Nahum

Purpose & theme

Nahum is a book about the justice of God poured out on a violent empire. Its single subject is the coming fall of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria: the same city that had repented in Jonah’s day, more than a century earlier, but had long since returned to its brutality. Assyria was the cruelest superpower of the ancient world, famous for its savagery: flaying captives, impaling the conquered, deporting whole nations, and boasting of the terror it spread. It had crushed the northern kingdom of Israel and menaced Judah. To the peoples groaning under Assyria’s boot, the question pressed hard: will God let such cruelty go on forever? Nahum answers with a thunderous no.

The book opens by declaring who God is: “a jealous and avenging God,” yet “slow to anger and great in power,” who “will by no means clear the guilty” but who is also “good, a stronghold in the day of trouble” and “knows those who take refuge in him” (1:2-7). From that portrait of God’s character, Nahum announces Nineveh’s doom in vivid, poetic detail: the siege, the sack, the plundering, the emptying of the great city. For God’s oppressed people this is not bad news but good: “Behold, upon the mountains, the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace!” (1:15). Nahum is a hard book, unflinching about God’s wrath against evil, but it is meant to comfort: assuring the afflicted that God sees, that He is a refuge for those who trust Him, and that no tyranny will escape His justice forever.