NAHUM 1 — THE LORD IS A JEALOUS AVENGER, A STRONGHOLD FOR HIS OWN, AND THE END OF NINEVEH

Nahum is an oracle against Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The prophet is called Nahum the Elkoshite, and his name means "comfort" or "consolation," which suits the message that his book brings to Judah, though it brings no comfort to Assyria. The location of Elkosh is unknown, and traditions place it in Galilee, in southern Judah, or in Assyria itself, but none of these is certain. The book gives no date, but two events set the limits. Nahum 3:8 refers to the fall of Thebes (No-Amon) in Egypt, which the Assyrians captured in 663 BC. Nineveh itself fell in 612 BC to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes. The book was therefore written between 663 and 612 BC, probably in the second half of the seventh century, during a time when Assyria's power was beginning to weaken, though it was still feared. The background is a long history of Assyrian cruelty. Assyria had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and carried its people into exile in 722 BC, and it had invaded Judah in 701 BC under Sennacherib, besieging Jerusalem and ravaging the countryside (2 Kings 18–19). Its kings were known for brutality, for deporting populations, impaling captives, and for boasting of such acts in their royal inscriptions. A century before Nahum, Jonah had been sent to Nineveh, and its people had repented in response to his message (Jonah 3). By Nahum's day, that repentance had evidently not lasted, and the city had returned to violence and arrogance. Nahum is not a contradiction of Jonah but its sequel, and the two books together show both God's mercy to the repentant and His justice toward the unrepentant. The first chapter is composed of a poem about God (1:2–8), a series of statements about Nineveh and Judah (1:9–14), and a final announcement of good news (1:15). The first part of the poem partly follows the pattern of the Hebrew alphabet, with lines beginning with successive letters, though the pattern is incomplete in the text we have and scholars debate its extent. The opening hymn is similar to hymns of God as warrior in the psalms (Psalms 18; 68; 97), and it describes how all creation responds to God's presence. In the English Bible, chapter 1 has fifteen verses, and the final verse is the first verse of chapter 2 in the Hebrew Bible, so verse numbers differ from there on.

The prophecy of Nineveh's destruction is notable because of its historical setting. In the seventh century BC, Assyria was the dominant power of the Near East, and a forecast of its destruction would have seemed very unlikely. Assyria's empire stretched from Egypt to the Persian Gulf, and Nineveh, with its massive walls, the palaces of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, and its great library, was one of the largest cities of the world. The archaeological record confirms the city's greatness. Excavations at Nineveh in the nineteenth century uncovered palaces decorated with reliefs of military campaigns, including Sennacherib's siege of Lachish, and the royal library of Ashurbanipal, with thousands of cuneiform tablets. Sennacherib's Prism, a clay record of his campaign against Judah in 701 BC, describes how he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage, and it does not claim to have captured the city, which agrees with the biblical account. The fall of Nineveh in 612 BC is attested in the Babylonian Chronicle, a cuneiform tablet that records the capture of the city by the Babylonians and the Medes after a siege of three months. Later writers, such as Diodorus Siculus, associate the city's fall with a flood of the Tigris that broke down part of its wall, though his account is much later and must be handled with care. Archaeologists have found evidence of burning and destruction in the palaces and temples, in agreement with the book's description of fire and sword. The Greek writer Xenophon, who marched past the area in 401 BC, describes a large deserted city with ruined walls that is usually identified with Nineveh, and he shows no awareness of its former greatness, which illustrates how completely the memory of the city was lost. The precision of the book's references to Thebes (3:8), which was sacked by Ashurbanipal in 663 BC, and its picture of Assyria's weakness agree with a date before Nineveh's fall.