Lives of Scripture

Almost nothing is recorded of Nahum beyond his hometown, Elkosh, a location no longer identifiable with certainty (Nahum 1:1). His entire brief book is directed at Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire that had brutalized Israel and Judah for generations — the same city that had repented under Jonah's preaching roughly a century earlier, but had since reverted to violent cruelty. Nahum opens by affirming God's patient character even as he pronounces judgment: "The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty" (Nahum 1:3). He describes Nineveh's coming destruction in vivid, almost cinematic detail — chariots racing in the streets, its defenses collapsing, its plunder stripped bare — announcing that the empire's cruelty toward conquered nations had finally reached its limit (Nahum 2:1-3:19). Nahum points to the earlier fall of Egyptian Thebes ("No-amon") as proof that no city, however fortified, is beyond God's reach when its cruelty is finished being tolerated (Nahum 3:8-10). For Judah, still under Assyrian domination, Nahum's message was meant as comfort as much as threat: "Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news, who proclaims peace!" (Nahum 1:15). Nineveh did fall to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC, within a generation of Nahum's prophecy.