Nahum 2

2 : 1 He that dasheth in pieces is come up before thy face : keep the munition, watch the 2 way, make thy loins strong, fortify thy power mightily. For the LORD bringeth again the excellency of Jacob, as the excellency of Israel : for the emptiers have emptied them out, 3 and marred their vine branches. The shield of his mighty men is made red, the valiant men are in scarlet : the chariots flash with steel in the day of his preparation, and the spears are 4 shaken terribly. The chariots rage in the streets, they justle one against another in the broad 5 ways : the appearance of them is like torches, they run like the lightnings. He remembereth his worthies : they stumble in their march ; they make haste to the wall thereof, and the 6 mantelet is prepared. The gates of the rivers are opened, and the palace is dissolved. 7 And Huzzab is uncovered, she is carried away, and her handmaids mourn as with the voice 8 of doves, tabering upon their breasts. But Nineveh hath been from of old like a pool of 9 water : yet they flee away ; Stand, stand, they cry ; but none looketh back. Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold : for there is none end of the store, the glory of all pleas- 10 ant furniture. She is empty, and void, and waste : and the heart melteth, and the knees 11 smite together, and anguish is in all loins, and the faces of them all are waxed pale. Where is the den of the lions, and the feeding place of the young lions, where the lion and the lion- 12 ess walked, the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid ? The lion did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his caves with prey, and his 13 dens with ravin. Behold, I am against thee, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions : and I will cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messengers shall no more be heard.

3 : 1 Woe to the bloody city ! it is all full of lies and rapine ; the prey departeth not. 2 The noise of the whip, and the noise of the rattling of wheels ; and prancing horses, and 3 jumping chariots ; the horseman mounting, and the flashing sword, and the glittering spear ; and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of carcasses : and there is none end of the 4 corpses ; they stumble upon their corpses . because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the well favoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whore- 5 doms, and families through her witchcrafts. Behold, I am against thee, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will discover thy skirts upon thy face ; and I will shew the nations thy naked- 6 ness, and the kingdoms thy shame. And I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make 7 thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock. And it shall come to pass, that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste : who will bemoan her ? 8 whence shall I seek comforters for thee ? Art thou better than No-amon, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about her ; whose rampart was the sea, and her 9 wall was of the sea ? Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite ; Put and 10 Lubim were thy helpers. Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity : her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets : and they cast lots for her 11 honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains. Thou also shalt be drunken, 12 thou shalt be hid ; thou also shalt seek a strong hold because of the enemy. All thy for- tresses shall be like fig trees with the firstripe figs : if they be shaken, they fall into the mouth 13 of the eater. Behold, thy people in the midst of thee are women ; the gates of thy land 14 are set wide open unto thine enemies : the fire hath devoured thy bars. Draw thee water for the siege, strengthen thy fortresses: go into the clay, and tread the mortar, make strong 15 the brickkin. There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off, it shall devour thee like the cankerworm: make thyself many as the cankerworm, make thyself many as 16 the locust. Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven: the cankerworm 17 spoileth, and fletch away. Thy crowned are as the locusts, and thy marshals as the swarms of grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they 18 flee away, and their place is not known where they are. Thy shepherds slumber, O king of Assyria: thy worthies are at rest: thy people are scattered upon the mountains, and there 19 is none to gather them. There is no assuaging of thy hurt; thy wound is grievous: all that hear the bruit of thee clap the hands over thee; for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?

THE whole of the prophecy of Nahum is “the burden of Nineveh,” and is occupied with a most animated description of the future down- fall of that great city; and the accounts of its overthrow, which the ancient historians have left, with the recent discoveries made on the spot, afford ample evidence of the exact fulfil- ment of his predictions. The event was brought about by the combined revolt of the Medes and Babylonians against the luxurious tyrant who then occupied the Assyrian throne. The king gave them battle, and was for a time successful; but eventually the allied revolters, gaining con- tinual accessions of strength, defeated him, and he was constrained to shut himself in the city and prepare to sustain a siege, until the forces he had summoned from the remote provinces of his empire should arrive to his relief. Relying much upon an ancient oracle—that the city would never be taken until the river became its enemy—he was by no means dispirited, but prepared for the siege with a degree of cour- age, skill, and judicious forethought, for which he does not seem to have previously had credit. He sent away his family and treasure to the care of a distant friend on the borders of the Black Sea; he strengthened and repaired the fortifications; and he laid in large stores of ammunition and provisions for the use of the soldiers and inhabitants. The siege had lasted two years, and no immediate cause of alarm for the safety of the city existed, when there was an extraordinary overflow of the Tigris, which carried away no less than twenty furlongs of the great wall of the city toward the river. Seeing this, and remembering the old oracle, the king gave up for lost, and withdrew to his palace, which, like another Zimri, he set on fire, and perished in the flames with all his con- cubines. The army of the confederates entered precipitately by the breach thus unexpectedly presented, and completed the ruin of the city.

The agency of the river and its waters in the destruction of the city is emphatically indicat- ed. Babylon as well as Nineveh were destroyed through the agency of the rivers upon which they stood, and at first view this may suggest that the doom of the two cities is so similar that what is said of one may apply to the other. But closer consideration presents es- sential differences. In the case of Babylon the river was “dried up”—that is, exhausted, so as to admit the enemy; but in the case of Nine- veh the very reverse occurs—the river over- flows its banks, and becomes an immediate and active agent in the city’s overthrow. “With an overrunning flood shall He make an utter end of the place thereof. The gates of the river shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved. Nineveh of old is like a pool of water.” Of the appropriateness of every point in this description to an inundation of the Tigris, we are ourselves but too well able to speak, having been present in the greatest city (Bagdad) now upon the same river, when it was in most part destroyed by the most extensive inundation that has been known in modern times. But fire was also to be an agent in the destruction of Nineveh. “They shall be de- voured as stubble fully dry.” “The fire shall devour thy bars.” “The fire shall devour thee.” Secular history points to this agency, but not with so much distinctness and fulness of meaning as the actual ruins. It was former- ly thought sufficient to point to the historical fact that the king destroyed himself by fire upon a funeral pile of his costly furniture and treasures. But the words of the prophet imply a more extensive conflagration, and the excava- tions lately made upon the site have distinctly confirmed this by showing that the city, or at least the public buildings, must have been fired by the conquerors after they had completed their work of slaughter and pillage. M. Botta is unable to account for the appearances which he found in the Khorsabad palace, but by sup- posing that the roof was of timber, and, being fired, fell into the area of the building, and con- tinued burning a long time. During the exca- vations a considerable quantity of charcoal, and even pieces of wood, either half burnt or in a perfect state of preservation, were found in many places. The lining of the chambers also bears certain marks of the action of fire. In fact, while the outside walls are untouched, the inside are calcined by intense heat. The appearances are such as could not be produced by the burning of a quantity of furniture. There must have been a violent and prolonged fire to be able to calcine not only a few places, but every part of the slabs of gypsum, which were ten feet high, and several inches thick, reducing them so thoroughly to lime that they rapidly fell to pieces on being exposed to the air. Nor were these appearances confined to this locality. Layard makes the same observations with reference to the ruins of the palace at Koyunjik. “The palace had been destroyed by fire. The alabaster slabs were almost all reduced to lime, and many of them fell to pieces as soon as uncovered.” Kitto.

Chap. 2. This chapter brings us at once to the prophet’s great theme—the burden of Nineveh. The mad and proud invasion of Judah by Sennacherib must first be noticed, that being the antecedent occasion of this final overthrow—the great sin of which this fall was the signal retribution. That consequently is spoken of in the first chapter. This chapter and the third give us the assault on ancient Nineveh, and her final fall.

1. Nineveh and her kings are addressed. Nineveh had been in her day a conquering power, dashing nations and their strong cities to atoms. Now, another great “hammer of the nations” is raised up of God, and appears at her gates, and the prophet tauntingly admonishes her to look well to her fortifications; to set watchmen along the ways leading to the city; to gird her loins for strife, and fortify to the utmost H. C.

2. The Lord had seemed to forsake His people for awhile, when He suffered the Assyrian to invade and ravage their land. But He was still jealous for them. He would avenge the wrongs done them. Therefore He would summon the destroyer against Nineveh. B. C.

“Because the Lord hath restored the glory of Jacob as the glory of Israel, although the ’emptiers’ (her foreign enemies) had (almost) emptied the land of her population, and marred their vine branches.” This language implies that Judah had suffered sorely from her enemies, both in the waste of precious life, and in the damage done her vines, and of course other vegetable growths as well. The same facts are indicated by Isaiah of this very time:

“And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward,” etc. “From out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant,” etc., showing that many must have perished. (See Isa. 37: 31, 32.) Verse 30 shows that cultivation had been entirely neglected during two full years. H. C.

3. In verses 3-7 the prophet with a few bold strokes gives a picture of the besiegers and the besieged, and the capture of the city. In this verse we see the invading army. The shield, small and round, is made red, or, as the word is rendered elsewhere, dyed red. This is said to have been the color in use among the Medes, and from them, of the Persians (Xen. “Cyr.” i., 3. 2, viii., 3. 1). B. C.

3,4. This description, given by the prophet, of the approaching hosts of Media and Chaldea, is, like all his descriptive paragraphs, full of fire, painting to the eye most vividly. H. C.

4. The mention of streets and broad ways makes it probable that the scene is now transferred to the inside of the city, and that the commotion caused by the approach of the enemy is here described. The verbs may all be rendered in the present.

5. He. The king of Assyria, roused by imminent danger, recounts, or bethinks him of his worthies, or nobles, as the same word is rendered in 3: 18. But they avail him not, they are not fit for the emergency. They stumble in their walk, or ways (the word is plural in the Hebrew text), like men panic-stricken and ready to fall. The word translated defence makes it likely that the attack is described. What is meant seems to be a movable tower of wood, which protected the besiegers from missiles, while using the battering ram, and carried soldiers on the upper part, so as to be better able to assail with arrows the defenders of the walls. Such towers, with four or six wheels, are to be seen on Assyrian sculptures. B. C.

6. “The gates of her watercourses are burst open, and the palace is swept away.” Nineveh stood upon the Tigris, on low ground. These “rivers” were artificial canals for letting in their supply of water for irrigation and for other uses. Now, burst open by the besiegers, the palace, and consequently much of the city, was inundated.

7. “Though Nineveh has been since her early days as a reservoir of waters”—a point for the confluence of people from every clime and kingdom, “yet now are they fleeing.” “Stand! stand! but there is no turning them back.” This translation imitates the terseness of the original. H. C.