Reading: Nahum 1-3, Psalm 132

Does there come a time when enough is enough? Is there an end to patience, to endurance, and to suffering? Will there be an ultimate judgment of evil? Is God good enough to deal with not only the bad things I have done, but the bad things that have been done to me? These kinds of questions arise every time a human population suffers. It can be a population of one, or the whole world. I have thought them myself after some intense personal suffering. Much of the world struggled with them in the middle of the 20th century, as it reflected in horror at what it is had done to itself over the previous 40 years.

I believe the prophet Nahum is written to and for people struggling with those questions. All the prophets we have read so far have been rough contemporaries. Amos was quickly followed by Hosea, who overlapped with Isaiah and Micah. Joel and Jonah are harder to place, but it is my opinion they also belong to the same rough period. After all these prophets, there is a generation of silence, lasting more than 40 years. The northern kingdom has been destroyed by Assyria. Recall that during the reign of Hezekiah, God saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians, but they captured and despoiled the rest of the kingdom of Judah. The land was left in ruins.

Then Judah comes under the rule of Manasseh, their all time worst king. Tradition tells us he put the prophet Isaiah to death, and the book of Kings accuses him of making the streets of Jerusalem run with innocent blood. It wasn’t a good time to be a prophet of the God of Israel, and it was probably a pretty hard time for everyone. We know from historical records that Assyria was distracted by a huge decades long rebellion centered on Babylon (the letter to Hezekiah was likely an attempt by Babylon to get Judah to join this rebellion) during this time, but the menace of the brutal Assyrian Empire still hung over the land. Finally Manasseh’s long, brutal reign is brought to an end by the returning Assyrians, who deport him to their recently captured city of Babylon.

Enter the prophet Nahum. There has been no named prophet of the God of Israel for 40 years. The land has been ravaged. The king, bad as he was, has been deported. He successor is so bad he the people revolt and kill him, placing the child Josiah on the throne. What kinds of questions are people in those circumstances asking themselves? Where is God? Will there be justice? Does the kind of brutal conquest Assyria engaged in ever stop, ever get repaid?

The first chapter of Nahum answers these questions with a resounding Yes! He declares that while God is slow to anger, he is great in power and will by no means clear the guilty. Nahum preaches to Judah God’s eternal standard from the books of Moses: God is slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, but will not leave the guilty unpunished. Like all the prophets before him, Nahum roots his message in the book of Moses. The message is not new and not out of date. It is, in fact, the very thing the people need to hear in answer to their questions. There is final justice. God is still there, still the powerful God he has always been, and he will always carry out justice in the end.

Having reassured the people of the nature of their God, Nahum turns his attention to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. Sometimes Nahum is treated as a companion book to Jonah, as he also “prophesied” about the coming destruction of Nineveh. But there is no indication that Nahum travels to Nineveh to proclaim his message of doom to them directly, as Jonah (eventually) does. I believe Nahum makes this prophesy about Nineveh, but for Judah to hear. It is assurance of God’s concern for justice. He has seen the things Assyria has done, not only to his chosen people, but to all the nations they have mistreated. For this he proclaims Nineveh’s total destruction. The rest of the book is a long poetic accusation and proclamation of doom for Nineveh. Nahum believed that the God of Israel was everything he claimed to be, and that the judgment of Nineveh was going to come upon them for their evil. What would be a shock for the people of Judah would be the means of God’s wrath on Nineveh: the rising power of Babylon.