Nahum 3

They flee away. Hebrew, and they are fleeing, or fugitives. Her citizens are seeking safety in headlong flight. It is in vain for those who have any spirit or courage to say, Stand. There is no rallying. None heeds. None looks back.

9. Take ye the spoil. It is the command of God to the victors, for He is against Nineveh (verse 13). The latter part of the verse may also be rendered thus: And there is no end to the store; there is glory from all vessels of desire. Store represents not only the treasures of the city, but the abundance of everything that was stored up. Glory is used as in Gen. 31:1; Esther 5:11. There is magnificence from the accumulation of all kinds of costly and beautiful things. (Cf. Hos. 13:15.) B. C.

The prophet turns for a word to the conquerors, who are thought of now as within the city. “Seize the silver; seize the gold; there is no end to her stores” (i.e., of carefully prepared and curiously wrought furniture, equipage, etc.)—a huge mass of all beautiful things. H. C.

10. She is empty, and void, and waste. In the Hebrew there are three substantives of similar sound and meaning, and the first two from one root—būkah ūm’būkah ūm’bullākah; each having an additional syllable. Something of this force may be retained by rendering, emptying, and ransacking, and desolation.

11. The prophet sees the foremost city in the world, ancient and populous, not only given up to pillage, but overthrown and razed, so that it should be a question where its site was. The lion is the emblem of majesty and strength. Here it expresses also, as the context shows, violence, bloodshed, and rapine. B. C.

11-13. The lion was their national symbol. This figure consequently is prominent in the ruins of ancient Nineveh (see Layard’s “Nineveh,” pp. 32, 47, 85, 88, etc.). Hence the prophet exultingly asks, “Where is the old den now?” In the last verse the figure is half dropped and half retained. “Burning her chariots in the smoke,” drops the figure; “the sword devouring her young lions, and cutting off his prey from the earth,” mostly retains it. “The voice of her messengers” is that of her ambassadors, who represented her power in distant countries, with perhaps a tacit allusion to the taunting speech of her Rabshakeh to the Jewish people on the walls of Jerusalem, as in Isa. 36:4-20. Such a voice as this shall be heard no more. The immediate cause of her ruin is presented forcibly: “Behold, I am against thee, saith Jehovah of hosts.”

Chap. 3. The same subject—the fall of

Nineveh—is resumed and concluded. H. C.—In this chapter the prophet denounces war against Nineveh for her perfidy and violence; and strongly places before our eyes the number of her chariots and cavalry, her burnished arms, and the great and unrelenting slaughter which she spread around her (verses 1-3). He assigns her idolatries as one cause of her ignominious and unpitied fall (verses 4-7). He describes No Amon, her rival in populousness, confederacies and situation, as sharing a like fate with herself (verses 8-11); and beautifully illustrates the ease with which her strongholds should be taken (verse 12), and the feebleness of her people during the siege (verse 13). He pronounces that all her preparations, her numbers, her opulence, her multitude of chief men, would be of no avail (verses 14-17). He foretells that her tributaries would desert her (verse 18). He concludes with a triumphant exclamation, the topics of which are the greatness and incurableness of her wound, and the just triumph of others over her, on account of her extensive oppressions (verse 19). Abp. Newcome.

1. First come the moral causes of this fearful desolation. It is a city of blood; “all full of lies”—no truth between man and man; and thence come, by natural result, violence and robbery. The seizing of prey, by the strong from the weaker, never ceases. The original words suggest that men, created rational and moral, have become fierce and savage as beasts of prey.

2,3. These verses resume the account of the siege and assault, continued from 2:3-5, 9, 10: “The crack of the whip; the noise of rattling wheels, prancing horses, bounding chariots. There are horsemen mounting; flashing swords, the lightnings of the spear; heaps of slain, masses of the dead, and no end to the corpses; men stumble over their dead bodies.” Think of it, and note how it looks—this onslaught of warriors through the crowded streets of helpless Nineveh, leaving traces of their work in the heaps of her mangled dead! One of the marvels is, that the pen of prophecy should paint such a life-scene with no less vividness and force than the ablest historic pen. Surely we must see in this the impress of God’s own finger!

4. Under this figure of a harlot, the prophet really means idolatry and its monstrous brood of superstitions, witchcrafts, and doubtless licentiousness as well. Through the influence wielded by her world-wide commerce, Nineveh had corrupted all the nations round about.

8-10. When Nahum wrote, Nineveh was still in her glory. Her people felt as secure from this or any other destruction as the people of London, Paris, or New York to-day. It was to meet such a feeling of security that the prophet calls their attention to No, the great city known as Thebes and Diospolis, the capital of Upper Egypt, which, from a state of unrivalled splendor, wealth and greatness, had been suddenly laid in ruins. “Art thou better”—i.e., stronger and more safe—“than No Amon?” “No Amon,” called only “No,” Ezek. 30:14-16 and Jer. 46:25, but more often in Egyptian history, “Thebes,” stood on both sides of the Nile—a most magnificent city, the ruins of whose temples and tombs are at this day one of the wonders of the world. This city is supposed to have fallen under the assault of Sargon, king of Assyria, of whom Isa. 20 speaks.

11. Nineveh also, as well as Thebes, should “be drunken”—should take the wine-cup of Jehovah’s wrath and drink her death-doom. (See notes on Nahum 1:10.) “Thou shalt be hid,” means shall be lost to public view—obliterated and forgotten; dropped from the knowledge of the human race. How wonderfully has this been true of old Nineveh for twenty-five centuries! Until the present generation, ages have passed over her ruins, and no living man knew the site where once she sat so proudly and sinned so fearfully.

14. Tauntingly the prophet commends to her a little more labor on her fortifications—advice the more in point, because Nineveh had already expended an untold amount of wealth and labor upon this very thing, and also because she was so sure her walls were impregnable, and because they were, after all, of so very small account as against her enemies. The irony was put on for an edge, to make the truth cut. H. C.

15. There, in the very place fortified with so much care. It is as if the prophet pointed at the doomed city, and by this little word declared the certainty of her overthrow. The city is to perish with fire, her inhabitants by the sword. The ruins attest the agency of fire in their destruction. B. C.

16. She had enjoyed an immense commerce with India on the east, and with all western Asia and northeastern Africa on the west. The wealth of those valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris was also immense; but the prophet quietly suggests that the locust pillages and then flies away. So would her great wealth vanish before the hosts of her foes. H. C.

18. From verses 10-17 the pronouns are all feminine, because Nineveh is addressed. Here and in the following verse they are masculine, since the prophet speaks to the king of Assyria himself. B. C.

19. In this passage, as well as in chap. 1:8 and 2:11, 13, the prophet foretells the total and entire destruction of this city. The prophet Zephaniah likewise, in the days of Josiah, king of Judah, foretells the same sad event (chap. 2:13, 14, 15). But what probability was there that the capital city of a great kingdom, a city which was sixty miles in circumference, a city which contained so many thousand inhabitants, a city which had walls, according to Diodorus Siculus, a hundred feet high, and so thick that three chariots could go abreast upon them, and fifteen hundred towers at proper distances in the walls of two hundred feet in height—what probability was there that such a city should ever be totally destroyed? And yet so totally was it destroyed that the place where it was situated is hardly known. The city was taken and destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians; and what probably helped to complete its ruin and devastation was the enlarging and beautifying of Babylon soon after by Nebuchadnezzar. From that time no mention is made of Nineveh by any of the sacred writers; and the most ancient of the heathen authors, who have occasion to say anything about it, speak of it as a city that was once great and flourishing, but now destroyed and desolate. Bp. Newton.

So the prophet leaves proud Nineveh to her righteous yet fearful doom! Considering this prophecy as written and sent forth to the world almost a century before the final catastrophe, it was a standing admonition to the king and people of Nineveh to prepare to meet God in the judgments of His wrath. Considered in its relations to God’s people in the reign of Hezekiah, it was admirably adapted to secure a right moral impression from the overthrow of Sennacherib’s army, and to make the people feel that, with God on their side, they need not fear the mightiest or proudest of their foes. H. C.

1:1 THE burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see.

2. O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto thee of violence, 3 and thou wilt not save. Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and look upon perverseness? 4 for spoiling and violence are before me: and there is strife, and contention riseth up. 5 Therefore the law is slacked, and judgement doth never go forth: for the wicked doth com- 6 pass about the righteous; therefore judgement goeth forth perverted. Behold ye among 7 the nations, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for I work a work in your days, which 8 ye will not believe though it be told you. For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and 9 hasty nation; which march through the breadth of the earth, to possess dwelling places that 10 are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful: their judgement and their dignity proceed 11 from themselves. Their horses also are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the 12 evening wolves; and their horsemen spread themselves: yea, their horsemen come from far; 13 they fly as an eagle that hasteth to devour. They come all of them for violence; their faces 14 are set eagerly as the east wind; and they gather captives as the sand. Yea, he scoffeth at 15 kings, and princes are a derision unto him: he derideth every strong hold; for he heapeth up 16 dust, and taketh it. Then shall he sweep by as a wind, and shall pass over, and be guilty: 17 even he whose might is his god. Art not thou from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy 18 One? we shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained him for judgement; and thou, O Rock, 19 hast established him for correction. Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and 20 that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, 21 and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous 22 than he; and makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler 23 over them? He taketh up all of them with the angle, he catcheth them in his net, and gath- 24 ereth them in his drag: therefore he rejoiceth and is glad. Therefore he sacrificeth unto his 25 net, and burneth incense unto his drag; because by them his portion is fat, and his meat 26 plenteous. Shall he therefore empty his net, and not spare to slay the nations continually?

Introduction.

HABAKKUK was contemporary with Jeremiah, who began to prophesy in the thirteenth year of Josiah and continued down to the destruction of the city and the last deportation of captives in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, a range of some forty years. Near the middle of this period fell the first invasion by the Chaldeans in the fourth year of Jehoiakim. From Jeremiah, therefore, we may learn much respecting the general and moral condition of the people when Habakkuk wrote. One leading course of thought runs through the entire book: the sins of the covenant people; God’s raising up the Chaldeans to scourge them therefor; the prophet’s expostulation with the Lord against permitting a people so cruel and wicked as they to afflict and destroy Judah; the Lord’s answer touching the Chaldeans; closing with the prophet’s prayer that God would re-enact the glorious scenes of deliverance that appear on so many pages of the nation’s early history; and God’s virtual reply, by causing His glory to pass before the prophet’s eye, thus impressing his soul with a sense of His power to save, and of His faithfulness and love as well. In view of these manifestations, the prophet exults in Jehovah alone, satisfied that under the wing and in the love of such a God he has nothing to fear, but every reason for joyful trust and triumph. In point of style Habakkuk stands unrivalled. Who can name the writer that excels him in the best qualities of a poetic imagination, and especially in his grand and sublime conceptions of Jehovah? H. C.

In prophetic vision Habakkuk beholds the foe invade his native land, the temple and its worship abolished, the sacred land and the free nation given over to devastation and to opprobrium. A prospect like this was well suited to plunge any sensitive heart into the most bitter grief; and when realized in all the sharpness of prophetic perception, it could not but rend asunder a heart so warm and ardent as that of Habakkuk. It was not to be expected that a soul like his should make its inspirations heard in soft and plaintive notes—it must speak in the loud sound of the trumpet. It were difficult to find words to set forth adequately the exalted claims and peculiar merits of this high minstrel of grief and joy, of desolateness and hope, of scorn and derision. In the small compass of this prophet’s book may be found, as in a compendium, all the glories and excellencies of prophetic poetry. Nothing can be more magnificent and sublime than the Divine hymn which terminates his book, nothing more terrible than his threats, nothing more biting than his scorn, nothing more sweet and safe than his consolations. On Habakkuk God had bestowed in large measure all the qualities which belong to a great poet—an imagination equal to the reception and transmission of the grandest ideas; an exquisite judgment, which imparts to his figures and pictures the utmost regularity and delicacy, and the most exact proportions; and a power over language which gives so much harmony and softness, so much brilliancy and strength to all his utterances.

Habakkuk begins his poem with one animated portraiture, and closes it with another. Surely there is no poet who ever described the march of a conqueror, mighty and full of arrogance, in more vivid colors than he has done that of the Chaldeans: “That bitter and impetuous nation which traverseth the wide regions of the earth, to seize upon habitations belonging not to it,” etc.; riding upon horses “swifter than leopards, and fiercer than evening wolves,” etc. Who has ever uttered more derisive taunts than those in which the prophet proclaims the eventual triumph of the oppressed people over their proud tyrants, fallen from the height of their grandeur, and trodden beneath the feet of their enemies? What poet has traced with so much force and sublimity as this one, the dread solemnity of universal nature when the Lord descends upon the earth? All the ancient history of the Hebrews opens up to afford the images and pictures of his great and marvellous scenes. All that nature has of the dreadful and magnificent becomes subservient to the aim of his inspired pen. When He came in His Almightiness, “His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise.” “Before Him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at His feet.” At His presence “the everlasting mountains were scattered, and the perpetual hills did bow.” The “sun and moon stand still in their habitation,” at the greater brightness of His arrows as they flew, at the gleam of His glittering spear. Yet amid all these terrors there is rest for the faithful soul. “The Lord God is my strength,” and “although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stall: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.”

Language is at best an imperfect instrument of thought—still more imperfect as the vehicle of high inspirations from heaven. And, in the case of Habakkuk, we seem to see the prophet grasping to seize words worthy to express his great conceptions, and images which may adequately represent them. Sometimes he adopts the expressions of earlier prophets, but he does not imitate them; and all that he takes becomes his own, fused up in the solid and glowing mass of his golden prophecy. Kitto.

An unusually clear and continuous line of thought may be discerned running through this prophecy. There are three chief divisions. We have, first, the Divine design to raise up the Chaldean empire as a scourge for men’s sins (1); second, its ultimate overthrow and replacement by God’s kingdom (2); third, the certainty of this happy issue in the grandeur of the Divine nature (3). These ruling ideas are worked out in the following fashion. The seer, confronted by the spectacle of violence, corruption and injustice, obdurate and incurable, demands almost passionately the Divine intervention (1:1-4). God answers by announcing speedy chastisement in the Chaldean career of conquest, rude, resistless, unmerciful, and finally sacrilegious (1:5-11). Awed and sadly the prophet accepts the necessity of the Chaldean discipline, but his sense of the repugnance between God’s holy nature and the brutality of the scourge He employs convinces him instinctively that Babylonian conquest is not God’s last word in the world’s story, and so he asks for further light (1:12-17).

Waiting thus on Divine guidance, he receives and is ordered to record a vision of the developments of time (2:1-3). Doubt as to the issue is destroyed in the assurance that the future belongs to the righteous who possess God in

living faith, not to the godless tyranny which, unrestrained by principle, shall be driven by lust of conquest, as by love of drink, to excess that breeds its own ruin. This law of history is expanded in five woes, of which the first shows how oppression creates insurrection, the second how ill-gotten gains turn against its owner, the third enunciates the futility of all godless civilization, the fourth the demoralizing effect on tyrants of an immoral rule, and the last finds the root of the ruin in the impossibility of building up an abiding social order on aught save the knowledge and obedience of the living God (2 : 4-20). This course of thought has brought the seer to recognize in the nature of God the final solution of all problems, and has stirred his spirit to an intense realization of the Divine presence in all human affairs past, present, future. He beholds God, as in the days of old, emerging from the world unseen, marching gloriously through the earth, bending nature, nations, history to His majestic designs, righting all wrongs, overturning every oppression, annihilating the most formidable resistance, and triumphantly establishing His kingdom on earth. In the splendor of that certainty of faith the prophet can possess his soul in patience, and already, even amid the collapse of all earthly props and solaces, he will rejoice in the Lord and joy in the God of his salvation (3 : 1-19).