand, he destroyed the mountain…. He cut away the trunks of the cedar forest…. He obliterated mountains and slew their wild life, he convulsed the sea and destroyed its increase.”9

Hills melt away (1:5). This figure is echoed in a fragment of poetry written on the plaster of a wall in the desert caravanserai at Kuntillet ʿAjrud on the road from Gaza to Elath about 800 B.C., “When God shone forth … the mountains melted, and peaks grew weak.”10

God’s Faithfulness to the Faithful (1:7)

He cares for those who trust in him (1:7). This translation of the Hebrew verb usually rendered “to know” assumes a sense found in the Ugaritic phrase ʾil dyd ʿnn, “the god who cares for me.”11 Oracles that women gave in the name of Ishtar reassured King Esarhaddon, “I will keep you safe”; “Do not be afraid, O king, I have spoken to you, I have not lied to you; I have given you faith, I will not let you be shamed”; and advised him, “Do not trust human beings, lift your eyes, look to me.”12

God’s Punishment for His Opponents (1:8–11)

Overwhelming flood (1:8). Isaiah had forecast Assyria’s attack on Judah in similar terms (Isa. 8:7; cf. 7:17–25); now the tables are turned! Storm waters that channeled through the steep valleys of the Judean hills could easily overwhelm travelers and wash away small settlements. An Assyrian curse calls for “an irresistible flood” to rise and devastate a disloyal vassal.13 According to Ctesias, there was a prophecy that Nineveh would be impregnable unless the river “became its enemy”; after a two-year siege, the Euphrates rose and broke the walls. Ctesias may have preserved some information from the fall of Nineveh not found in the succinct Babylonian Chronicle, although he, or a later copyist, named the Euphrates instead of the Tigris.14

Babylonian Chronicle recording the destruction of Nineveh

Doug Bookman/www.BiblePlaces.com, courtesy of the British Muesum

Into darkness (1:8). Darkness is a common figure for despair, loss, and ultimately death. The Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer laments that news of his dire situation made the day grow dim for his family and the sun dark for his friends. In the Babylonian Epic of Atraḫasis, the mother-goddess wishes that the day when she agreed with the gods about sending the flood might “grow dark, turn back to gloom.”15

Plot against the Lord … will not come a second time (1:9). Just as the Canaanites’ evil reached the point beyond which there was no possibility of repentance (Gen. 15–16), so now Nineveh’s actions have taken her beyond the reach of God’s mercy extended to her in the days of Jonah. She will suffer like those kingdoms whose rulers broke agreements they had made with her. When Esarhaddon invaded Egypt, he set a number of rulers over the cities of the Nile Delta, but they supported an Egyptian king in his rebellion. Esarhaddon’s son Ashurbanipal defeated the rebel and renewed the pact; yet the rulers rebelled against Assyria again, so they were clapped in irons. Ashurbanipal observed, “The curse of Assur, king of the gods, overtook them, because they sinned against the oath (they had sworn) by the great gods. I required at their hands the good which I had done them in kindness.”16

Tangled among thorns (1:10). If the obscure Hebrew words are correctly translated, they depict the impasse that will overtake the plotter. His road will be choked; as the Assyrian king Sargon described a route, “thorns, thistles and bush had grown over (the tracks).”17

One … who plots evil against the Lord (1:11). In Babylonian theology disaster befell kings who failed to revere the major gods, such as Marduk of Babylon,18 but the gods of foreign nations were assimilated into, or considered subject to, the native deities. Nahum proclaims the Lord’s universal rule; Sennacherib’s arrogant assertions before Jerusalem that “the Lord himself told me to march against this country and destroy it” and that Israel’s God could not save Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:25, 35) brought divine punishment on him, which would overtake his successors.