Nahum

Nahum (Heb. Nachum, “comfort”) is the Elkoshite (Nah.1.1), a prophet of Judah whose three-chapter book is a single sustained oracle against Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire. His ministry must fall between two fixed points he himself names: the fall of No-amon (Thebes) to Ashurbanipal in 663 BC, which Nahum treats as a recent event (Nah.3.8–10), and the fall of Nineveh itself to the combined Median and Babylonian armies in 612 BC, which he prophesies as still future. A date around 650–620 BC, late in Manasseh’s reign or early in Josiah’s, fits all the evidence. Where Jonah a century earlier had seen Nineveh repent at his preaching, the city had long since returned to violence, and Nahum’s book is the LORD’s answer to a generation of cruelty: “the LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked” (Nah.1.3). The book gives a vivid imagined eyewitness account of the city’s last day — the river gates opened, the palace dissolved, the chariots raging in the streets, the lion’s den emptied. For the people of God it is a quiet word of comfort: “Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings” (Nah.1.15), an image taken up later by Isaiah (Isa.52.7) and Paul (Rom.10.15).